A ray of starlight piercing through the cracks of a limestone ceiling. Throughout this ceremony, fragments of past and future will flicker, tracing the cycles of freedom, loss, and the distant glimmer of what comes next.

Performance: x.ypno
Animation/VJ: Giorgos Tsangaris
Light Technician: Alexandros Gregoriou
Dialogue Partners: Diego Aparicio, Nefeli Kentoni
Photo by Julie Michael

Meet the director of Doppelgängers³ and Berlinale Talents alumna Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian!

This 90-min workshop will start with a short presentation on Nelly's diverse documentary practice and invites drag queens, drag kings, queers who want to come dolled-up, and any willing participants to step inside the world of the work-in-progress feature documentary Heartsnatcher. Participants will warm up together, then split into groups to test script lines and embody three key scenes: Timortis climbing the hill in search of world peace, Clementine’s hallucinatory birth, and the International Space Station reimagined as a Love Hotel. The session offers the chance to improvise, perform, and contribute ideas, textures, and props, helping shape the living storyboard of the film.

There will be filming and photography taking place at the workshop.
Click here for the Film Contributor / Participant brief

Join us for a chance to meet and discuss with the filmmakers participating at this year's Queer Wave. Chat, laugh, and dive into the stories behind the screen—open to film lovers and filmmakers alike.

We are once again collaborating with the AIDS Solidarity Movement — Cy Checkpoint, and setting up a 3-hour walk-in testing session at NiMAC from 18:00 to 21:00 on Sunday 14 September. Queer Wave audiences and the general public are welcome to drop in anytime within that window for HIV/Syphilis testing without any prior booking.

Cypriot drag kings Karagöza, Melis and Elfis unite their mustaches for the first time for an extravaganza drag king show. Bring your fans - it's gonna be hot!

Production credits: Karagöza, Melis & Elfis
Photography: Eirini Kakopierou

Join us for an in-depth conversation with Sylvia Robyn director, Panayotis Evangelidis. Drawing on his experience creating films with little to no budget, the director will be sharing insights on independent filmmaking, screenwriting vs. directing, fiction vs. documentary, and more. Tailored to the needs of the participating audience!

Step inside the world behind the screen with actors, curators, and professionals from across the film industry. This round-table opens up conversations on performance, curation, and the shifting landscape of the film industry—an open forum for audiences and professionals to connect.

The stage becomes a ritual site, a threshold where entities slip into the present through voice, music, and machine. It hosts the physical body and its unsettling experiences within society. Narratives circle the body: its desires, its ruptures, its dualities. Yet nothing lands cleanly. Everything is doubled, refracted, blurred, as if seen through water. Like dream logic, the body becomes a riddle.

The audience is invited into this threshold space.

Duration: 1 hour

Photo credit: Pavlos Vrionides for Open House Festival, 2024

Stranger in the Body summon immersive performances that merge ancient and contemporary influences. Their work blends fast rhythms, lyrical ritual elements, and a distinctive composition of analog and digital sounds, held within a framework of experimental storytelling. Post-punk meets echoes of the “Book of the Dead” and mysticism, forming reconstructed soundscapes that juxtapose the raw and the electronic. Songwriting is drawn from fragments of Middle Eastern myth and shards of film and poetry.

A corner dedicated to Palestine: a place for reading, printing and learning. Learning Palestine is a collective initiative which aims to disseminate knowledge on the history of the ongoing struggle for justice, liberation, and the freedom of Palestine and the Palestinian People. On their website essential readings for a comprehensive understanding of the Palestinian struggle are made accessible to the public, along with guides for their circulation and re-printing in the form of pamphlets. This corner at Queer Wave will be a space where the tools will be provided to produce more copies of these readings, and to read (alone or together) these writings.

Throughout the festival there will be two readings by fisherwomxn.

In these portraits, people become landscapes of light and shadow, quiet vessels of intimacy and longing. Shot mostly on analogue film, the work lingers in moments of stillness — a gaze that resists performance, a gesture poised between strength and fragility. Often photographed nude and in natural light, those portrayed seem suspended between presence and memory, inviting a tender recognition of solitude. Together, the portraits form a meditation on melancholy and nostalgia: not as absence, but as traces of beauty that remain. In their vulnerability, they remind us that to be seen is also to belong.

Curated by Pierre Mohamed-Petit