In person, online, and across the country. Here is the full QWOCFF 2026 season.
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In a time when the empire would rather LBTQIA+ BIPOC folx be invisible and afraid, we are going louder than ever. We built a season around our filmmakers and their submissions: three days at the Presidio in June, an Online Encore in September, and a Satellite Season that runs from May into November across Oakland, LA, San Francisco's Chinatown, and more. Watching our stories together has always been one of the ways we survive each other into the future.
Below is the whole schedule with the reason behind every screening program.
This is QWOCMAP's annual Pride & Juneteenth screening, and like every year, it focuses on liberation. Especially right now, when queer & trans Black folx remind terror and empire on the daily that by the light of our fire we can clearly see what they are, and we are not impressed. We open with joy because joy is what keeps our memories burning, what keeps us fueled, what keeps us warm, what prepares us for what we will see in the flames.
This is mostly a love letter to introverts. If you don't know anyone, we'll put you in a group with a physical activity to do (bowling) and some low-stakes talking to do alongside it (about the game), and you'll be great. Extroverts will find new people to love and cheer on.
If you're not bowling, there are jello shots, a full bar, non-alcoholic brews, fountain drinks and tea, plus chicken fingers, chili dogs, and tater tots eaten by the fire's glow, with salads and pizzas available if any of that isn't your thing. We like it when everyone wins.
Thank you Presidio Bowl for being a home and a partner for QWOCFF!
The Bay Area has one of the strongest film communities in the country. Industry Brunch is the morning where filmmakers get to know it: funders, production houses, other festivals, the local ecosystem that helps more films get made.
We're filmmakers too, so we know how little sun some of us see. The brunch lives outside on the plaza for a reason. Note: this is the only event that has paid tickets. Filmmakers who have been through our program will receive a discount code to get in for free.
Creation is always paired with breaking things down, and the things that need breaking down include systems, whatever holds us back, and the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. These seven films don't explain themselves, they just go, because we can't be afraid of a little breakage before we remix, remold, and restore what was lost with our new dreams.
Colonialism has always sought to displace us from deep ecologies. To define human beings as if we were not intimately connected to the environment that now needs "saving" and not its original stewards. These three films remind us that queer and trans Indigenous people and African diasporic peoples are spiritually interwoven with the land that forms the basis of our resistance. We programmed this one to remind us that we are sacred and we are creators of new worlds.
Who are we, if not absolute, daily defiance, as we live and breathe? Our fiercest history has been about desire, and about the love we hold for our chosen families. These seven films catch queer love in all its messy, tender, hilarious, unexpected forms, and stand as a reminder of our history, and our present, as outlaws.
The family is the one place most of us are taught that we ought to belong, and we love that queer and trans folx choose and ferociously protect family configurations where we can all actually belong. QWOCMAP programs these screenings every year because exploring, imagining, and creating what kin, community, and family mean to each of us is part of how we keep building.
Six films, all of them about who counts as family and who gets to define it.
Several years in at the Presidio, the afternoon reception has become one of our favorite things in the whole festival. Picture performance, sunshine, and play, with Community Partners and other organizations holding court at their tables, and ample room for families to connect between screenings. This year we're featuring Sistahs of the Drum and Black, whose resounding songs will be heard across the park.
Come for the films, stay for the love and the revolution.
With our second annual Queer Asian World Cinema satellite screenings, we wanted to program a companion that grounds Queer Asian America (and the West/Global North) in our histories, our traditions, and our ability to create something new from the old.
Join us for six films that ask what it means to carry a history forward and make it yours.
Free East Bay Shuttle, wheelchair-accessible, runs Friday and Sunday to Oakland. Details on the transportation guide.
In the years leading up to 2020, QWOCMAP had been planning Safe Space/No Place, a hybrid in-person and online festival built on then-emerging film tech, meeting platforms, and custom software. Central to our research and planning: increasing accessibility for disabled and elderly audience members.
By the time COVID-19 was underway, other film festivals had completely cancelled their programs. QWOCMAP pivoted at lightning speed to a LIVE, completely ONLINE Film Festival. QWOCFF had always drawn people from around the world to San Francisco. Now we were bringing the Film Festival into homes across the globe. Audiences participated in screenings and filmmaker Q&As from dozens of states and dozens of countries.
We returned to in-person screenings in 2022 with respiratory health protocols that we continue to this day. And we started presenting the Film Festival's Online Encore. Just like in-person and satellite screenings, all films are audio described and captioned, so we continue to expand accessibility for LBTQIA+ people of color communities wherever we are.
We still plan to offer hybrid screenings one day, when we have the budget and staff size to do it, to connect LBTQIA+ people of color around the world and build power through film. As filmmakers our vision is persistent, and QWOCMAP's long-time dreams are tenacious.
The 2026 Online Encore opens September 11. Every in-person block returns, plus exclusive screenings you'll only see online.
In 2025, the year of QWOCMAP's 25th anniversary, we had what is known as a good problem.
We received so many film submissions from LBTQIA+ filmmakers of color around the world that there was no way we could screen them all at the Film Festival. We'd have to run screenings 24 hours a day for 3 days and still have more. So we added as many screenings as possible in person, and added exclusive screenings to the Online Encore. And still, we added two extremely special satellite screenings, which have grown into the satellite season you're seeing now.
The QWOCFF season now stretches from May into November, partnered with organizations doing serious work in their own communities. If a satellite screening lands near you, come.
Queer Asian World Cinema
Queer Asian World Cinema is officially an annual event. This year we partnered with three venues to bring queer and trans Asian diaspora stories to the Bay Area and beyond.
At the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, presented by Visual Communications, we combined films from QWOCFF 2026 with queer and trans API films from our Film and Freedom Academy catalog, holding local and translocal stories from the Asian diaspora side by side.
In Oakland, we headed to the Oakland Asian Cultural Center with a double feature, mixing films submitted to QWOCFF, films from QWOCMAP's Film and Freedom Academy, and Visual Communications' Armed With A Camera Fellowship, presented in partnership with OACC and the Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center.
Still to come: if you missed the first two, the Queer Asian World Cinema series heads to San Francisco's Chinatown in July at the Chinese Culture Center. The Chinese Culture Center sits at the site of the first American flag when California joined the U.S. as a state, and this screening is one way to understand the 250th anniversary of this country. Asian diasporas are part of this country's history. LBTQIA+ Asian people are part of what this collection of states could become, especially alongside Native sovereignty that redresses the theft of Indigenous lands, and Black liberation that repairs the legacy of kidnapping indigenous Africans from their lands.
Queer Black August
This year Queer Black August returns to two Bay Area homes.
On Friday, August 21 at 7pm, we are at EastSide Arts Alliance. As EastSide commemorates Black political prisoners through their event, this QWOCFF screening focuses on connection, survival, creation, magic, and the futurity of queer and transgender Black people, with films that show resistance and transformation as personal and political at once. Love is the foundation of Black liberation.
On Tuesday, August 25 at 6pm, we return to San Francisco Black Pride for year two, programmed inside their full week of community conversations, panels, and wellness sessions. These are films that move through grief, lineage, and becoming, which is to say through Black liberation and joy at once.
IndigiQueer Stewards
Date to be announced, between Indigenous People's Day and Native American Heritage Month.
Hands working hide, bringing knowledge back to life. Voices and language refusing to disappear. Two films grounded in land, language, and continuance, where what was nearly lost is carried forward, practiced, and protected, coming from Dené communities in what is known as Alaska and from Cree First Nations.
QWOCMAP has supported IndigiQueer filmmakers since our founding in 2000, with filmmaker development workshops in San Francisco, Gallup and Navajo Nation, and festival focus screenings in 2010 and 2018. QWOCMAP's catalog holds the largest collection of LBTQIA+ and Two Spirit Native American, Indígena, and First Nations stories anywhere. These stories are crucial to Indigenous Sovereignty and land back.
A NOTE ON FREE
Every screening and every event is free, every film is audio described and open captioned, the East Bay shuttle is wheelchair-accessible and free, and childcare during daytime screenings is free. None of that happens by accident. It happens because LBTQIA+ BIPOC communities, donors, sustainers, and Community Partners keep making it happen, year over year. If you have it to give,give.
We send a lot more emails than usual during festival season. If you would like to adjust which communications you receive about the QWOCFF, you can update your preferences below.
You're receiving this because you're part of our community. If you receive emails claiming to be from QWOCMAP about anything other than our programs or events, it's spam, not us. Please report and delete.
