Screening
Queer Opening Shorts
Thursday, February 26 | 19:15 | Schikaneder
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.
Screening
Queer Panorama
Thursday, February 26 | 21:00 | Schikaneder
A gay man drifts through Hong Kong from one hookup to the next, adopting a new identity each time. Moments of intimacy emerge, then fade, as he studies and imitates his partners, becoming whoever they desire.
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Jun Li’s Queerpanorama is a sensual, intimate meditation on loneliness and the fragile connections of gay dating culture.
Screening
Queer Youth Shorts
Friday, February 27 | 19:00 | Schikaneder
Queer Youth traces moments of first becoming: first love, secret night escapes, stolen time, and first heartbreaks.
Curated also with young audiences in mind, the films move between tenderness and vulnerability, portraying queer youth as self experiences shaped by desire, uncertainty, and the search for one’s own rhythm.
Screening
Queer Minorities Shorts: Refugee Perspectives
Friday, February 27 | 21:00 | Schikaneder
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.
Screening
Queer Sci-Fi & Horror Shorts
Friday, February 27 | 23:00 | Schikaneder
This short film program centers voices that are too often pushed to the margins — stories of queer lives shaped by intersectional realities, complex identities, and sometimes loud resistance.
Screening
Queer Coming of Age Shorts
Saturday, February 28 | 19:00 | Schikaneder
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.
Screening
Queer Gazed Bodies Shorts
Saturday, February 28 | 21:00 | Schikaneder
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.
Screening
Queer Art & Experimental Shorts
Saturday, February 28 | 21:00 | Schikaneder
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. The shorts invite viewers into experiences that are felt before they are understood, proposing cinema as a site of tension, intimacy, and transformation.
Screening
DREAMERS
Sunday, March | 15:00 | Schikaneder
After living illegally in the United Kingdom for two years, Isio is placed in the Hatchworth detention centre. She hopes her asylum application will be approved quickly so she can return to her former life. Her roommate Farah has little faith in the system and is already planning an escape with her friends. As time passes and chaos fills the centre, the two women grow closer. A small moment of happiness begins to expand, hope emerges — until Farah’s asylum application is rejected.
Screening
Queer Love Shorts
Sunday, March | 17:00 | Schikaneder
»I’m feeling butterflies« — and not just because it’s spring. This short film block dives headfirst into the wild, wonderful, and messy realism of queer love: from awkward first dates to deep longing, from fleeting glances to heartbreak and healing. Swipe right on this programme. You might just fall in love.
Screening
Queer Minorities Shorts:
BIPOC Perspectives
Sunday, March | 19:00 | Schikaneder
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.
Screening
Queer History Shorts
Sunday, March | 21:00 | Schikaneder
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.
