LGBTQIA+

The LGBT collection includes films made by and about members of the LGBT community in Ireland. Films include contemporary short and feature dramas in which LGBT characters and issues are foregrounded and also older titles where LGBT representation may have been less central but significant nonetheless. The collection also includes documentaries charting the changing position of LGBT people in Irish society. You can discover more about LGBT representations in this blog post from the IFI Irish Film Archive’s Tiernan MacBride library which examines fictional and factual depictions of gay, lesbian and bisexual lives in Ireland’s film and television production, and also from Brian Finnegan's IFI Spotlight 2015 presentation here.

Sort by

The 34th: The Story of Marriage Equality

Linda Cullen
Vanessa Gildea
, 78 minutes, 2017

Spanning a decade that culminated in the 34th amendment to the Irish constitution, Linda Cullen and Vanessa Gildea’s IFTA-nominated documentary feature follows the founders and members of the Marriage Equality in Ireland organisation as they campaigned for the extension of…

A Ferret Called Mickey

Barry Dignam , 12 minutes, 2003

Paulie (Colin Middleton), a young boy who dresses in women’s clothes and holds tea parties, is subject to a calamitous intervention from his father Jim (Darragh Kelly). When presented with a ferret who he promptly names Mickey, Paulie is taken…

A Man of No Importance

Suri Krishnamma, 99 minutes, 1994

Albert Finney delivers a star turn in this deeply human drama about a 1960s Dublin bus conductor unwilling to reveal his homosexuality to an unwelcoming city. This ‘man of no importance’, Alfred Byrne (Finney), attempts to celebrate his love for…

Afternoon

Ruairi McKenna, 10 minutes, 2008

Afternoon tells the sad story of Gerard (Tommie Curran), a teenage boy forced to deal with painful loss early in life. After the suicide of friend William, Gerard keeps quiet about the pair’s gay experiences and William’s difficulty in accepting…

Breakfast on Pluto

Neil Jordan, 128 minutes, 2005

Returning to the boundless imagination of The Butcher Boy novelist Pat McCabe, Jordan here recreates Ireland’s turbulent 1970s as an odyssey of gender-bending possibility, courtesy of the irrepressible, cross-dressing Patrick ‘Kitten’ Braden (Cillian Murphy). Abandoned on a doorstep as a…