China’s longest-running queer film festival won’t happen this year.

The Beijing Queer Film Festival, billed this year as Love Queer Film Week, announced on Instagram on Thursday, October 29, that its 2026 edition was off. It had been due to open the next day, Friday, October 30. QNews reports that authorities had stepped up the pressure in the weeks before with repeated phone calls from police.

“We regret to inform you that the Love Queer Film Week has been cancelled,” the organisers wrote. “We sincerely apologise for any inconvenience and disappointment that the cancellation of this event may cause.”

They have not said whether it will be rescheduled or come back in another form. Beijing’s public security bureau did not respond when The Guardian asked for comment, according to Gay Express, which cites the Guardian’s reporting.

A festival that has been here before

The festival was started in 2001 by students at Peking University, and it has a long history of trouble with the authorities. Back in 2011, Fridae reported that police harassment had forced it to go back underground, and organisers kept it running in a low-profile format rather than give up.

That’s what makes this year’s cancellation land so hard. A festival that kept finding a way for years has, this time, called it off.

Hongwei Bao, a professor of Chinese studies at the University of St Andrews, said the festival had been “a beacon for LGBT resilience” in China. “The shutdown of the Love Queer Cinema Week has a chilling affect on the Chinese queer community,” he said, as quoted by QNews.

Not the first this year

In June, during Pride month, screenings of LGBTQ+ films at Beijing’s Institut Français, the French cultural centre, were cancelled after police pressure. Urania reported at the time that two French films were dropped after police officers came to the centre and intimidated staff.

And it fits a longer pattern. The Beijing LGBT Center, which had been a safe space for the city’s queer community, closed in 2023 as pressure on civil society grew.

“The Chinese government under Xi has been relentlessly tightening social and ideological control,” Maya Wang, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said. “A queer film festival basically faces all of these overlapping pressures.”

Where the law actually stands

It’s worth being precise, because China isn’t a country where being gay is a crime:

  • Homosexuality was decriminalised in 1997.
  • Same-sex couples can’t marry, and there are no comprehensive anti-discrimination protections.
  • Same-sex relationships are heavily censored in mainstream media, advocacy groups have been sidelined, and dating apps have been removed from app stores.

That’s the trick of this kind of pressure. Nothing has to be banned outright. A few phone calls, a venue that suddenly gets nervous, and a festival that has run since 2001 quietly apologises for the inconvenience.

Why it matters outside China

Queer film festivals are often the first place people see a story that looks like their own. In a country where same-sex love is cut from mainstream screens, Love Queer Film Week was one of the few film festivals in mainland China focused on LGBTQ+ stories, and a rare place to talk about them together.

Elsewhere in the region, the picture is mixed. Just across the strait, more than 170,000 people marched at Taiwan Pride last weekend, four weeks after a police raid on a gay bar in Taipei. Visibility in one place, a cancelled festival in the other.

If you want to support queer Chinese filmmakers, the simplest thing is to watch and share their work where it’s legally available to you, and to back festivals abroad that programme it.