Queer Shorts Vienna returns with an opening programme that foregrounds queer visibility in all its complexity. Drawing from highlights across the festival, this selection of short films offers a first glimpse into the breadth and diversity of this year’s curatorial focus.

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A gay man drifts through Hong Kong’s apartment complexes, moving from one sex date to the next — each time adopting a new identity. Sometimes a brief connection forms, a moment of real intimacy. Other times, things turn ugly.

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Queer Youth traces moments of first becoming: first love, secret night escapes, stolen time, and first heartbreaks. The programme lingers on fleeting encounters and fragile emotions, capturing youth as a space of intensity, risk, and discovery.
Curated also with young audiences in mind, the films move between tenderness and vulnerability, portraying queer youth as self-determined, complex, and deeply felt — experiences shaped by desire, uncertainty, and the search for one’s own rhythm."

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Across borders and broken systems, queer refugees continue to love, dream, and resist.
This program presents intimate short films that explore exile, belonging, trauma, and hope through queer migrant voices.
Together they create a moving portrait of resilience, showing how queer life survives — and transforms — even under the most fragile conditions.
By centering stories told from within these communities, the films challenge dominant narratives about migration and identity.
They remind us that behind every status, border, and label is a human being searching for safety, dignity, and connection.
This program is both a space of reflection and an act of visibility.

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A future out of sync. Bodies that glitch, mutate, or refuse their assigned roles. Queer Sci-Fi & Horror Shorts uses genre as a queer tool — to unsettle norms, bend reality, and imagine other ways of being. Monsters, machines, and uncanny worlds become mirrors for desire, fear, and transformation. These films don’t offer comfort or clear answers; they embrace the strange, the unsettling, and the unknown. In these speculative visions, queerness survives by changing, resisting, and re-inventing itself.

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After living illegally in the United Kingdom for two years, Isio is placed in the Hatchworth immigration removal centre. She hopes her asylum claim will be approved quickly so she can return to the life she once had. Her roommate Farah has far less faith in the system and, together with her friends, is already planning an escape.

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Growing up queer is never just about getting older — it is about learning how to exist in a world that was not built for you.
This program brings together short films that explore first love, identity, family, shame, freedom, and self-discovery through queer youth and young adult perspectives.
The films move between tenderness and rebellion, confusion and clarity, capturing the fragile and powerful moments that shape who we become.
Together they form an intimate portrait of becoming — of finding language for desire, courage for difference, and space for one’s true self.
These stories remind us that queer coming of age is not only about survival, but about claiming joy, presence, and future.

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Queer Gazed Bodies moves between two intertwined perspectives: queer bodies on screen and a queer gaze that reshapes cinematic perception. The programme traces fluid, unstable body images while foregrounding films that are queer not only in what they show, but in how they are constructed.
Queerness emerges through cinematic language — through montage, rhythm, framing, and movement — sometimes without depicting explicitly queer subjects. These films resist fixed meanings and normative body images, opening spaces of ambiguity, sensuality, and transformation, and proposing cinema itself as a site of queer perception."



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Art & Experimental Shorts brings together films that work against narrative certainty and familiar cinematic language. These works use experimentation not as a gesture of abstraction alone, but as a queer method — to disrupt perception, resist legibility, and open space for ambiguity. Through image, sound, performance, and rhythm, the films invite viewers into experiences that are felt before they are understood, proposing cinema as a site of tension, intimacy, and transformation.

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“I’m feeling butterflies” — and not just because it’s spring. This short film block dives headfirst into the wild, wonderful, and messy realm of queer love: from awkward first dates to deep longing, from fleeting glances to heartbreak and healing. With humour, tenderness, and cinematic charm, these films remind us that love is never one-size-fits-all — and that queer love deserves its own spotlight, full of nuance, tension, joy, and surprise.
Swipe right on this programme. You might just fall in love.

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This program celebrates queer Black, Indigenous, and People of Color voices in all their complexity, beauty, and power.
Through bold, intimate, and deeply personal short films, we encounter stories of identity, heritage, love, and resistance shaped by lived experience beyond whiteness.
The films reflect a wide range of cultural backgrounds and artistic languages, creating a rich and layered cinematic dialogue.
They open space for stories that are too often overlooked, while affirming queer BIPoC lives as central, creative, and essential to contemporary queer cinema.
This program is an invitation to listen, witness, and be transformed by these perspectives.


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History is not fixed. It lingers in bodies, gestures, and silences. Queer History Shorts moves across different layers of time — from the direct illumination of queer histories that were hidden or erased, to more experimental approaches that slip out of linear narration. Some films reconstruct the past through documents and memories; others treat history as something inscribed in us, carried forward through feeling, movement, and resistance. Together, these works show queer history not as a closed chapter, but as a living process. Sometimes precise, sometimes fractured, sometimes poetic, they remind us that queer existence has always been here — even when it had to find other ways to be seen.

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