GAZE International Film Festival Director Greg Thorpe: "Marriage equality was a huge milestone, but it’s not the end of the line. The queer community is global, and our resistance is global”

Greg Thorpe is calm. Disarmingly so. Days before the GAZE International LGBTQ+ Film Festival opens its doors in Dublin, tickets are selling briskly, and the team is ready. This is no small feat, considering the festival lost its major corporate sponsor Accenture this year, trimmed its programme by a quarter, and leaned with intention into what Thorpe calls “the nitty gritty of it” - a return to community, care, and courage. GAZE 2025 is smaller - but sharper, more political, more emotionally coherent.

“It’s funny,” Thorpe says, “because this has been the easiest year. I know that sounds mad, because we lost Accenture and everything - but it’s been drama-free, other than that.”
In many ways, the drama has returned to where it belongs: the screen.

Thorpe - who divides his time between Dublin, Salford, and West Yorkshire - is a writer, curator and creative producer. He has worked with artist communities across the UK and Ireland and mentored dozens of emerging creatives. But for the last three years, he’s been the Festival Director of GAZE, overseeing what has become one of Ireland’s most vital cultural events, and one of the longest-running queer film festivals in the world.

From the moment the festival opens with Plainclothes, a taut, stylised, noir-inflected film about police entrapment of gay men in 1990s Britain, it is clear GAZE has no interest in nostalgia for its own sake.

“People forget that those witch hunts lasted well into the 90s,” Thorpe says. “These aren’t distant stories - they’re still part of our communities. And this film captures that with such originality. It’s staged like a thriller. It’s suspenseful, but it never lets you look away. It’s about two men trying to live in secrecy - about what it means to hide. The closet not as metaphor but as survival.”

By contrast, the closing film, Dreams and Nightmares, looks defiantly outward - a Black, queer, Afrofuturist road movie that Thorpe describes as “funny, sharp, deeply political, and beautifully performed.” The film offers a vision of what queer kinship and solidarity might look like when built on activism and joy, rather than assimilation or fear.

“I wanted to end with that sense of hope,” he says. “Because hope is thin on the ground right now. And this film offers us a glimpse of what we could be. It’s a model of queer community grounded in friendship, activism, joy. It’s also my final screening as festival director - so it’s my invitation to everyone to come together, one last time, and imagine that future.”

The arc between these two poles - between hunted past and visionary future - is deliberate. “I think of the festival as a journey,” Thorpe says. “Not just a collection of screenings, but an emotional narrative. We start in the shadows, with criminalisation and secrecy, and we move toward something brighter, more defiant, more collective. Not naïve optimism - earned hope.”

That idea - of hope amidst adversity - is central to GAZE’s mission this year, which also marks the tenth anniversary of marriage equality in Ireland. At the festival launch, that historic moment was honoured with a powerful short film - but also complicated by the inclusion of Blood Like Water, a queer Palestinian documentary, and a fundraising campaign for Medical Aid for Palestinians.

“We didn’t want to be complacent,” Thorpe explains. “Marriage equality was a huge milestone, but it’s not the end of the line. The queer community is global, and our resistance is global.”

At this year’s launch, GAZE screened Blood Like Water, a powerful short film by a queer Palestinian filmmaker, and invited donations to Medical Aid for Palestinians - an act of solidarity, but also one of political clarity.

“At the moment, LGBT rights are very often used as a stick to beat us with,” Thorpe says. “They’re used to erase the experience of queer Palestinians, by pitching queer freedom against a free Palestine. And we know those things aren’t opposed. We understand that struggle is intersectional.”

He’s clear that Blood Like Water isn’t propaganda; it’s nuanced, difficult, honest. “It doesn’t shy away from homophobia in Palestinian society, and it doesn’t shy away from criticising the occupation. That’s the clarity we need. It holds both truths, and that’s very real to us.”

For GAZE, the goal isn’t to speak over people, but to platform voices that are too often silenced. “I feel like all voices are equal at GAZE,” Thorpe says. “And I hope that’s apparent to our audience, because it’s very meaningful to us.”

GAZE, under Thorpe’s direction, has never flinched from politics. And this year, freed from the constraints of corporate sponsorship, it feels bolder, more unapologetic - and more honest.

“I’m more interested in what parts of queer life can’t be appropriated,” he says. “The sex positivity, the mess, the joy that comes from learning to be yourself later in life. The bad decisions. The refusal to be the good guy. Respectability politics? We need to leave that behind.” This is not about courting controversy, but about rejecting constraint and conditional acceptance. “You don’t have to be well-behaved to be loved,” he says. “You don’t have to be respectable to have rights.”

The festival’s shorts programme is full of this energy - queer characters who are complicated, unkempt, defiant, chaotic, soft. Characters who feel real.

“I’m all for queer joy,” Thorpe says, “but sometimes joy gets flattened into something neat and tidy. The joy I’m talking about is messy - it comes with hangovers and bad choices and forgiveness and yearning. That’s where we live.”

And if joy is political, so is language. For the first time, GAZE has programmed a full strand of Irish-language queer shorts - films that feel both ancient and urgent, rooted and radical.

“We’ve been watching the Irish language revival with excitement,” he says. “But my question is always - are we there too? Are queer artists part of that revival, or are we being left behind again?” I point that Irish is a language of resistance, of love, of poetry, of myth. It’s inherently queer. Thorpe lights up when talking about the nuances of gender as Gaeilge, the flexibility and freedom it allows for non-binary expression. “It’s more expansive than English. It bends, it accommodates, it opens up possibilities. That’s thrilling.”

For him, these films are more than representation - they are reclamation. “We need to tell Irish queer stories. Not as a side-note. As the foundation. Because if we don’t tell them, someone else will. And probably badly.”

The same logic underpins this year’s retrospective strand, which includes High Art - a newly restored 1990s lesbian classic starring Ally Sheedy - and I’m Your Venus, a follow-up to Paris Is Burning that tracks legacy, drag, and survival across decades.

“These are legacy films,” Thorpe says. “They’re not just nostalgia. They’re how we inherit our culture. And Strange Journey, the new documentary about Rocky Horror, is the same. That story is weird and messy and joyful and totally queer. And it changed lives.”

These films, he insists, are for everyone. Not just the queer community.

“One of the things I always say is - our stories are as good, as complex, and as universal as anyone else’s. GAZE is for everyone. And if you call yourself an ally, the best way to support queer culture is to show up. Buy a ticket. Sit in the room. Listen. Be part of the conversation. Everyone is welcome at GAZE.”

And the stories they’ll find there are genuine treasures. “Some of the films we show will never screen anywhere else in Ireland,” Thorpe explains. “When we say it’s a premiere, we don’t mean it’s the first screening - we mean it might be the only one. This could be your one chance to see it, with other people, in a dark room. And that matters. That’s culture.”

It’s why, even as GAZE showcases polished features, it remains fiercely loyal to grassroots work. “Some of these films are made on iPhones,” he says, “with a group of friends and a prayer. And yet, they arrive like miracles. And we get hundreds of little miracles every year.”

As funding shrinks and streaming platforms dominate the landscape, Greg remains focused on access, on inclusion, on asking hard questions. “Dublin is an expensive city. Queer people are often priced out of their own culture. So we work with partners to offer free or discounted tickets, and we ask ourselves constantly - who is missing from this room? Who isn’t seeing themselves in the program?”

That kind of witnessing and community building is part of what he’ll miss most. His proudest legacy? The relationship he’s helped grow between GAZE and Irish filmmakers. “That trust, that support, through things like the Stargaze programme - that closeness, that sense that we’re a home for them - that’s what I’m proud of.”

He’s also proud of the festival’s scale: one that can premiere an Andrew Scott film and still spotlight an unknown director from Croatia. “That full spectrum,” he says. “That’s the point.”
And what next for Thorpe? A break. A swim in a lake in rural Leitrim. Time with his partner. A return to his fiction - and maybe, just maybe, a short film of his own.

“There’s this rollback on queer rights. Funding’s being pulled. And maybe, just maybe, that’s our chance to get as authentic as possible. To tell the stories no one else will. The messier, the better.”

The legacy Greg Thorpe leaves behind is not just one of intelligent programming, international reach, and artistic integrity. It’s a legacy of community - of holding fast to queer culture even when the market turns away, of demanding more from allies, of reminding us that cinema can still be a gathering place.

“Film lets people see that we’ve always been here,” he says. “It gives people a version of themselves they didn’t know was possible. It insists on our humanity, in the most beautiful, spectacular ways.”

And that, perhaps, is what GAZE under Thorpe has done best of all - insisted on queer humanity, loudly, brilliantly, with all its glorious contradictions intact.

GAZE 2025 runs from July 29 to August 4 at the Light House Cinema and the Irish Film Institute. Full programme and ticket information available at gaze.ie.