The 30th edition of Queer Lisboa, the city's international queer film festival, runs from 18 to 26 September 2026. The festival has printed the dates on its own front page alongside those of its sister event in Porto, which follows from 3 to 7 November.
Screenings are spread across four venues, all of them walkable from each other. Cinema São Jorge on Avenida da Liberdade is the main house, with the Cinemateca Portuguesa on Rua Barata Salgueiro a few streets away. Two smaller venues sit in Bairro Alto: Casa do Comum on Rua da Rosa, and Purex Clube on Rua das Salgadeiras, which is a gay bar for the rest of the year and shows festival films with free admission.
Tickets are cheap by festival standards. A full ticket at Cinema São Jorge costs 4,50 euros and a reduced one 3,50 euros, with a pack of five tickets for five different screenings at 18 euros. The Cinemateca charges 3,20 euros, reduced to 2,15 or 1,35 euros. Casa do Comum and Purex Clube are free. According to the festival's own venues and tickets page, tickets for the São Jorge screenings go on sale on 10 September at BOL and at the cinema box office, which opens daily from 7 September at 14:00. Cinemateca tickets are sold on the day of the screening at its own box office and have been available online at bol.pt since 25 August.
What has been announced so far
The full programme is published on 2 September, so anyone booking travel now is booking on the dates rather than on the films. Enough is out to show the shape of the anniversary edition. On 29 July the festival announced a retrospective built around Pedro Almodóvar, Kenneth Anger, Barbara Hammer, Lana and Lilly Wachowski, Marlon T. Riggs, Kim Longinotto and Sally Potter. On 27 August it added a section called Queer Family, aimed at younger audiences, with the Brazilian titles Feito Pipa and Papaya, plus two more films in its Panorama strand, Stop! That! Train! and Outerlands. The programming team went through 1.027 films this year, 678 of them submitted directly to the festival.
Why it matters for a visit
Lisbon's Pride march is in June, and the city's large outdoor Pride party has no date at all in 2026. That leaves the film festival as the queer event in the Lisbon calendar with the firmest dates for the rest of the year, and it lands in the middle of the districts where the scene already is. Cinema São Jorge sits at the top of Avenida da Liberdade, ten minutes on foot from Príncipe Real; the two Bairro Alto venues are among the bars and clubs that stay open long after the last screening. The city tourism board also lists the festival with the same dates.
Our Portugal country page covers the legal situation for LGBTQ+ visitors, which is worth reading before a trip this year.
