After a heavy news week, here’s something to look forward to.

The Iris Prize LGBTQ+ Film Festival turns 20 this year, and its anniversary edition runs October 12–18 in Cardiff, Wales. It’s home to what the festival calls the largest short film prize in the world: £40,000, which the winner uses to make their next LGBTQ+ short in Wales.

Here’s what’s on, and how to watch if you can’t get to Cardiff.

The numbers

According to the festival and Movie Marker, this year’s programme brings:

  • 35 short films competing for the Iris Prize, from 22 countries and in 14 languages or formats
  • 15 British shorts competing for the Best British award
  • A record 16 feature films
  • 5 public Iris Talks

Screenings are at Cineworld Cardiff.

How the shortlist gets made

This is one of the things that makes Iris special. The festival works with 22 international partner festivals, and each one nominates a film for the shortlist. The rest are picked by a pre-selection jury, Movie Marker reports.

So the shortlist works like a map of queer filmmaking worldwide. This year it includes work from India, Hong Kong, Brazil, Palestine and Jordan (a co-production with France and the UK), Canada, Australia and all over Europe.

A few titles we’re curious about:

  • Hills Don’t Dance Alone (Shubham Negi, India)
  • When The Petals Fall (Tsoi Ka Hin Henry, Hong Kong)
  • Coyotes (Said Zagha, France, Palestine, Jordan and UK)
  • Lesbian Ditch Day (Olivia Cade, USA)
  • Charlie is Not a Boy (Pol Kurucz, a USA, France and Hungary co-production)

Central and Eastern Europe are represented through Poland, with two films: A Cappella (Marcin Kluczykowski) and Black Shawl (Kamila Boichenko). There’s nothing from the Balkans on this year’s shortlist, which we’d love to see change. Belgrade’s Merlinka festival, held every December, shows there’s an audience and a scene for it.

The features

The anniversary programme leans into queer film history as well as new work. Highlights reported by Movie Marker include:

  • Desert Hearts (Donna Deitch, USA, 1986), the landmark lesbian romance, with Deitch attending for a Q&A
  • Weekend (Andrew Haigh), screening on opening day, October 12, alongside a talk, Weekend Revisited: In Conversation with Andrew Haigh
  • Lesbian Lines (Cara Holmes, Ireland), a Welsh premiere
  • I Am Going To Miss You (Daniel Ribeiro, Brazil), a Welsh premiere
  • Sunday Boyfriends (Gabriel Ordóñez, Mexico)
  • Chatlines (Lloyd Eyre-Morgan and Neil Ely, England)
  • Black Church Bay (Rhys Marc Jones, Wales)

Two of the programme’s big names say a lot about queer cinema’s arc. Desert Hearts was made by a lesbian director at a time when stories like it barely got funded. Weekend turned a two-day romance between two men in Nottingham into a modern queer classic. Seeing both in one week is a crash course.

Talks worth your time

Among the five public talks:

  • Beyond the Tropes: Lesbians, Representation & Cinema, on how screen representation has (and hasn’t) moved on
  • Queer Archive: In or Out?, hosted by Paul “Stumpy” Davies
  • Queer Welsh Creativity: What’s Out There?, hosted by Dan Huw Bowen

The two Welsh-led talks are in Welsh with translation, a nice reminder that queer culture isn’t only made in English.

The festival week, day by day

The festival’s own schedule gives each day a theme:

  • Oct 12: Opening Night, including premieres of new Welsh shorts
  • Oct 13: Education Day
  • Oct 14: Community Day
  • Oct 15: Industry Day
  • Oct 16: Best British Day
  • Oct 17: Iris20 celebration
  • Oct 18: Prize winners announced

Can’t get to Cardiff?

If you’re in the UK, Iris Online runs October 13–31, so you can catch much of the programme from home, per the festival. Tickets and the full programme are at irisprize.org.

Outside the UK, it’s worth keeping a list. Iris films have a habit of turning up later at queer festivals everywhere, and some selected British films go on to be broadcast on Channel 4 through the festival’s partnership with Film4.

Why a short film prize matters

Shorts are where a lot of queer filmmakers get their start, especially those from countries where there’s no money, or no appetite, for a feature about queer lives. A £40,000 prize that funds the next film is a practical bet on the people behind the camera, not just a trophy.

Twenty years in, that bet has created a small, steady pipeline of LGBTQ+ stories. In a year when queer people in many countries are fighting to be seen at all, that’s something to celebrate.