Coming up soon is the fifth edition of the Cyprus LGBTQIA+ Film Festival. Happening from September 20 to 29 at NiMAC – Nicosia Municipal Arts Center – a ten-day agenda of screenings is about to unfold. Twenty films and over 50 Cyprus premieres of shorts and feature films make up Queer Wave’s programme this year.

“Many of the films in this year’s selection have been screened and celebrated at some of the world’s most important film festivals, such as Venice, Berlin, Locarno, Rotterdam, Sundance and Clermont-Ferrand,” says Queer Wave in anticipation of the festival.

Among them are six short films by Cypriot filmmakers. Alongside the screening programme, the festival will also include specially selected parallel events led by local artists from every corner of Cyprus, across the divide. And that’s not all. Music, DJ sets, drag shows and experimental video performance projects are also part of the 2024 programme.

“For the first time,” the festival adds, “Queer Wave will also host workshops and short lectures, delivered by creatives and film professionals who will visit the festival from Poland, France and Greece. Special emphasis this year is given to works that allude to the idea of queer memory and cinema as a means of capturing personal experiences and recording the collective histories of the LGBTQIA+ community. Landmarks in the history of cinema, fiction films that reimagine history, documentaries and hybrid forms that reappropriate archival material, will all be an important part of this year’s Queer Wave programme.

“Queer history and a process-based approach towards a more systematic archiving of queer experience in Cyprus will also be central themes in an exhibition that will have its opening on the same day as the festival, Friday 20 September, titled ‘nono, bad timing! archiving queer times and spaces’.”

The full programme will soon be announced on the festival’s website queerwave.com.

Queer Wave

5th edition of Cyprus LGBTQIA+ film festival. September 20-29. NiMAC, Nicosia. www.queerwave.com