Glasgow’s Queer Screen Scene Is In Its Golden Age

Glasgow is a city with a great film scene and a great queer scene: if you’re a cinephile, part of the LGBT+ community, and just about to start your studies in Glasgow, you’ve hit the jackpot! SNACK spoke to a few of the organisations involved in Glasgow’s current golden age for queer film events: the Scottish Queer International Film Festival (SQIFF), Sapphic Cinema Club, and Bi Movies Film Club.

Scottish Queer International Film Festival (SQIFF)

You can’t mention queer film in Glasgow without mentioning SQIFF which, as it prepares for its 11th edition (19th till 24th October at Glasgow Film Theatre), can be considered the scene’s elder. A second generation organising team, led by festival director Indigo Korres, took the reins post-lockdown, and they’ve really worked on expanding SQIFF’s remit from an annual festival to a wraparound calendar of events.

With a monthly Queer Filmmakers Group and this summer’s SATURATE filmmaking course, they’ve particularly emphasised providing local queer filmmakers with practical training and networking opportunities. With audiences keen to support local talent, SQIFF’s Scottish Shorts programme has always been one of its most popular events, but initiatives like these mean SQIFF now plays a more direct role in the development and production of queer film in Scotland.

SQIFF has even contributed seed money to queer film projects via Pitch Funds; two successful pitches will be awarded £500 each at this year’s festival, with the finished films to premiere at SQIFF 2027.

The SATURATE course ran for ten weeks and covered ‘the whole independent filmmaking process from start to end. We had such a dedicated cohort who showed up each week with curiosity and creativity, and it was a privilege to spend that time together.’

The nine completed films from the programme’s 29 participants will screen at this year’s festival. If you’re sad you missed out, SQIFF is hopeful that, so long as the funding for it is confirmed, ‘a yearly filmmaking programme will become part of our regular projects and offerings.’

SQIFF has noticed the benefits of maintaining a more hands-on presence in Glasgow’s scene. ‘We’ve always had a great community of film enthusiasts coming to SQIFF from all over Scotland and beyond; now we’re also building a community of filmmakers in Glasgow. It’s really nice to see the same faces and follow people’s growth. We also coordinate a filmmakers’ directory and Discord group, with people starting to self-organise to get crews and collaborators together to make their own films.

Since starting to do more regular events in 2023, we’ve seen an increase in Scotland-made queer films being submitted to our annual open call, which is what we want! We hope our community feels supported and loved by SQIFF, and that we will keep showing up!’

SQIFF shares its insider perspective on the filmmakers it’s been supporting: ‘The next generation of queer filmmakers in Scotland is always surprising us! Just when you think you’ve seen all the styles and themes a film could have, there’s always something new, wacky, moving, titillating, exciting, or thought-provoking. People are bringing in talents and skills from many different creative disciplines and cultures, and that makes for a very rich pool for our filmmaking scene.’

When it comes to accessibility in the Scottish film scene, SQIFF was definitely at the vanguard with its early embrace of measures such as pay-what-you-can and sliding-scale pricing, content warnings, wheelchair access, descriptive subtitling, and BSL interpretation. ‘We’ve always been committed to integrating access from the start, rather than as an add-on.

We want as many people as possible to be able to see great queer film and connect to community, especially those who may experience social marginalisation and would benefit from the support of queer community and culture. We’re passionate about film made by disabled, Deaf, and hard of hearing people, so of course we want all our events to be accessible to all our filmmakers and their communities too.

As well as disability access, we recognise there’s barriers to accessing culture for other groups who may not feel welcomed or represented, such as people from lower social economic backgrounds, people of colour, and trans people, so we look to have access measures that enthusiastically, genuinely, and practically welcome folks who may have experienced those barriers.’

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Sapphic Cinema Club

Set to collaborate with SQIFF on a screening of ‘freaky, dreamy shorts about sapphic imaginations’, Sapphic Cinema Club is the brainchild of 16 Collective’s Nancy Holt and Aga Młyńczak, springing up this time last year with a trio of pilot screenings in 16 Collective’s former Trongate space.

Nancy, who takes the lead on programming, tells us: ‘I’d had the idea for Sapphic Cinema Club pretty much ever since I went to my first queer film festival and realised the potential of community-focused queer cinema events – I’d always wanted to replicate that feeling of being in a really social, relaxed setting with loads of queer people watching films about us and our identities.

I’ve always loved lesbian cinema, and when you look at it as a genre you can map out some really interesting trends from the 60s up until now. I wanted to showcase this and was definitely inspired by the film clubs already happening in Glasgow, e.g. Inclinations Film Club. I realised there was a gap in the Glasgow film scene for regular queer programming and I was really eager to make something happen.’

As one of 16 Collective’s curatorial directors, Aga’s role in Sapphic Cinema Club is to propose complementary artistic interventions and manage its financial aspects. It was Aga who encouraged Nancy to apply for Film Hub Scotland’s Pitch Pot funding to realise her idea; the pilot screenings went down a storm, selling out and with healthily subscribed waiting lists.

Overwhelmed by the response, Aga reflects: ‘We regretted not having greater capacity at our Trongate space but we enjoyed the living room ambience and casual vibe of the get-togethers’. Nancy credits artist Sasha Staicu, who ‘designs every inch of our branding, capturing the club’s identity and channeling it into sexy sapphic posters’, as a ‘massive factor in our success.’

So far Sapphic Cinema Club has shown new queer cinema classic Go Fish, coming-of-age dramas Pariah and Water Lilies, direct action documentary Lesbian Avengers Eat Fire Too, a collection of lesbian erotica and porn shorts, and Barbara Forever, an archive-driven work about lesbian filmmaking icon Barbara Hammer.

Nancy tells us what ties the programming together: ‘I’m really keen to show people films they wouldn’t otherwise get to see in a mainstream cinema context. The films also have to be inherently queer, which is funny to say when you’re programming for a queer film club, but I think it’s very easy to tell when the lens through which we’re viewing sapphic relationships or identities is a cis straight male one. Roundabout way to say that I won’t be showing Blue is the Warmest Colour anytime soon, sorry to any dedicated fans out there.

We’re always keen to show work from local filmmakers and try to show a short film before every feature.’ Aga adds: ‘Our remit at 16 Collective is to platform experimental artistic practice with a focus on LGBTQIA+ and class-marginalised artists. This is what guides the selection.’

The current spate of uncertainty for Glasgow’s arts venues has been an issue for both established and emerging organisations. SQIFF previously used the now-closed Centre for Contemporary Arts as both its events and office space – the team now consider themselves ‘nomadic’ and find it particularly hard to find venues that meet SQIFF’s size and accessibility requirements.

Sapphic Cinema Club has also found itself at the centre of the uncertainty, with previous venues 16 Collective and GMAC, both formerly on the Trongate, having had to relocate to 5 Florence Street in the Gorbals and Anderston’s The Pyramid. Aga laments that: ‘Arts organisations don’t get the same kind of commitments from landlords and funders as we used to. Precarity seems to be understood as an expected condition of cultural industry operations.’

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Bi Movies Film Club

Against this landscape, Bi Movies Film Club is ‘grateful’ for its home in Govanhill’s The Deep End. A relative baby queer in Glasgow’s film scene, Bi Movies Film Club launched over the summer with screenings of Cabaret, The Talented Mr Ripley, and Jennifer’s Body. Run by pals Lewis, Rosa, Becca, Shyaam, and Sandra, the idea came after Rosa ‘went down a rabbit hole researching bisexual representation on screen and found a pretty grim picture. A disproportionate number of bisexual characters were at best agents of chaos and at worst completely evil. Given that there aren’t many explicitly bisexual spaces or events out there, we thought the club might fill that gap!’

Audiences evidently agree, with Bi Movies Film Club saying it’s had ‘a really warm response – it immediately felt like a wee community where everyone was game to watch some camp cinema and have a laugh.’ Discussions always continue in The Rum Shack afterwards, with Bi Movies Film Club stressing that ‘you definitely don’t need to be a film buff to take part!’

When it comes to programming, Bi Movies Film Club is interested in ‘showing films that have explicitly bisexual characters and plotlines that involve that part of their identity in some way. So for the time being we’re not showing films with straight characters that have a popular bi ship, or “bi vibes”, without any actual representation. We love the chaos of exploitation cinema but a lot of that early bi representation boils down to titillating the male gaze. A lot of the films we’re showing still have problematic representation (there’s barely any bi movies that don’t), but we want to present that in a critical way, poke fun at the tropes, and laugh along with the chaos.

A lot of bi movies have been read as narratives about closeted gay characters, or straight characters who can’t make up their minds: we want to challenge some of that erasure and celebrate bi characters who might have been overlooked. Bi movies are usually sexy, chaotic, and a bit mad, which is all good with us and our audiences!’

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All three organisations look forward to a busy autumn. SQIFF promises a ‘euphoric’ festival programme that ‘embraces experimentation, plays with expectations, creates new mythologies, and brings audiences on a journey into the fantastical’, and the Queer Filmmakers Group runs monthly through to March 2027.

Aside from its collaboration with SQIFF, Sapphic Cinema Club recently held a screening of Leilah Weinraub’s Black lesbian strip club documentary Shakedown. Bi Movies Film Club continues on the last Thursday of every month, with Call Me By Your Name on September 24th and Interview with the Vampire for a Halloween special in October: ‘All vampires are bisexual and it’s important that we represent that part of our community.’

Sapphic Cinema Club’s long-term goals involve ‘becoming a permanent fixture in the Glasgow scene, releasing a publication, and increasing our capacity towards screening more ambitious and challenging work. We have big dreams to host things like multi-screen expanded cinema screenings, but we’re still quite limited by the budget.’ Bi Movies Film Club is ‘just trying to sustainably carve out our little bit of bi joy in the southside’, but loves ‘being part of a rich tapestry of queer cinema events in Glasgow.’

For LGBT+ students arriving in Glasgow this month, Nancy recommends: ‘Central Belters karaoke night at Glad Cafe, Adrian’s Bar on Victoria Road, and Stereo in town for some queer clubbing. And get on down to Sapphic Cinema Club!’ Bi Movies Film Club urges you to ‘Get snogging – unless you have symptoms of glandular fever!

Seek out queer spaces in Glasgow – there’s loads going on all over the city and people are really welcoming. Don’t be afraid to get involved or start your own club!’

And SQIFF encourages you to ‘check out Queer Theory and Pony Boy for queer performances, pick up something to read in Queen’s Park from Category Is Books, play a game at Pluto Q, make a zine at Glasgow Zine Library, go to Adrian’s Bar for a drink and some live music, have a dance at WSHWSH and Scandal.gla, and of course come along to SQIFF 2026 to watch some queer films and meet new friends!’

Find out more from SQIFF (also @scotsqueerfilm), Sapphic Cinema Club, and Bi Movies Film Club.

A condensed version of this article featured in the SNACK Student Guide 2026.