A Guide to SCENE

BY programe lead, gARY james wILLIAMS

After a dazzling debut in 2024, SCENE Manchester’s LGBTQ+ Film and TV Festival is back and gearing up for an even bigger celebration of queer screen culture this summer.

The week-long festival will run from Friday 15th to Thursday 21st August, showcasing the best of both new and classic LGBTQ+ cinema and television.

Programme Lead, Gary James Williams, shares his exclusive guide on what to see at the festival – from opening night queer animation and Channel 4 stand-up comedy all the way through to Showgirls and a Manchester Camerata performance via Party Monster, Russell T Davies, Victoria Wood, Gimme Gimme Gimme, and loads of amazing new queer docs, shorts, and narrative films in between.

SCENE is a week of powerful storytelling, uplifting and shining a light on our LGBTQIA+ community across cinemas, screens, and spaces in our city. I am so excited to take you through the programme we've put together.

Our two main strands this year celebrate our queer clubbing scenes and LGBTQ+ comedy, hoping to raise smiles and heartbeats.

QUEER AS JOKES

Queer As Jokes is the obvious name for our comedy strand - it’s all about what makes us laugh and championing queer comedy creators.

Kicking off the festival we have a live comedy night with our partners at Channel 4; An Altogether Different Comedy Night is a showcase of new queer comedy talent from Channel 4, which has led the way with boundary-pushing LGBT comedy since the 1980s.

Jonathan Harvey in Conversation celebrates one of our top LGBTQ+ comedy writers (a Liverpudlian, but we won’t hold that against him) who has not only written some of the best episodes of Coronation Street ever – think the Barlows’ Alcoholics Anonymous meeting - but also iconic 90s sitcom Gimme Gimme Gimme, starring Kathy Burke, as well as the stage play turned queer cinema classic Beautiful Thing, telling the story of two young lads falling in love on a London council estate. Join us for an evening celebrating Jonathan's work as we talk about his career and show some of his favourites, including a screening of Beautiful Thing.

New and classic comedy films, including camp cult comedies on our free outdoor screen on First Street, include Some Like It Hot The First Wives Club plus Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar and Bottoms at CULTPLEX, and new lesbian comedy musical Queens of Drama

Finally, a northern comedy legend beloved by the LGBTQ+ community, Victoria Wood is rightly celebrated in our all-night Victoria Wood-A-Thon With thanks to the BFI TV archive, we’re screening classic episodes of BBC’s Victoria Wood: As Seen on TV (Acorn Antiques, “two soups,” “is it on the trolley!”) and Dinner Ladies. With drag queen hosts Anna Phylactic and Banksie as Mrs Overall and Miss Babs, expect games, singing along, special guests, and a Victoria Wood costume catwalk.

NIGHTLIVES

NightLives celebrates queer clubbing culture on screen, from Canal Street to Studio 54, featuring:

A screening of 54 (Director’s Cut) the new version of this could-have-been-classic is queerer, wilder, and goes deeper in exploring the excesses of the legendary club.

Queerchester – Mark Jordan’s independent documentary, part-funded by Superbia, which charts Manchester’s 90s transformation into a queer clubbing mecca.

A live link-up from LA with very special guests Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey - creators of RuPaul’s Drag Race and the minds behind World of Wonder - talking about their journey from nightclubs to media moguls with their own streaming platform and a whole empire whilst also championing community and queerness. They directed Party Monster , the documentary about notorious club kid Michael Alig, whose partnership with James St. James influenced club culture forever and landed Michael in prison for murder. The documentary was turned into a narrative feature starring Macaulay Culkin, which we will be showing in full after the unmissable conversation at Aviva Studios.

Speaking of club culture, we’re thrilled to be hosting the cast of Paris Lee’s adaptation of her memoir What It Feels Like for a Girl at SCENE 2025 for a panel and screening. The show is one of the most critically acclaimed of the year, taking BBC Three and iPlayer by storm with its heart-pounding, hilarious, brilliant story of trans identity and finding your chosen family on the dancefloor.

TELEVISION

Our TV programme is as exciting as ever, with Manchester’s Waterloo Road joining us for a panel on how the show has championed LGBTQ+ inclusion since its first iteration in the early 2000s to its return in 2021.

Whilst we’re talking about returns, Russell T Davies is back at SCENE, celebrating 10 years of TV drama Cucumber , a sort of semi-sequel to Queer As Folk that sees Vincent Franklin’s Henry struggle to deal with being proposed to by his long-term boyfriend Lance, played by Cyril Nri. Russell will be joined by Vincent and Cyril and executive producer Nicola Schindler for a reunion and a screening of the heartbreaking sixth episode.

We will also be joined by Canadian filmmaker Regan Latimer, whose documentary Bulletproof: A Lesbian's Guide to Surviving the Plot explores the “bury your gays” trope and asks: why do TV lesbians always have to die?

DOCUMENTARIES

On the documentary side, we are partnering with Sheffield DocFest to showcase the best of their 2025 edition, as well as Linus O’Brien’s documentary A Strange Journey which celebrates his father’s trailblazing creation The Rocky Horror Picture Show as it celebrates 50 years.

I’m Your Venus is a moving and timely documentary following the unsolved murder of Venus Xtravaganza, star of the legendary film Paris Is Burning. What starts as queer real crime turns into a moving document of how very different people can come together to remember and uplift those we have lost.

QUEER SHORTS

We’re thrilled to be working with Iris Prize and GAZE Festival, who will be curating special shorts selections from their festivals (including a screening of Welsh-language trans masc Benny Hill spoof Teth).

In partnership with Queer Filmmakers Network, OUT OF MCR: SCENE Queer Shorts Showcase will play every day at the festival, showing the best of the Greater Manchester shorts submitted to the competition and curated into an hour-long programme, with the audience voting on their favourite, which will be announced on Wednesday night.

All of the shorts screenings are totally free, so please pick up a ticket and support these upcoming future filmmakers of tomorrow.

MANCHESTER FAVES

For horror fans, GASP! , the Manchester festival celebrating marginalised voices in horror and thriller genres, has curated an all-day queer horror fest at CULTPLEX from midday to midnight on Saturday 16th, including screenings of Knife + Heart and Cruising

Local queer film programmers Mondo Queero programme our Friday night midnight movie at Treehouse Hotel with a screening of Mick Jagger drama Performance

If that’s not enough, we’re filming a documentary at this year’s festival. Protest! - Documenting Dissent - On The Scene will see artists Josh Val Martin, Jez Dolan, and Lee Baxter recreate the gathering after the 1988 Section 28 march in an event that is part cabaret, part film shoot, part historical re-enactment. The experience will offer space to gather and share memories of the biggest queer protest in UK history, and what it means now.

NEW NARRATIVE

We're bringing you the very best new fiction films from around the world this year, including Drive Back Home with Alan Cumming, and gay police drama Plainclothes , starring Tom Blythe and Russell Tovey.

There’s the Black queer femme road-trip movie Dreams in Nightmares , sexy Brazilian drama Streets of Gloria , and Australian adult animation Lesbian Space Princess which is our opening film.

To wrap up a spectacular week of events, on Thursday 21st August we have a very special performance from Manchester Camerata celebrating queer composers in a show fresh from Classical Pride in London. A 22-piece orchestra and trumpet player Aaron Akugbo will play the most beautiful classical pieces written by LGBTQ+ talent from across the decades, followed by Teddy-nominated documentary Monk in Pieces about groundbreaking lesbian composer, performer, and visionary Meredith Monk.

Finally, our closing film – a camp classic beloved by the LGBTQ+ community and back on the big screen in glorious 4K – Showgirls