In 2026, the Toronto Queer Film Festival is celebrating ten years of bringing 2SLGBTQIA+ filmmaking to Toronto, with radical roots and a focus on amplifying voices from the margins.
What is the Toronto Queer Film Festival?
The Toronto Queer Film Festival (TQFF) was started in 2016 as a result of “frustration with the mainstream, corporate-focused nature of many of the more institutionalized LGBT cultural organizations like Pride Toronto and Inside Out [another Toronto 2SLGBTQIA+ film festival],” said filmmaker and TQFF founder, Kami Chisholm, in 2016.
TQFF organizers wanted to focus on contemporary political issues in films that “feel relevant to the community, especially by people on the margins.” In a cultural space — the Pride and the queer liberation movement in general — that was quickly being sold to corporations, becoming increasingly apolitical, and moving away from its radical, Black, and trans-focused roots, TQFF filled a community need.
Since the founding of TQFF, things have only gotten more grim for 2SLGBTQIA+ communities in Canada. In 2024, Pride was successfully disrupted by pro-Palestine protestors who brought to light Pride’s financial support for Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people via their corporate sponsorships. In June 2026, the CCLA (Canadian Civil Liberties Association) had to intervene in the Supreme Court to challenge Canada’s first anti-trans legislation.
This year, TQFF runs from October 14 to October 18 at the Tranzac Club in Toronto, located at 292 Brunswick Ave. As a response to a rise in tensions towards 2SLGBTQIA+ people in Canada, TQFF carries its political messaging through this year’s anniversary theme: Pissed Off, Still Laughing.
TQFF’s programming highlights the radical, inclusive nature of Pride as a protest
The festival’s Film Submission guidelines explicitly state:
“[…] We are thrilled that the proliferation of digital technologies is increasingly making it possible for even queer and trans folks with the least resources and institutional supports to make work.
[…] We want to foster and support the production of all kinds of work, and that means dismantling institutional structures that discourage those with the least access and resources from submitting their films, much less have them be seriously considered. While money and resources can sometimes be instrumental in producing great work, they are no substitute for – and, in fact, often wind up being an anathema to – creativity, insight, and a commitment to bettering our communities. […]
TQFF encourages anyone and everyone to make and submit work that fits with our mission to our festival. We will continue to do our best to reduce and remove barriers to production and distribution of work by queer and trans artists, we will never charge submission fees, and every film submitted will be watched by our programming team and considered for inclusion in the festival.”
This year is no different, as Pissed Off, Still Laughing includes a diverse mix of feature films, shorts, creative non-fiction and experimental works from LGBTQ+ filmmakers across the GTA and beyond. In addition to screenings, the festival offers a symposium with interactive presentations and workshops on topics like clowning, burlesque, sculpting and more. These events are developed to challenge corporate-driven models of art exhibition and reinforce TQFF’s commitment to solidarity with its community.
“There have been many political crises in the last decade, but despite that, queer folks are always building stronger communities and solidarities. We make art, we march, we play, and we celebrate our wins where we have them,” says Nedda Ibrahim, TQFF’s outgoing Executive Director. “So, this theme asks: how can we re-centre that queer expression, whether it’s grief or joy, and return to this idea of queer as something we do or practice rather than just an identity that fits neatly into DEI mandates?”
“It’s not about hiding or shirking the bad things in the world or the errors we make, but more about playing with them, basking in them, or messing with them a little bit,” says Collie McCutcheon, Programming Coordinator for the festival.
Films the festival’s organizers are most excited about
Spring spoke to Sindi Pinari, TQFF’s Head of Communications, and Collie McCutcheon, TQFF’s Associate Programmer and Administrative Assistant, about the films they were most looking forward to.
Sindi Pinari, Head of Communications at TQFF: “I really wouldn’t miss the screening of Lucid on October 15! Edgy, fun, campy horror is one of my favourite genres to indulge in and we’re so lucky to bring that to TQFF this year. Horror and queerness have embraced each other in cinema for a long time and witnessing them together on screen can encourage us to touch and hold such visceral ambivalence. Lucid will do that and it’ll have so much fun doing it!”
Collie McCutcheon, Associate Programmer and Administrative Assistant at TQFF: “Our theme this year is Pissed Off, Still Laughing, a combination of seemingly contradictory emotions. I find the theme personally relatable – it tends to be how I feel when I get street harassed for being trans in public, a scary but often silly experience – but it’s also a theme that encapsulates how we as a festival feel after 10 years around the sun. 10 years is both a lot of years (not every festival has the luck to last this long!) and very little (being ten in trans years, I still feel like a wee baby).
With that theme in mind, we selected films by queer filmmakers, both local and from across the world, that both understand the weight of histories of systemic oppression and repression and gleefully snub their noses at them. We curated the shorts programme Playplace, screening on Saturday [October 17th] at 4 PM at the Tranzac, around films that feature queers young and old carving out time and space to play by their own rules and to mock the familial and economic structures that keep them down.
Of the films featured in Playplace, I wanted to highlight two for you and your readers: Double Chesticle Extraction is a goth comedy (think early Tim Burton) done in the style of a Youtube how-to video, where an irrefutably cool goth trans masc surgeon performs top surgery on a creepy but kinda cute clay creature. The surgeon, played by filmmaker Ciel Sourdeau, is a camp combination of the gatekeeping doctors that all trans people encounter when medically transitioning and of the many trans people who share their tips and tricks for transitioning online. Double Chesticle Extraction is one of the few films of ours that won’t be available through our online festival, so please come by and check it out! I think it’s hysterical and a great way to sluff off all the traumas trans people accumulate while transitioning.
Then there’s the closing film of the programme, SLAM DUNK by Salem Zurch Smith. It’s a short yet wise and warm rumination on life after death, one that finds some solace and humour in imagining the ultimate escape from this shitty world we live in.”
The schedule and tickets are available at TQFF.ca and are Pay What You Can (PWYC) in order to reduce barriers for low-income audiences. No one will be turned away for lack of funds. All screenings will be closed-captioned and all industry panels will have Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) captioning.
As part of TQFF’s commitment to providing a low-risk space during in-person gatherings, and in recognition of the fact that COVID-19 is a serious and disabling health concern, they are requiring that all attendees wear N95 masks in festival spaces, and are also offering free masks to all attendees. Following the festival, all programming will be available for online viewing from October 20 to October 25, 2026.
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