Perlen (pearls), the Queer Film Festival Hannover, is an integral part of the cultural life of Hannover as well as the queer community of Lower Saxony’s capital. Every year the Kino in Künstlerhaus Hannover open their doors for one of the biggest queer film festivals in northern Germany.
In its current form as a queer film festival with all-gender topics, Perlen exist since 1997, but its roots go back much further. Already in the late 1970s the former manager of the Communal Cinema initiated an anual, but solely gay film festival in Künstlerhaus.

Programme:
Our festival takes 10 days and comes up to 30 screenings (16 feature films, 8 documentaries and 6 short film programmes). Our festival is supposed to be as accessible as possible and we try to show subtitles during our screenings (in English or in the best case in German!).

PERLEN - QUEER FILM FESTIVAL is a member of QueerScope, the organisation of independent German queer film festivals.
We're new to FilmFreeway.

Awards & Prizes

Audience Award GOLDENE PERLE (GOLDEN PEARL) for
--> Best Feature Film
--> Best Documentary
--> Best Short Film

Rules & Terms

We're looking for the most exciting and innovative storytelling in short films, feature films, documentaries with LGBTIQ*-content.
Your film must feature explicit LGBTIQ* content; otherwise, we cannot consider it for our program selection.
Submitted short films must not exceed 30 minutes in length. There is no time limit for feature films and documentaries.

Submit your film to us only if the film was completed in 2024 - 2026 and if you haven’t submitted it in the last years. In order for us to see and understand the submissions, they should either be in english or have english (or german) subtitles.

Please note: It's not possible to refund submission fees!