The GAZE International LGBTQIA Film Festival has today announced the new full festival programme of Irish and international films, as they’ll be showcasing a spectacular 7 day schedule of Irish and international queer cinema in its full splendour at the Light House Cinema and Irish Film Institute (IFI) from 29th July to 4th August 2025.
In the 33rd edition of one of Dublin’s biggest festivals, the programme will include a handpicked selection of films from all around the world. Films with Hollywood stars like Alan Cumming are mixed with international unknowns, and the 2025 festival will also include a new animation strand, expanding the outlets for the stories shared at GAZE. Additions this year include a new special showcase of queer films in the Irish language, and a spotlight on stories of queer migrants and asylum seekers.
Festival Director Greg Thorpe presents his fourth and final GAZE programme this year, and will be leaving a legacy of ground-breaking and important film titles for the Irish LGBTQIA community to enjoy.
“There’ll be popcorn and tears before bedtime! Life for the queer community is fraught and unpredictable as when I took over, but one thing we can depend on is the power of queer cinema to sustain and astound us.”
Greg Thorpe, GAZE International LGBTQIA Film Festival Director
Spilling the tea at the IFI
Wait staff at the IFI Café Bar needn’t worry, it’s just that the festival are hosting the Launch Night of this year’s programme tonight at the Irish Film Institute, Temple Bar (Tuesday 24th June). The big night continues a strong partnership between the IFI and GAZE as together they celebrate the 10th Anniversary of the Marriage Referendum, with thanks to LGBT Ireland. The event will kick off with the launch of the film festival’s 2025 programme, followed by a special short film selection celebrating activist victories and solidarity with LGBTQIA people around the world campaigning for equal rights.
Beginning with the Iris Prize-winning Palestinian short film Blood Like Water, the screening will give a preview of GAZE’s 2025 shorts programme with films from Australia, Japan, the US, and Northern Ireland, capping things off with an archive screening of Anna Rodgers’ short film Making History, which was made in collaboration with GAZE, which documents the momentous day of the Marriage Referendum. The full programme will be live and kicking from 6pm onwards.
Festival Recs
The festival have highlighted a number of this year’s big features, showing film fans how to make the 33rd GAZE a good one, whether you’re a first timer or a seasoned pro.
Opening this year’s festival is Plainclothes, starring Tom Blyth (Benediction, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes) and Russell Tovey (Being Human, Looking) in an explosive and romantic thriller. Set in a 1990’s New York, a promising undercover agent played by Tovey is assigned to lure and arrest gay men, but defies professional orders when he falls in love with a target.
Girls & Boys promises to be a must-see Irish gem screening at the festival. Directed by Donncha Gilmore, this feature debut set in the fair city of film sees rising stars Liath Hannon and Adam Lunnon-Collery in a tender trans-led romantic drama.
The festival will screen queer classics too, most notably a new digital restoration of High Art, starring Ally Sheedy, screening in Ireland for the first time ever. The film sees a young female intern at a small magazine company and a drug-addicted lesbian photographer slowly fall in love while exploiting each other to advance their respective careers.
Another title to top your GAZE viewing card is Drive Back Home, in the latest offering by Canadian writer/director, Michael Clowater. Based on a true story and starring Alan Cumming at his frazzled and fragile best, the film, set in the 1970s, follows a gruff New Brunswick plumber who travels to Toronto to bail out his estranged gay brother jailed for public indecency. The drive back home forces the brothers to become acquainted in an honest new way.
3*3
For GAZE’s 33rd edition, the festival presents 3*3 – a series of three special screenings, each including three films on a subject close to the festival’s heart with crucial post-screening conversations. While LGBTQIA people around the world disproportionately face mistreatment because of their identities, and migrants, refugees and asylum seekers remaining an underrepresented part of the queer community; GAZE have identified three Queer Migration Stories that address these current concerns.
Beginning with two short films following queer and trans people’s migrations through India, Brunei, Lebanon, Ukraine, Germany and the UK, the focus feature is the Irish premiere of Dreamers. From breakout director Joy Gharoro–Akpojotor, the film humanises the experience of women asylum seekers in a drama that teems with laughter, resistance and desire.
This focus on international queer lives continues with Three Japanese Love Stories. GAZE revisits the landscape-shifting documentary Shinjuku Boys on its 30th anniversary, alongside two new lesbian and non-binary narrative shorts from Japan’s contemporary queer filmmaking scene, creating new conversations about Japanese queer film and the legacy of Shinjuku Boys.
The 2025 festival looks at Three HIV Legacy Stories too, where three striking documentaries led by the subjects’ own children and successors immortalise activist legacies around the AIDS crisis in Australia, the US and the Netherlands in intimate detail.
The animation industry is a hotbed of queer talent, and this year GAZE has a selection of the best animated LGBTQIA shorts from around the world in their new strand Our Animated Lives – a selection of 14 new animations –including the audacious Aussie animation Lesbian Space Princess.
GAZE as Gaeilge
Tá an teanga í fhéin Aiteach – the language is queer. GAZE will screen 8 Short films as Gaeilge as part of their partnership with Bród na Gaeltachta, Ireland’s first Gaeltacht Pride. This unmissable selection will also tour to Donegal, where Bród na Gaeltachta is nurturing a new wave of queer Irish-language filmmaking, followed by a conversation centering Gaeilge as a language for queer art. It includes a brand-new weekend film challenge, with the festival running 3–6 July.
Insights & Events
From 2nd – 4th August, the festival will host talks with visiting filmmakers and more at Café au GAZE. These events will include the launch of a queer crew database, created by Alba Fernadez, and supported by the National Talent Academy (NTA).
The starGaze professional development initiative started last year to support emerging LGBTQIA filmmakers continues this year, as the GAZE Film Festival has selected six new participants for 2025 – Billy Buckley, Eleanor Rogers, Lewis Doherty, Stephen T Lally, Venus Patel and Film In Dublin contributor Jack Warren.
starGAZEprovides a platform for LGBTQIA talent through an internationally recognised film festival with access to Irish and international creatives. The initiative’s ambition is to increase the number of Irish LGBTQIA stories on screen and showcase the next generation of Irish queer and trans voices. The initiative accepts applications from LGBTQIA people of all backgrounds, particularly encouraging applicants from the global majority, trans and non-binary people, people from working-class communities, the Travelling community, people with disabilities and all equity-seeking individuals facing additional challenges within the film industry.
Ahead of the Festival launch night, Chair of the GAZE board, Tom Creed praised Thorpe and the entire festival team, commenting:
“We’re hugely grateful to our outgoing Festival Director Greg Thorpe who carried the GAZE flag into its fourth decade and brought us so many unforgettable nights at the cinema with his excellent taste and great humanity. Our amazing team should be the envy of any arts or film festival in Ireland, and the board are enormously grateful to them for all their work year-round to bring us a thrilling and remarkably well-organised week of film and events. We couldn’t do this without the Arts Council and a range of new funders who have come on board to support our work, and I want to pay special tribute to our Festival Friends who stick with us year on year to help us make it all happen.”
You can start checking out the full programme and booking your tickets soon HERE.
GAZE is supported by the Arts Council, National Talent Academies, Comisiún na Meán, Dublin City Council, and the Department of Children, Disability and Equality, as well as our Festival Friends and a range of other partners and sponsors.