20th Anniversary XPOSED Queer Film Festival Berlin

XPOSED Queer Film Festival will take place for the 20th time in 2026. It was founded in 2006 by Bartholomew Sammut, who believed that queer stories mean more than coming out and girl-meets-girl. The festival not only shows the latest queer films and short films from different countries, but also focuses on highlighting the development and status of queer life in different regions. As one of the most important and famous queer film festivals in Germany, it is also important to support representations of trans*, BIPOC, indigenous, disabled artists, as well as non-commercial productions. For XPOSED, queerness is not just a positioning of directors and their protagonists, but an approach, a political front, or an attempt to develop a new form of queer cinema. In 20 years, 20 editions, 20 film programs, posters, and brochures, i.e., approximately 300 feature films and 600 short films, have been shown. In 2015, 10 years ago, the Queer Short Film Fund section was founded to support short film projects by queer filmmakers residing/producing in Berlin.For this 20 anniversary, we aim to have few retrospective programs on our last 20 years of curation, the new films for 2026 competition, as well as expanded cinema performances, expanded exhibition (especially in new media video arts - especially VR-works), and our new database.

The festival core team includes Sarnt Utamachote, Merle Gröneweg, Pol Merchan, Jey Baholzer, David Bakum, Nastaran Tajeri-Foumani, Kate Fasano, Thomas Schallhart, Ronny Heine, Kai Hermann, and more.