Terms & Conditions:
We are only open to short films (50 minutes and under). Films must have had people with lived experience of LGBTQIA+ or equivalent issues involved in the production. We will prioritise films made by people/communities with typically less access to film industries. For example Black and PoC, Deaf, Disabled, working class, and refugee and immigrant filmmakers.
SQIFF is a not-for-profit Festival which receives public funding for promoting and supporting LGBTQIA+ filmmakers and communities. We will offer set screening fees for films received via submissions of £50 per screening for short films. Our Festival is ticketed on a sliding scale with free entry available to anyone who could not otherwise afford to come along. SQIFF is designed to be accessible to the most marginalised and exploited people within our LGBTQIA+ communities.
We are looking for:
SQIFF is interested in showing work created by and about queer/LGBTQIA+ individuals and communities. We are open within this to all subject matter and styles.
We screen all films in the Festival with English language captions/subtitles. This supports Deaf, hard of hearing, and various other audiences to access the festival. Since 2021, we require all films selected for the programme to provide their own open or closed captions. We have applied for funding to offer online captioning workshops and email support to filmmakers with less experience in creating captions as needed. It is also possible that some of our submissions viewers will need captions to be able to experience your film. Therefore, your chances of being selected for the festival will be higher if you submit a version of your film with captions.
We are also applying for funding to create audio description for all English, sign, or visual language films in our 2023 programme. We therefore appreciate films which already have audio description available.
Year of completion:
Films may have been completed at any time.
Premiere status:
We do not have any premiere status requirements and it's ok if your film is viewable online.
Fee waivers:
Submission fees are on a Pay What You Can basis. Please choose the submission fee you are able to afford. If you are able to pay to submit your film, we very much appreciate this as it helps support the most marginalised and exploited queer communities to submit their films and attend our Festival. If you need to submit your film for free, that's completely fine and we will treat your submission the same as everyone else's.
The Pay What You Can price options for short films are £20, £15, £10, £5, £3, or free.
This submission policy is to challenge the lack of access to filmmaking and institutional film culture for people from the most marginalised and exploited backgrounds. If you have any questions about what to pay for your submission, please email info@sqiff.org.
