GAZE international film festival 2026 Programme Highlights: International auteurs, restored classics, and boundary-pushing documentaries

Every summer, GAZE arrives as a reminder that queer cinema has never been a niche interest. It is one of the richest, most inventive and politically vital spaces in contemporary filmmaking. Running from July 28 to August 3, the 2026 edition of GAZE International LGBTQIA Film Festival once again transforms Dublin into a hub for queer storytelling, with screenings taking place across the Light House Cinema, the Irish Film Institute and IMMA's Living Canvas.

This year's programme is perhaps one of the festival's broadest yet. International auteurs sit alongside emerging filmmakers. Restored classics screen beside boundary-pushing documentaries. There are intimate romances, historical excavations, experimental shorts, absurd comedies and documentaries about sport, activism and art. Rather than presenting a singular vision of queer life, GAZE embraces contradiction and complexity, demonstrating that LGBTQIA+ cinema is as expansive as cinema itself.

Appropriately, the festival opens with one of Europe's greatest living filmmakers. Pedro Almodóvar's Bitter Christmas is classic Almodóvar: lush, melodramatic and visually sumptuous, while probing the uneasy relationship between grief, memory and artistic creation. The film follows filmmaker Elsa as she escapes to Lanzarote following her mother's death, while another director, Raúl, appears to be fictionalising her life in real time. As their worlds become increasingly entangled, Almodóvar asks difficult questions about authorship, exploitation and the emotional cost of turning life into art. It's an opening film that signals GAZE's ambitions from the outset.

Irish cinema is equally central to this year's programme. One of the most anticipated screenings is Cara Holmes' Lesbian Lines, which has already proved so popular that an additional screening has been added after the original sold out. The documentary tells the story of the volunteers behind the Dublin Lesbian Line between the 1970s and 1990s, whose work supported thousands of women across Ireland. Drawing on anonymous logbooks, oral histories and Holmes' distinctive visual style, the film recovers a vital piece of Irish queer history while celebrating the humour, resilience and compassion of the women who built community infrastructures long before institutional support existed.

That commitment to homegrown talent extends beyond features. GAZE's annual New Irish Shorts programme continues to showcase emerging filmmakers working across documentary, drama, animation and experimental forms. Alongside it sits a new New Brazilian Shorts programme, reflecting not only Brazil's extraordinary contemporary queer cinema, but also Ireland's growing Brazilian community and the cultural ties between the two countries. It's a thoughtful example of how the festival continues to evolve alongside modern Ireland itself.

The international feature programme travels widely. Iván & Hadoum, from Spanish director Ian de la Rosa, tells the tender story of a romance between a Moroccan woman and a trans man. Rather than centring transition as conflict, the film foregrounds love itself while allowing questions of family, migration and identity to emerge naturally around it. Meanwhile, Kal Stänicke's Trial of Hein offers something altogether stranger: a haunting German-language mystery in which a man returns to his isolated island home only to discover nobody remembers him. Part psychological drama, part identity parable, it promises one of the festival's most intriguing cinematic experiences.

Elsewhere, GAZE demonstrates its willingness to embrace work that tackles difficult subjects head-on. The Passion According to G.H.B. examines chemsex culture in São Paulo with remarkable openness, combining documentary, magical realism and explicit sexuality into a deeply compassionate portrait of desire, survival and queer community.

Audiences looking for pure escapist entertainment can find it in Stop! That! Train!, Adam Shankman's gleefully chaotic drag disaster comedy starring RuPaul, Ginger Minj and Jujubee. The absurd premise - two train attendants attempting to stop a runaway train headed for Stormaganza - feels deliberately ridiculous, recalling the broad spoof comedies of the early 2000s while celebrating drag's exuberant theatricality.

The programme also pays tribute to the figures who shaped queer cultural history. Barbara Forever celebrates pioneering lesbian filmmaker Barbara Hammer through her own extraordinary archive, tracing both her artistic innovations and the barriers she faced within a male-dominated avant-garde world. Joy Boy: A Tribute to Julius Eastman, created by six filmmakers in collaboration with aemi, honours the groundbreaking Black composer, performer and activist whose uncompromising work challenged both musical convention and political complacency.

Meanwhile, sport and activism meet in Give Me The Ball!, Liz Garbus and Elizabeth Wolff's documentary about tennis legend Billie Jean King. Moving from the Battle of the Sexes to King's eventual public coming out, the film reminds audiences that many of the rights now taken for granted were fought for by individuals willing to risk everything.

For those interested in queer film history, there is perhaps no more exciting screening than the 35mm presentation of Bound. Nearly three decades after its release, the Wachowskis' stylish noir thriller remains one of cinema's great lesbian love stories, combining erotic tension with razor-sharp filmmaking. Seeing it projected on film rather than digitally offers audiences a rare opportunity to experience the work as it was originally intended.

GAZE has always understood that festivals are about more than individual screenings. They create temporary communities where audiences discover unfamiliar stories, recognise themselves on screen or simply experience cinema collectively. At a time when queer rights continue to face renewed political attacks in many parts of the world, there is something quietly radical about gathering together to watch films that refuse invisibility.

That spirit carries through to the festival's closing film, Jaripeo, in which filmmaker Efraín Mojica returns to their conservative Mexican hometown to explore masculinity, secrecy and queer identity within the hyper-masculine culture of rodeos. It feels like an appropriate conclusion to a festival built around the idea that queer stories are never confined to one place, one genre or one experience.
And if you want to be part of a collective experience of cinematic surprise, pop by the mystery Film Screening on Friday July 31 and discover what wonders await.

Across documentaries and dramas, classics and experimental work, comedy and tragedy, GAZE 2026 demonstrates exactly why it has become one of Ireland's essential cultural events. More than three decades after its founding, the festival continues to expand our understanding of what queer cinema can be - not simply a category of film, but a space for artistic innovation, historical recovery, political reflection and, above all, extraordinary storytelling.

• For more information and booking, see Gaze.ie.