The Circles Film Festival is a Barcelona-based queer-lesbian film festival dedicated to amplifying lesbian perspectives, stories and cinematic voices across gender, genres, formats and cultural backgrounds.
Circles stands for connection, care, continuity and collective visibility. The festival is committed to creating a safer, affirming and empowering space for filmmakers whose work centers lesbian experiences and challenges heteronormative, patriarchal and misogynistic structures. At its core, Circles celebrates lesbian lives in all their diversity — tender, political, joyful, complex and defiant.
The festival understands queerness through a lesbian-feminist lens, while remaining inclusive of broader LGBTQIA+ identities and alliances, especially beeing welcoming to non-binary and trans lesbians. Lesbian visibility is not treated as a niche, but as an essential and powerful perspective within queer cinema.
The annual program presents contemporary international lesbian and queer cinema through a variety of sections including feature films, short films, documentaries, animation, experimental and essay films, as well as rediscovered and underrepresented lesbian works from film history.
Circles Film Festival aims to strengthen visibility, solidarity and exchange by offering a platform where lesbian filmmakers and audiences can encounter each other in an environment shaped by respect, consent and mutual care. The festival actively positions itself as a safer space and reserves the right to select works that align with its queer-feminist values, its commitment to lesbian representation, and its support for marginalized communities in their ongoing struggles for dignity, autonomy and fundamental rights.
There are no awards are prizes in the first edition planned, though the team is open for suggestions and sponsorships of prizes for their second edition.
