Qaleidoscope: Queer City Cinema Nordic Tour 2026

Qaleidoscope Tour – Nordic 2026 a project by the Queer City Cinema, an annual film festival in Regina, Saskatchewan, will come to Molde.

Represented by its director, Gary Varro, the Qaleidoscope Tour will present films by Queer and QTIBPOC artists that explore, question and play with notions of identity and utilize queer artistic expression to propose and investigate diverse ways of looking at sexuality, gender, race and film and performance art itself.

Qaleidoscope Tour – Nordic 2026 will be a well-textured assemblage of images, characters, ideas, and realities that collide in fantastical, personal, and playful ways to produce an ever changing, multi-faceted film and performance art viewing experience.

Some films will focus on image, sound and abstract narratives; others present information, facts, and queerforward realities; while others share the pleasure and pain of individual and collective identities. Refractive content includes experimental and artistically rigorous films as well as heavy-hitting and thoughtful topics such as feminism, race, racism, fat activism, class, colonization, crip arts, politics, religion, violence, HIV/AIDS, gender and of course sexuality – all provided for their role in engendering awareness and insight on many levels.

Transgressive and subversive play is also an important characteristic in a number of films and performances, activating Queer City Cinema’s (QCC’s) mandate to reflect hallmarks of queer image making – in this case, film and performance art with a decidedly tongue-in-cheek disposition and sensibility; injecting the programming with moments of intelligent, incisive humour – film and performance art that pleases and appeases.

The Qaleidoscope Tours were conceived to promote the artistic vision of Queer and QTBIPOC filmmakers and performance artists whose work might not otherwise be shown in these parts of Europe.

These works, though falling under the banner of ‘queer’, remain relevant to the broader artistic communities in each of the locations, not only because of the subject matter broached but because many of the artists represented float amongst multiple disciplines within the context of film, visual and performance art. In this sense, artistic rigour and fluidity of experience are paramount in the programming for the tour.

Gary Varro is a curator and visual artist based in Regina, SK. He has exhibited installations across Canada, and has appeared in numerous performance artworks over the last few decades. In 1996, he established Queer City Cinema, an organization which now presents two festivals annually: Performatorium: Festival of Queer Performance, and Queer City Cinema Film Festival. Varro’s work encompasses his interests in queer identities; public/private domains; self humiliation, spectacle and transgression; humour and pathos, endurance; and the creative process itself. Through his installations and performances, he proposes critical relationships with architectural and social spaces. Using a process of intervention, accommodation, manipulation, and modification, Varro draws attention to shifts in meaning brought about by spatial alterations, giving precedence to the perspective of the viewer and their representative role in these spaces. Within these parameters, Varro addresses notions of identity as delineated by difference, territory, and cultural histories.