SUBMISSION DEADLINE:
Friday, 09 May 2025Outburst Queer Arts Festival
Friday, 14 November 2025 until Saturday, 22 November 2025
The Annual OUTBURST Queer Arts Festival brings you eight days of world class and new local theatre, performance, film, visual art and discussion, celebrating lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender creativity in venues across the city of Belfast. The festival showcases international and homegrown talent, with the aim of sharing and exploring LGBT experiences and bringing exciting, entertaining and challenging new work to the Belfast stage.
The festival is a curated programme, so not all submissions will be selected. Outburst Queer Arts Festival is a queer festival, so we tend to look beyond mainstream LGBTQ+ thematics to offer audiences thought-provoking, fresh and challenging work around sexuality and gender (and all that intersects with those) that they won’t experience elsewhere in this part of the world. We encourage anyone submitting a proposal to check out previous festival events in the brochures in our archive HERE, especially over the last three years, before sending through your proposal. You can also check out our broader strategy HERE, to get a sense of what Outburst is all about and our vision for the queer work that we are passionate about supporting.
The festival is a curated week of brilliant new queer ideas in art and culture. We carefully cook up a mix of work that we’ve seen and can’t wait to share, along with shows, publications, events and happenings that we’ve commissioned or co-developed in collaboration with queer artists and other co-conspirators at home and beyond. All of the work we showcase in the festival is new work, keeping it fresh and vital for audiences and relevant to the moment we are in. We love creative ideas that take audiences beyond the obvious and the normative. So we centre intersectional work that challenges our thinking, asks interesting questions, brings us to unexpected spaces and places and reimagines the possibilities of queer art to transform.
Tender transgressions and beautiful disruptions can come in surprising forms, big and small, loud and quiet, and we’re here for it all.
We always make sure there’s room for as many hidden treasures and exciting new creative voices as possible in Outburst. We accept submissions on a rolling basis until the start of summer each year. We especially love work from artists and writers in Northern Ireland / The North Of Ireland / This Place but we programme work from all over the world.
2025 films...
Atmospheric Arrivals Canada / 2023 / 6 mins
In a world where forced migration and cultural dislocation fracture identity, this experimental short film reclaims presence through an autopoietic visual language rooted in Black and queer thought.
Moved Ireland / 2025 / 13 mins
Nine people from different countries gather in their local LGBTQIA+ Community Centre to discuss the reasons they were forced to leave their homeland, and what life is like since arriving in a country where they are safe to be themselves.
Everybody’s Gotta Love Sometimes France / 2023 / 15 mins
This hauntingly tender drama follows Phyo; a queer Burmese international protection seeker, attempting to rebuild his life and search for love. Beneath the city’s romantic surface lies the quiet loneliness of displacement and the ache of navigating foreign streets with a heart still heavy from home.
Journey Ireland / 2024 / 4 mins
A video poem love letter to U=U activism in Ireland that fuses film, performance and spoken word into a raw and celebratory chronicle of living ten years with HIV.
We Clap for Airballs United States / 2023 / 12 mins
A layered documentary, visually, expressly and thematically – where the basketball court is a safe space for queer and trans BIPOC people to play, feel seen, and valued by one another.
Skin to Skin Talks Gay Men of Colour and the Racial Politics of Exclusion
Ireland / 2023 / 12 mins
Completed as part of the artist’s MOE – Communal residency at IMMA, Skin To Skin Talks explores themes of alienation, otherness, sexual racism and outsiderness using abstract imagery, prose and sensation-invoking techniques to reflect on the intersections of race and sexuality.
Dyketactics
Dir Barbara Hammer / 1974 / 4 mins / 16mm on video
Untitled (Dyketactics Revisited)
Dir Riv Rosenfeld / 2005 / 12 mins / Digital
Double Strength
Dir Barbara Hammer / 1978 / 14 mins / 16mm on HD video
Lucid Noon, Sunset Blush
Dir Alli Logout / 2015 / 32 mins / 4K Digital
Break The Game
Director Jane M. Wagner crafts a deeply human portrait of resilience at the intersection of modern technology, queerness and performance, as we watch Narcissa attempt to set a new world record in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, in an attempt to win back her fanbase by livestreaming every minute of her quest.
If I Die, It’ll Be Of Joy
Director Alexis Tailant gives space to these queer elders, each defying invisibility and societal expectations by asserting that aging does not mean silence, solitude or shame. Beautifully filmed and emotionally courageous, this documentary reminds us that joy is not just something youthful, it’s a practice, a statement and a right.
Purebred
During a heatwave in Belfast, transgender man Owen cycles to the flat of his on-off-again lover after taking a pregnancy test in a public men’s bathroom. Refusing tropes and labels around trans masculinity, desire and what’s unsaid, this beautifully filmed work is intimate, gritty and tender.