The inaugural ChromaQueer Film+Arts Festival launches in Ottawa this week!

ChromaQueer Film + Arts Festival will hold its inaugural event from November 7 to 9, 2025, at Arts Court in Ottawa. Our weekend festival is bringing together film and video makers, performers, scholars, and the public, building new networks among 2SLGBTQIA+ creative communities to share work with Ottawa audiences and network with creative peers. More than 20 events - film screenings, community panels, film lectures, artist talks, dance and music performances, literary launches, workshops, and evening parties - will take place across Arts Court: Arts Court Theatre, Black Box Studio, Ottawa Dance Directive ODD Box, Studio B, with a video installation inside DARC Microcinema. With our 2025 Festival lineup, event schedule and online ticket sales launched, our website is chromaqueer.ca 

ChromaQueer aims to be a vibrant source for queer creative connection and cultural sector boosting in Ottawa-Gatineau – an opportunity to tell more queer stories, build community and push back against disconnection. ChromaQueer 2025 is produced by Qu’ART (Ottawa Queer Arts Collective), DARC (Digital Arts Resource Centre)  and MAX Ottawa. 

In our festival’s first year, this collaboration between DARC, an acclaimed media arts artist-run centre providing year-long workshops, training opportunities, film equipment and mentorship resources, with MAX Ottawa , an Ottawa queer health service organization, lays the groundwork for more years of ChromaQueer’s goals of reducing isolation and barriers while creating more opportunities to bring queer stories , connection, and creativity for more members of Ottawa queer and trans communities.

COMMUNITY PARTNERS and BRILLIANT COLLABORATIVE PROGRAMMING  

ChromaQueer’s festival weekend of events are also being programmed alongside selected artist curators, film creators and collectives, and with events alongside community partner organizations, including (with links to events)   Ottawa Dance Directive, Lambda Scholarship Foundation Canada, Hot Docs Citizen Minutes, Be Proud Productions, Bruce House, Transgender Media Portal, Carleton University, Ottawa Transformative Justice Collective, VERSe Ottawa, Bumpah2Bumpah and more. 

More than just a collaborative queer film festival, ChromaQueer is working to connect Ottawa’s queer community groups with the tools to create films for next year’s Festival so that we can support each other in our goals to be more artful and impactful in our communities– building bridges between arts, culture, social, and mental, physical, and sexual health organizations to make easier and lasting support within our communities, to share our tools and networks for creativity. 

Qu’ART - Ottawa Queer Arts Collective is grateful to have proposed and to now co-present the inaugural 2025 ChromaQueer Film + Arts Festival with funding from a Grow Grant through the City of Ottawa’s Equity & Inclusion in the Arts Fund.

Opening Night of ChromaQueer is Friday November 7th, starting 7pm at Arts Court Theatre.

Supported by the National Arts Centre

Instead of choosing one feature narrative or a documentary film as our ChromaQueer Opening Night Event, Qu’ART Ottawa is curating an Opening Night Evening program, one that will showcase an array of bold, diversely-talented queer Ottawa-based artists and groups in literary, musical, dance, drag and theatrical performances. These on-stage artists will be interspersed with Canadian short films and acclaimed International shorts, with invited guest directors and actors in attendance!

Musical, comedic, poetic or artfully varietal local performances to be presented include: (TBC)

• Glenys Marshall ( SmallFish Show)

• Billie Nell ( Urban Legends Poetry Collective ) 

• Moth and Firefly Collective ( "Death of a Swan” excerpt)

• Kim Farris-Manning (King of Chlorophyll) 

• Geoffrey Dollar  ( "In(sight)" dance performance with film )

• Glenn Nuotio  (Qu’ART Collective - Host and Event Curator )

• Jessie Lindsay ( French language singer-songwriter)

Opening Night Short Documentaries and Narratives to be shown include: 

• Ottawa’s Tatum Thompson depicts a coming-out conversation as party game in 1990’s style with their smart and inspired short film “Seven Minutes In the Closet”

• A HotDocs/Citizen Minutes short of local Ottawa comedian “Janelle Niles: Inconvenient”

• Welsh queer Director Peter Darney visits Ottawa this week with an artist talk and a Saturday screening of acclaimed queer Welsh Films including his own Opening Night dramatic short film of an widowed gay musician in "Gb" 

• Montreal’s Atif Siddiqi brings awareness to the potential dangers of dating men online & shares a musical response to adversity in "Tranie Tronic: Beauty is Revenge”

• Ottawa Grove613 community builder  & Chinese-Canadian independent filmmaker Hingman Leung explores how break-ups can affect the custody of plant life in “Pot Bound.”

Bonus! 7pm Opening night tickets also serve as an invite to our 10pm Friday Night Opening Party “ChromaCAKE” at Club SAW.  Drag and burlesque performances include  Caligula,  Miss Patience Plush, Habib Tea, and Karen Ligays with DJ’s Zraa and Osita!

ChromaQueer 2025 promises a weekend full of love, social justice, sexuality, diasporic artistic communities, connection, writing & movement workshops, local heroes, queer scholarship legacies celebrated, trans media representation, group singing lessons, laughter in the face of HIV, queer foreign-language films debuting in Canada from Wales, a noon Saturday nearly-silent art film on loneliness, chubbiness and body worship, a Saturday dance party of Ottawa Black Queer history being written before our very eyes, a Sunday morning life drawing, a slate of favorite local films, and even a special karaoke-meets-poetry launch on Sunday night before a queer-led west coast swing dance group brings our first-ever Festival year to a joyous last-call.

• ChromaQueer runs from Friday November 7th until Sunday November 9th

• Individual tickets ($10+)  festival passes($40, $65) are found at www.chromaqueer.ca

• Media passes and free NOTAFLOF / community tickets can be obtained by emailing the ChromaQueer team: hello@chromaqueer.ca

Media Availability for artists or Festival organizers from November 4th - 10th include:

• Jayel Lamont, DJ MusicByJayel, community music educator, curator of Bumpah2Bumpah dance party and Saturday Night’s ChromaQueer Black Queer film programming https://www.chromaqueer.ca/program Saturday Nov 8th 7:15pm to 1:00 am

• Darren Stehle (Lambda Scholarship Foundation Canada) as Wilde About Sappho—Lambda’s pioneering 2SLGBTQIA+ literary gala—returns for one special afternoon to mark Lambda Foundation’s 40th Anniversary Sunday November 9th 3pm https://www.chromaqueer.ca/return-of-wilde-about-sappho

• Massimo Agostinelli- Bouffon master with Cirque de Soleil & National Theatre School shares the power of laughter and clown with the world as a long-time HIV survivor Sun. Nov. 9 12pm Le Ridicule Ne Tue Pas (Silly Won’t Kill You): https://www.chromaqueer.ca/hiv-films

  
  

Please contact hello@chromaqueer.ca for media inquiries, sponsorship opportunities or to arrange an interview with Festival organizers or other ChromaQueer artists. 

It’s our first year! Any offer by local business of supplies or food for volunteers is always welcome. hello@chromaqueer.ca

Volunteers can register at https://www.chromaqueer.ca/volunteer.  so please spread the word and we’d love to see you with us at Arts Court.