News

The 2023 Toronto Queer Film Festival will be held online from March 23 to April 23, 2023 with the theme of Queer Wonderlands. This year our programme invokes realms full of transitions, joy, and love, inspired by imagination with the anticipation of what is to come. Calling on the queer imagining that occurs through the uncanny, monstrous, whimsical, and fantastical, we invite our audiences to step into a world of collective visioning where all 2Spirit/Queer/Trans people and communities thrive in an environment of wellness, protection, connection, and sustainability.

For the third consecutive year, we will host the TQFF annual festival entirely online. We continue to prioritize making our programming accessible to queer, trans and Two-Spirit filmmakers and audiences – both in Toronto and worldwide – amidst the still ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

To facilitate access to the festival, TQFF’s entire programme will be presented without geoblocking, making it accessible to anyone, anywhere, at any time. Following its premiere weekend, all programming will be available for online viewing for one month until April 23, 2023.

TQFF is ecstatic to announce the selections of feature film presentations for 2023! The line up comprises some of the best queer cinema has to offer. First is the much awaited (and exclusive to TQFF) Sailor Moon Scandalous – PSPSPS: I love you by Director Harjot Bal. This second in a series of Sailor Moon satires is a post-2020 parody fandub of the iconic 90s anime. Bal’s Sailor Moon is rewritten as a dark comedy that breaches issues related to queer folx, women, and people of colour.

TQFF’s second presentation is Cut, by Director Mike Hoolboom. Building on theorist Hito Steyerl’s bracing 2009 essay of the same name, Cut looks at how cinema and the assembly line both cut the body in new ways, organizing newly urban work forces. Cut is a dreamy collage essay made of scraps and fragments, with asides from Susan Sontag on Disney fascism and Paul B. Preciado on the cost of living in a body.

Next, TQFF  will present Estuaries, by Director Lior Shamriz. Estuaries is set in Los Angeles in 2017, months after a car crashed through the front window of a Los Angeles art space, killing Bdalak, a rising nonbinary performance artist. Bdalak’s partner Eli, a queer Mizrahi musician with a past as an activist in Palestine, had planned on marrying them for a greencard, but now spends his time adrift, communing with others over his grief and struggling with his visa. He soon meets Myrna, an artist making work about immigration, who he feels can help with his precarious situation.

The final feature presentation will be The Last Image, by Director Benedito Ferreira. The film’s protagonist, Benedito Senna, is blind. He moved from the Brazilian city of Belém to France, where he fell in love with and married Jean Luc, who is somewhat his eyes and a devoted reader of his poems. In Paris, he meets another Benedito, a film director who is also Brazilian and gay. Their friendship begins with an exchange of videos and voicemails, and their passion for images reunite them years later to make a movie. As they set out to shoot, however, they realize things are no longer the same and differences arise.

TQFF will premiere films and stories from across the globe, taking you on a magical journey of love and triumph that crosses borders and takes you through realms of a better tomorrow!

Stay tuned for our details about our shorts programs, industry symposium, and the entire film festival line up for this year!