Chéries-Chéris

Chéries-Chéris is Paris's dedicated LGBTQ+ film festival, held annually at the Forum des Images in the Centre Pompidou area, and is one of the oldest and most established queer cinema events in France - a distinction it holds by virtue of its long continuity within a city that has historically been central to queer cultural production in Europe.

The festival presents feature films, documentaries, and short films with LGBTQ+ themes and subjects, drawing on production from across the globe. Its Paris location and Francophone audience give it a particular focus on French-language and Francophone queer cinema, while its international program reaches well beyond French production to include work from North America, Latin America, Spain, Germany, and beyond. The Forum des Images - an archive-driven cinema institution in the heart of Paris - is a fitting home for an event that treats cinema history and contemporary production with equal seriousness.

The festival's name is itself a bilingual pun: "chéries" (feminine plural "darlings") and "chéris" (masculine plural) play on French grammatical gender to signal an inclusive queer address. This naming choice reflects the festival's roots in a specific moment of French LGBTQ+ cultural organizing and continues to identify the event's community-facing character.

The programming at Chéries-Chéris has historically been broad in genre and tone. While drama, documentary, and comedy are the dominant modes, the festival has presented films with genre elements - including thriller and horror titles with queer content or queer readings - over the years. Queer horror as a subgenre has a real history, from vampire films with same-sex subtext to contemporary LGBTQ+ genre productions, and a festival like Chéries-Chéris is a natural home for such work when it surfaces.

French queer cinema has its own substantial tradition, and Chéries-Chéris functions as one of the key annual showcases for French LGBTQ+ production. Directors from France and the wider Francophone world have received significant exposure through the festival, and its programming choices have historically been attentive to work that falls outside mainstream French theatrical distribution.

The festival also operates with a community function beyond programming - panel discussions, filmmaker encounters, and retrospective screenings contribute to its role as a cultural institution within Paris's LGBTQ+ community. These events give the festival a social dimension that extends beyond cinema consumption and situates it within the broader landscape of queer cultural life in France.

For researchers interested in queer cinema from a European and specifically French perspective, Chéries-Chéris provides a consistent annual snapshot of what is being produced and distributed in LGBTQ+ cinema globally, filtered through a Parisian curatorial sensibility. The festival's Forum des Images home also gives it access to archival programming, and retrospective screenings of classic queer cinema have appeared in past editions alongside contemporary premieres.

The event's long run in Paris and its position within the Forum des Images make it one of the more institutionally stable LGBTQ+ film festivals in Europe, and a useful reference point for anyone tracking LGBTQ+ cinema in France and the wider Francophone world.