LESBIAN DITCH DAY
Olivia Cade
2025
15 min
United States
English
Olivia Cade (she/her) is a performer/filmmaker/director whose work centers around community, queerness, and mental health advocacy. She wrote and starred in the film Give It To Me (Outfest ‘23, Atlanta Film Fest ‘23) which explored the connection between kink and healing trauma. While creating her own work, Olivia has also collaborated on many femme-led creative teams as the assistant director, most notably on Beach Logs Kill (SXSW ‘24) and Pathological (Sundance ‘24). She creatively produced THAW (Tribeca ‘23). She also produced and helped shoot Books Across America, a documentary about literacy that traversed all 50 states with notable interviews of Joyce Carol Oates, the Librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden, and Ross Gay. Olivia received a full-ride talent scholarship to NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and, since graduating, has tirelessly worked her way from the experimental theater scene in New York to the frontier of independent film in Los Angeles. In her free time, she researches Scottish architectural history programs to calm her mounting fears about the current state of the film industry.
Lesbian Ditch Day is a film that centers around one central question: How much am I, a queer person, willing to reduce and commercialize my queer experience in order to at least achieve representation…and what constitutes ‘good’ representation in a corporate creative context? Our film isn’t trying to preach a specific answer or solution, but open up a dialogue that hasn’t necessarily been opened for Gen Z youth.
Lesbian Ditch Day offers a meta-commentary wrapped in the familiar package of a rom-com. As a parable created by and for queer folks, it examines not individual ‘white male villains’ but the systemic issues behind the corporate commodification of queerness. It’s a film that aims to ‘call in’ rather than ‘call out.’ The problem isn’t a single corrupt executive with a harmful agenda—it’s the broader system that reduces our complex stories to palatable, profit-driven narratives. While increased visibility on mainstream platforms might seem like progress, our relationships are being sanitized and our connections to queer history severed in the process.
Through this film, I hope to inspire younger queer generations to look beyond mainstream representation and explore our rich cultural history, which holds the blueprints for more authentic relationships and brighter futures.
Director Instagram: @oliviaaacade
Writer Instagram: @blandwiches
Cinematographer: @thetrashwitch
Starring @simonebrazzini and @mayadonuteo
Project Instagram: @lesbianditchdayfilm
Olivia Cade
