Making It Fit, directed by Mariana Leal, screens at the Hollywood Queer Short Film Festival (HQSFF) on Saturday, October 3, 2026 at 2:00 PM. It’s part of the “Dive Into the Current” program at the Hudson Theater, 6539 Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles.
Hollywood, CA (The Hollywood Times) 9/15/26 – Death may be universal, but the rituals surrounding it have never truly been one-size-fits-all.
In her thoughtful, animated documentary Making It Fit, Portuguese animation director Mariana Leal, now based in London, explores the ways LGBTQ+ people have reimagined mourning, funerals and remembrance when traditional ceremonies have failed to reflect their lives, relationships and chosen families.
Selected for the Hollywood Queer Short Film Festival, Making It Fit is only about five minutes long, yet it opens the door to a much larger conversation about grief, community, exclusion and the deeply personal question of how we want to be remembered.
During a recent Zoom interview with The Hollywood Times, Leal explained that the project began as a response to the death positive movement, which encourages people to speak more openly about death rather than treating the subject as something frightening or taboo.
The film also reaches into LGBTQ+ history, particularly the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, when queer people were sometimes excluded from traditional funerals or ceremonies because of their sexuality. In response, communities created their own rituals and gathered around one another when conventional institutions would not.
“They had resorted to making their own separate ceremonies together as a community,” Leal explained during our conversation.
Click below for our exclusive interview:
That history becomes the emotional foundation of Making It Fit, but Leal does not create a film rooted solely in pain. Instead, she turns toward possibility: What if a funeral could truly resemble the person being remembered? What if mourning could contain poetry, music, creativity, humor and community rather than following a predetermined formula?
Her research led her to Canadian author Zena Sharman’s “Queering Death” writings, which examine the ways people have created more joyful and personal ceremonies. Leal also interviewed trans activist Ash Hayhurst, creator of the free online Queer Funeral Guide, and worked with social anthropologist Dr. Hannah Rumble while developing the film.
The choice to tell this story through animation proves particularly effective.
Grief is difficult to photograph because so much of it exists internally. It can feel expansive one moment and suffocating the next. Memories appear without warning. A room can feel comforting or hostile depending entirely upon who occupies it.
Animation gives Leal permission to enter those invisible emotional spaces.
She described animation as a medium that allows filmmakers to explore “personal stories and inner worlds” without being restricted by the laws of physics. Rather than literally illustrating every story being told, she uses abstraction and visual metaphor, leaving viewers room to imagine, process and contemplate.
One of the film’s most effective visual devices is a lamp.
Characters appear within it, transforming the lamp into a kind of emotional space for grieving. The image works on several levels: candles and light have long been associated with remembrance, while “shining a light” can also mean drawing attention to experiences society has overlooked.
It is simple, elegant symbolism that suits the film beautifully.
Among the stories Leal encountered during production, one remained particularly powerful for her: the funeral of a woman named Lyra.
Knowing that she was going to die, Lyra was able to communicate her wishes to those closest to her. Her loved ones created a green burial that included poetry and music. They also wove stars from strips of wood, inspired by the Lyra constellation, and placed the stars with her during the burial.
The details are intimate rather than extravagant, and that is precisely what makes the story so affecting.
The ceremony was not about meeting someone else’s expectation of what a funeral should look like. It was about making the experience recognizable as Lyra.
Leal told me that these personalized rituals can give people something meaningful to do at a moment when they may otherwise feel helpless. Instead of simply rushing through the formalities of death, family and friends are given space to gather, create, remember and honor the person they have lost.
That idea may be the heart of Making It Fit: a ceremony can become an extension of the person.
The film becomes especially significant when it addresses chosen family.
Within LGBTQ+ communities, chosen family can be every bit as central as biological family, and sometimes far more present in a person’s everyday life. Friends may become caregivers, companions, emergency contacts and the people who know someone most intimately.
Yet after death, those relationships can suddenly become secondary to traditional family structures.
Leal called attention to that painful contradiction in our interview, noting that queer communities have often become exceptionally skilled at caring for one another because history required them to do so.
What struck her emotionally was seeing people remain beside someone through life and illness, only to find themselves pushed aside when mourning begins.
“There shouldn’t be a restriction on that,” she said.
It is a simple statement, but one that carries considerable weight.
Who gets to grieve publicly? Who gets to make decisions? Who is recognized as family? And who gets left outside the room?
Making It Fit does not pretend those questions have easy answers, but it insists that they deserve to be asked.
Condensing all of this into approximately five minutes was one of Leal’s greatest challenges.
She described editing as perhaps the longest and most difficult part of the filmmaking process because she felt a responsibility to remain truthful to the people who had trusted her with their stories.
The solution was focus.
Rather than attempting to address every inequality or every experience surrounding queer death and mourning, Leal continually returned to ritual, the ceremonies people create and the ways those ceremonies can either exclude or embrace them.
The film ultimately balances stories that reveal existing problems with examples offering something hopeful: innovative, communal approaches to saying goodbye.
That restraint works in the film’s favor. Making It Fit does not attempt to provide every answer. It creates an opening.
And sometimes five minutes is enough to begin a conversation that lasts considerably longer.
When I asked Leal what she hoped audiences would carry with them after seeing the film, her answer returned to the origins of the death positive movement.
She wants people to feel able to discuss death without fearing that speaking about it somehow invites it into their lives.
Those conversations can happen before a crisis, when people still have the emotional space to express what they want, whom they consider family and how they would like to be remembered.
Leal hopes the film creates greater awareness, encourages empathy and perhaps even inspires people to imagine entirely new ceremonies.
That may be Making It Fit‘s quietest and most important message.
We spend enormous amounts of time deciding how we want to live. There is nothing morbid about also considering how our lives should be celebrated when we are gone.
For LGBTQ+ people in particular, that conversation can also be an act of self-definition.
Making It Fit recognizes grief, but it refuses to make grief its only destination. Instead, Mariana Leal offers something warmer: the possibility that remembrance can be creative, communal, inclusive and deeply personal.
There is no single correct way to say goodbye.
Perhaps the most loving ceremony is simply the one that fits.
For more on Mariana Leal:
Website: lealanimation.myportfolio.com
Instagram: @_lealeal_
Making It Fit is an official selection of the Hollywood Queer Short Film Festival.
By Valerie Milano | The Hollywood Times
