Queer Lisboa Festival opens with film by Ira Sachs “The man I love”

A full programming of the 30th edition, today released, includes 94 films, which are a “symptom of an absolute maturity of queer cinema”, coming from spanish, african, asian and american cinema.

For the opening was chosen a film that says Ira Sachs “as an indisputable author who knows how to look at the legacy of New Queer Cinema and bring it to today”, says the organization.

Shown this year in Cannes, “The man I love”, with Rami Malek, Rebecca Hall and Tom Sturridge, “has as a scenario New York of the 1980s, in the midst of the AIDS epidemic”.

The closure of Queer Lisboa, on the 26th, will be with the animated feature film “Tangles”, by Canadian director Leah Nelson, from a comic book about a family dealing with the impact of Alzheimer’s disease.

In Queer Lisbon there will also be Portuguese cinema, especially with the premiere of “Nothing left”, the first feature film by director André Godinho and described by the festival as “a speculative dystopia of individuals who want to fight the world”.

The film, which is in the Queer Art competition, is produced by Terratreme Films and has the interpretation of Odete, Paula Sá Nogueira, Rodrigo Vaiapraia, João Duarte Costa, June João, Nádia Yracema, among others.

In the short films competition is “The Time of the Star”, by Rita Barbosa, and the festival also highlights the exhibition of a new digitization, made by the Portuguese Cinemateca, of the film “Fatucha Superstar – Opera Rock... Bufa” (1976), by João Paulo Ferreira, inspired by “Jesus Christ Superstar”, by Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Queer Lisboa had previously announced that it will show the films “Natal Amargo”, Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar, and “Adolescence, sex and death in the camp miasma”, of the American Jane Schoenbrun, both already exhibited at the Festival de Cannes.

Also announced is the retrospective “Rescuing Futures: The cinema queer is in the mirror”, in partnership with the Portuguese Cinemateca, to mark three decades of the festival.

The retrospective proposes “a set of films that, in their time, sought to build utopias and which were references in terms of an idea of community”, authors such as Cheryl Dunye, James Bidgood, John Greyson, Kenneth Anger, Kim Longinotto, Marlon T. Riggs, Lana and Lilly Wachowski, Lisa Cholodenko, Sally Potter, Su Friedrich, Ventura Pons and Yonfan.

For the direction of Queer Lisboa, “the extensive program of 2026 is aggregating a past that has idealized ways of being in the world, a present that continues to outline ways of looking at reality, and a future that, even in adverse times, the festival insists on imagining hopeful”.

The Queer Lisboa – International Festival of Queer Cinema, which has a budget of 150,000 euros, is marked from 18 to 26 September, at Cinema São Jorge and at Cinemateca Portuguesa.