Rio LGBTQIAP+ is a film festival founded in 2011 in Rio de Janeiro, dedicated to cinema that reflects and speaks to the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual, and pansexual communities in Brazil and internationally. Established in one of Latin America's most visually dramatic and culturally complex cities, the festival has developed within a specifically Brazilian context that makes it distinct from queer film events in North America or Europe.
Rio de Janeiro occupies a contradictory position in relation to LGBTQ+ life and culture. The city is internationally associated with Carnival and with a culture of bodily freedom and visibility that has made it a destination for queer tourists and a site of genuine LGBTQ+ community life for decades. At the same time, Brazil has experienced serious violence against LGBTQ+ people, and the political context in which the festival has operated since 2011 has included periods of significant hostility toward LGBTQ+ rights at the national level. The festival exists within this tension, celebrating queer culture and cinema while operating in a society that has not resolved its relationship to the communities it celebrates.
The festival programmes Brazilian and international films across features, short films, and documentaries, with particular attention to work that reflects the diversity of LGBTQ+ experience in Brazil - including the experiences of Black, Indigenous, and working-class queer Brazilians whose stories are underrepresented even within LGBTQ+ cinema internationally. The intersection of race, class, and sexual and gender identity in the Brazilian context gives the festival's programming a specificity that distinguishes it from events whose queer cinema canon is predominantly white and Northern.
Brazilian documentary filmmaking about LGBTQ+ life, identity politics, and community history has a strong tradition, and the festival has been a platform for this work alongside international narrative features. The queer Brazilian documentary tradition includes films about trans identity, Carnival culture, religious communities, and political activism that provide context for understanding what LGBTQ+ life in Brazil actually looks like rather than how it is imagined from abroad.
Drama and narrative films that deal with queer desire, identity, and relationship in Brazilian social contexts have been central to the festival's feature programme. Brazilian narrative cinema has produced internationally recognised queer films, and the festival situates that work within a broader programme of international queer cinema that allows for comparison and dialogue between Brazilian and international filmmaking traditions.
Genre cinema within a queer framework - horror, thriller, and fantasy films with LGBTQ+ characters and themes - has become an increasingly visible part of queer film festival programming internationally, and Rio LGBTQIAP+ has engaged with this tendency as it has developed. Latin American horror and genre cinema, including Brazilian work in these modes, has its own traditions and concerns that differ from North American and European genre filmmaking, and the festival provides a context in which those differences are legible.
The festival takes place in Rio de Janeiro against the city's backdrop of beaches, favelas, mountains, and colonial architecture - a landscape that has shaped Brazilian cinema for decades and that gives even indoor screening events a specific atmospheric charge. For international filmmakers and festival delegates, Rio itself is part of the experience of attending.
Brazil is one of the largest film markets in Latin America, and a Rio-based queer festival can reach audiences and build industry connections that matter for the distribution and visibility of queer cinema across the region. Rio LGBTQIAP+ has continued to develop its programme and its community engagement since its founding, operating as a cultural institution within a city and a country where that work carries genuine urgency.
Chéries-Chéris 
Athens International Film and Video Festival 
