2025 Festival Call
Since 2016, the Toronto Queer Film Festival has showcased the film and video art of queer and trans creators. We celebrate vigour, resistance, and defiance over nationalism and assimilation. We elevate Indigiqueer/Trans/2 Spirit filmmakers and filmmakers of colour where others erase or tokenize.
For TQFF 2025, we are soliciting film, video, and animation on the theme of Collective Resistance. We welcome all genres and on-screen media full of visions, reflections, community, and imaginations.
Collective Resistance emulates the strength of queer and trans communities that challenge and resist all forms of oppression, discrimination, dehumanization, and human rights violations. Today more than ever, we see the need for solidarity and action to halt the erasure of basic rights, stop colonization and imperialism (along with the genocides and eugenics they foster), and advocate for a sustainable future that values life over profit and property. We want to see films that focus on community, activism in different forms, environmental justice, freedom of expression and so much more. We exist therefore we resist. Collective Resistance aims to empower and unite our communities through the interconnectedness of the need for a more inclusive and balanced society.
This is an artist-run festival. At TQFF, we commit to the ethical treatment of artists in two concrete ways: we do not charge submission fees, and we pay all artists who have their films selected screening fees according to IMAA & CARFAC standard rates.
You can use the code TQFF2025 to submit.
TQFF is generously funded by the Toronto Arts Council, the Ontario Arts Council, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Ontario, Government of Canada and Building Communities through Arts & Heritage.
TQFF 2025 Symposium Call For PROPOSALS!
The Toronto Queer Film Festival is seeking proposals for its annual Symposium around the theme of Collective Resistance.
Collective Resistance emulates the strength of queer and trans communities that challenge and resist all forms of dispossession, dehumanization, and debt. Today more than ever, we ask how we can come together to challenge ongoing systems of colonization and imperialism (along with the genocides and eugenics they foster), to imagine a sustainable future that values life, and its diversity, over profit and property. Through our symposium we seek proposals to share artistic practices, moments of reflection (including talks and presentations), and experimental forms of gathering.
Everyone is welcome to apply. This is a paid opportunity for all involved if selected.
Proposal deadline: July 29, 2024
Statement On The Ongoing Genocide In Palestine
TQFF was founded in 2016 on the principle of deliberately rejecting the homonationalist consensus that has formed in and around major queer cultural institutions in Canada and internationally. Homonationalism refers to the facade of the promotion of LGBTQ rights by Western nations, and the parallel embrace of nationalist politics by LGBTQ individuals and organizations, to create a fiction of a homogenous, progressive LGBTQ friendly “us” (the west) and a regressive and intolerant “them” (the rest). Nation states capitalize on this fictional opposition’s legitimation of a “rights and rules based international order” to normalize the colonial projects of resource extraction, dispossession, environmental destruction, and settlement. Homonationalism has been used by the settler states of the US, Canada, and Israel to justify the acceleration of the genocide of the Palestinian people.
As a festival, we reject this homonationalist agenda and believe in the liberation of all people. We condemn the US, Israel, and Canada’s pinkwashing and the exploitation of queer and trans suffering in order to justify imperialism, colonialism, and genocide.
We reassert our commitment to the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement (BDS) in line with the 2005 call from Palestinian Civil Society to engage in non-violent actions until Israel complies with international law and universal principles of human rights.
To learn more about pinkwashing and homonationalism, watch this clip from Pride Denied: Homonationalism & the Future of Queer Politics (Kami Chisholm, 2016)