aGLIFF: Prism Film Festival

There is no more important place for your LGBTQ+ film to screen in the Southwest. aGLIFF is the longest-running queer film festival in the US Southwest and the Fourth oldest in America. We are also the oldest film festival in Austin (older than AFF and SXSW).

PRISM, our 38th annual marquee LGBTQ+ film festival will be held in-person August 20 - 24, 2025. aGLIFF is a nominating partner for the Iris Prize, the annual £30,000 prize allowing the winner to make their next film, the largest prize for an LGBTQ+ film in the world.

MISSION & OBJECTIVE
The All Genders, Lifestyles and Identities Film Festival (aGLIFF) cultivates the Texas LGBTQ+ community by enlightening, educating, and entertaining our clients and patrons through programs that enrich the LGBTQIA+ and ally communities while developing LGBTQ+ awareness. aGLIFF Nonprofit Organization Programs include the Queer Youth Media Project, Community Partnership Program, and the Queer Black Voices Fund, all of which culminate in or around the annual Prism Film Festival Program. In 2021, aGLIFF was awarded Non-profit Organization of the year by the Austin LGBT Chamber of Commerce.

Population Served

The constituency served by the aGLIFF nonprofit organization is primarily the LGBTQ+ communities of Central Texas as well as national and international LGBTQ+ communities. aGLIFF annually engages an outreach of over 10,000 people, approximately 70% of whom were LGBTQ+ identified. As aGLIFF has grown in scope and vision, the constituency has broadened and diversified. The organization has evolved from a program primarily based on entertainment and the experiences of American gay white men into an internationally-recognized community organization committed to reflecting and speaking to a broad range of issues across cultures, race, immigration status, class, gender identity and expression, age and region.

ABOUT PRISM FILM FESTIVAL

aGLIFF entertains our community through the exhibition and support of the best in recent LGBTQIA+ international, national, and regional films at the annual Prism Film Festival. The festival showcases features and shorts, narratives, documentaries, music videos, and the avant-garde. Festival events connect members of the community, filmmakers to each other and filmmakers to the community. Conversations and panels explore current political and social trends; and increasingly the festival serves as a major showcase for independent films from filmmakers across America and the International world.

In 2019, the Board of Directors selected PRISM as our festival theme to highlight the way our festival can refract a single beam of art into multiple viewpoints, showcasing all the voices in the spectrum of our LGBTQ+ community. With new Artistic Director Bears Rebecca Fonte taking over in 2021, aGLIFF made the Prism 'theme' the new name of the festival. "PRISM encapsulates the spirit of aGLIFF just like a prism captures light, splitting it into many colors," said Fonte, "We take the light of film (or a cinema projector) and reveal the many voices that make up our community. And prisms work both ways, if you put one in front of separate colors it combines them into one fused beam."

In 2020, in the wake of Covid, aGLIFF took its festival virtual and had its most successful event in years, garnering more publicity and eyes on films than the previous several years combined. In 2021, the Prism Film Festival was a hybrid event, with events and films both virtual on Eventive, and in person at various venues in the city. That year, Artistic Director Bears Rebecca Fonte was nominated for Community Leader of the Year by the Austin LGBT Chamber of Commerce and the organization was awarded Non-Profit of the Year.