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Antwerp Queer Arts Festival
Saturday, 02 August 2025 until Saturday, 30 August 2025
About Antwerp Queer Arts Festival
AQAF is a multidisciplinary arts festival, questioning gender and sexual diversity. It combines art with activism and academia. For the past 8 years, we have programmed both local performers and international talent within a variety of art forms: music, literature, film, dance, theatre, exposition, performance… We work with open calls and have a particular interest for new queer talent.
AQAF is more than an arts festival. Collaborating with academia and activists, we create a space and a platform for people to express themselves and to meet others. AQAF is a grassroots initiative. It relies on community support to create the spaces and representation that we need. Your ticket purchase or donations directly supports queer performers.
2025 films...
This selection pushes the boundaries of form and expectation – poetic, personal, abstract, or outspoken. Each film tells a story of gender, identity, love, and the body in its own distinctive way.
In B&S (India), director Lipika Singh Darai explores queerness in a society that prefers to look away, using sound, movement, and fragmented images.
Shame (France/Spain/Lebanon) by Hadi Moussally captures the queer body and self-image in visuals that are both confronting and tender.
Lloyd Wong, Unfinished (Canada) is an intimate tribute by Lesley Loksi Chan to queer Asian identity and the creative legacy of Lloyd Wong.
Ordinary Life (Japan) by Yoriko Mizushiri is a wordless, sensory animation about queer intimacy in the everyday.
Finally, Uit de Zon (Belgium) by Poespas Producties is a warm ode to queer friendship, resistance, and connection.
Director Leilah Weinraub charts the eight years of Shakedown and attempts to “portray the before and after of a utopian moment.” Filmed with the tenderness of a home movie and presented as an old-school mixtape, Shakedown captures the propulsive, dreamlike atmosphere of the club and showcases its subjects in a stunningly intimate way.This film is as bold as it is quietly mesmerising in the way it glosses over nothing but just shows everything. This empathetic documentary is an essential relic for the past, present, and future of the queer community.
The Last Year of Darkness offers an intimate look at the underground club scene in Chengdu, China, through the eyes of five young people who seek refuge in the almost-forgotten club Funky Town. In this neon-lit space, they search for freedom, love, and escapism, but the looming closure of the club forces them to confront the reality that brought them there.