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Hong Kong Lesbian and Gay Film Festival
Friday, 04 September 2026 until Sunday, 20 September 2026
The Hong Kong Lesbian & Gay Film Festival (HKLGFF) is Asia’s longest-running LGBTQ+ film festival. HKLGFF proudly celebrates its 37th year of championing innovative, bold stories and new voices.
As a registered non-profit organization, we are committed to promoting equal opportunities and challenging discrimination against sexual minority communities in Hong Kong through the power of cinema. Each year, we present a diverse range of films from Hong Kong and around the world that reflect the breadth, complexity, and vitality of LGBTQ+ experiences.
**Call for Submissions: Short Films & Narrative Feature Films**
HKLGFF is once again opening submissions for short films, continuing our tradition of showcasing diverse and powerful stories. For the first time ever, we are also calling for Narrative Feature Films — expanding our platform to celebrate longer-form storytelling. This addition reflects the festival’s ongoing curatorial commitment to long-form storytelling that engages with LGBTQ+ lives in nuanced, complex, and culturally specific ways. We welcome narrative features that offer distinctive perspectives, strong directorial vision, and thoughtful approaches to character, form, and narrative.
Short Film Jury Award
The Short Film Jury Award celebrates short films that take creative risks and leave a lasting impression. Chosen by a jury of filmmakers and industry professionals, the award honors originality, craft, and bold storytelling in short-form cinema. We’re looking for distinctive voices, fresh perspectives, and films that surprise us, move us, or make us see the world a little differently. If your short has something to say, we want to see it.
2026 films...
The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo
Virgin Machine
West Germany | 1988 | 84 mins
In German and English with Chinese and English subtitles
Synopsis
Dorothee Müller has a problem: she’s a Hamburg journalist researching romantic love, and she can’t find a shred of it. Ditching her dysfunctional relationships (and a hormone specialist’s baffling theories), she flies to San Francisco in search of her runaway mother, and tumbles instead down the rabbit hole of the city’s lesbian demi-monde, guided by strip-show barker Susie Sexpert (real-life sex guru Susie Bright) and magnetic drag king Ramona (Shelly Mars). Shot in luminous black-and-white by the great Elfi Mikesch, Monika Treut’s sex-positive picaresque scandalised feminists and censors alike in 1988 and has since ripened into an underground classic: part German-expressionist satire, part sapphic travelogue, all liberation. Ina Blum is irresistible as the wide-eyed pilgrim who came looking for love and found her libido. The dildo lecture alone is worth a ticket.
Ghosted
Germany, Taiwan / 2009 / 89 min
In German, English and Mandarin with Chinese and English subtitles
Synopsis
Grief has a way of following you across oceans. Hamburg artist Sophie Schmitt is undone by the sudden, unexplained death of her young Taiwanese lover, Ai-ling, and travels to Taipei with a video installation built in her memory. There she is pursued by Mei-li, a beguiling and persistent journalist who wants far more than an interview, and who soon materialises, unannounced, on Sophie’s Hamburg doorstep. As seduction shades into investigation, past and present blur, and Monika Treut’s cross-cultural mystery drifts elegantly toward the supernatural, steeped in Taiwanese ghost lore and the ache of unfinished love. The first German-Taiwanese co-production, shot between the night markets of Taipei and the grey light of Hamburg, GHOSTED premiered in the Berlinale’s Panorama and remains one of Treut’s most atmospheric works: a sapphic ghost story where the dead, like desire, refuse to stay buried.
Gendernauts: A Journey Through Shifting Identities
Germany, USA / 1999 / 87 min
In English with Chinese subtitles
Synopsis
Before the world had the vocabulary, San Francisco had the “gendernauts”. At the giddy height of the late-90s tech boom, Monika Treut embedded herself among the Bay Area’s community of trans and gender-fluid artists, activists and academics: historian Susan Stryker, “Goddess of Cyberspace” Sandy Stone, video artists Texas Tomboy and Jordy Jones, intersex activist Hida Viloria, and the irrepressible Annie Sprinkle. These voyagers were charting identities beyond the binary decades ahead of the culture, and Treut films them not as case studies but as pioneers: partying, working, skydiving, remaking their bodies and their world with wit and ferocious self-possession. Winner of the Teddy Award at the Berlinale, this landmark documentary now doubles as a time capsule of a freer, pre-gentrification San Francisco, and as proof that the future arrives first at the margins.
It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives
West Germany | 1971 | 67 mins
In German with Chinese and English subtitles
Synopsis
Few films can claim to have started a revolution. Two years after West Germany decriminalised homosexuality, Rosa von Praunheim detonated this scabrous agit-prop fable on national television. Young, provincial Daniel arrives in Berlin and drifts through the gay subcultures of the era, from bourgeois coupledom to bar cliques to cruising grounds, while a merciless voice-over flays gay men for their assimilation, self-hatred and political apathy, demanding they come out and organise. The scandal was seismic: furious TV debates, walkouts, and the founding of dozens of activist groups. The modern German gay liberation movement traces its birth directly to this one film. Restored and as confrontational as ever, this is queer cinema as a molotov cocktail: crude, hectoring, frequently hilarious, and utterly foundational. Half a century on, its closing rallying cry (out of the toilets, into the streets!) still rings in the air.
The Einstein of Sex
Germany, Netherlands / 1999 / 100 min
In German with Chinese and English subtitles
Synopsis
Long before Kinsey, there was Magnus Hirschfeld: physician, sexologist, socialist, Jew, homosexual, and the man the tabloids dubbed “the Einstein of Sex.” Rosa von Praunheim’s affectionate biopic charts Hirschfeld’s extraordinary crusade as he founds the world’s first gay rights organisation in 1897, battles Paragraph 175, and opens Berlin’s pioneering Institute for Sexual Science in 1920, a haven for queer and trans lives that flourished through the Weimar years until Nazi students torched its library in 1933. Friedel von Wangenheim plays the doctor with owlish warmth, flanked by his aristocratic great love Baron von Teschenberg, devoted young Karl Giese, and the institute’s guardian angel, housekeeper Dorchen. Mixing period drama, newsreel and von Praunheim’s trademark impish humour, it is both a monument to a man the Nazis nearly erased from history and a reminder of how quickly hard-won progress can burn.
Two Mothers
Germany / 2007 / 87 min
In German, Latvian and English with Chinese and English subtitles
Synopsis
At the age of 57, Rosa von Praunheim’s 94-year-old mother told him a secret that rewrote his life: he was adopted. Only after the death of Gertrud, the woman who raised the enfant terrible of German cinema with unconditional love, did he dare to look for his biological mother, armed with little more than the name of a Riga children’s home. What unfolds is a detective story through the darkest chapter of European history, leading through the archives of Nazi-occupied Latvia and the spectre of SS eugenics to a birth certificate discovered in a prison hospital, and to a biological mother whose fate proves devastating. Germany’s great provocateur turns the camera unflinchingly on himself and finds his most tender register: part whodunit, part reckoning with the Second World War, and above all a love letter to the mother who chose him. TWO MOTHERS was a jury award nominee at Tribeca.
Gay Shorts I – Behind The Lens
Gay Shorts II – Deep Within Us
Her Stories – New Hong Kong Shorts
Lesbian Shorts – Wilderness Dancers
LGBTQ Comedy Shorts – Laughing Matters
Love In Pink – Emerging Hong Kong Shorts
Queer Shorts – The Shapes Of Us