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Filmhuis Cavia

Van Hallstraat 52
Amsterdam
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Upcoming events in Filmhuis Cavia

  1. Queering Albion

    Filmhuis Cavia, Van Hallstraat 52, Amsterdam

    Queering Albion

    Filmhuis Cavia, Van Hallstraat 52, Amsterdam

    Too often the inclusion of queer narratives in the British and Irish film landscape are isolated to urban tales of found family, illicit activity and a general modern vs traditional culture dichotomy. While this represents vast populations of the queer society, it excludes the ‘ones left behind’; those that don’t want to trade their relationship with the land for their relationship with those they love. This programme investigates the nuance, pain and joy that exists for queer people in rural places in the British Isles.

  2. Coming of Age – by Porn Film Festival Amsterdam

    Filmhuis Cavia, Van Hallstraat 52, Amsterdam

    Coming of Age – by Porn Film Festival Amsterdam

    Filmhuis Cavia, Van Hallstraat 52, Amsterdam

    June is Pride Month, commemorating the Stonewall uprising. The Stonewall riots began in the early hours of June 28, 1969, when patrons of the Stonewall Inn in New York City's Greenwich Village resisted a police raid, sparking several days of protests. This uprising is widely considered the catalyst for the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement, leading directly to the first Pride march on June 28, 1970. To honour the Queer history with celebrations, reflection, and activism, Kissable Screens, a monthly sex positive screening of Cavia, will recall films that were presented at Porn Film Festival Amsterdam 2026.

    Stories of transition. Stories of becoming. This block explores thresholds: the before and after moments that crack something open. Coming of age isn’t bound to youth or tied to outdated ideas of purity, nor to a mainstream porn category or religious initiation. It can happen at any time, in countless forms. These films trace self-discovery, sexual awakenings, escapes from what was, returns to the self and the unstable in-between spaces where identity is still forming.

Past events in Filmhuis Cavia

  1. Queer Cinema for Palestine

    Filmhuis Cavia, Van Hallstraat 52, Amsterdam

    Queer Cinema for Palestine

    Filmhuis Cavia, Van Hallstraat 52, Amsterdam

    Alongside Queer Cinema for Palestine, Filmhuis Cavia celebrates Palestinian voices and expresses queer solidarity with Palestinians and their liberation struggle. Cavia has partnered with Queer Cinema for Palestine this Pride month to bring a shared programme focusing on the world of queer Palestinian and allied artists, in historic Palestine, across the diaspora and beyond.

    In addition to the 60-minute programme QCP has put together, we will also be screening the short film Etir by Fateema Al-Hamaydeh Miller.

    All proceeds of the screening will be donated to Doctors without borders to support their work in Palestine as they provide medical humanitarian assistance to Palestinians affected by conflict, displacement and siege.

  2. Kissable Screens: Phantom Love – by Porn Film Festival Amsterdam

    Filmhuis Cavia, Van Hallstraat 52, Amsterdam

    Kissable Screens: Phantom Love – by Porn Film Festival Amsterdam

    Filmhuis Cavia, Van Hallstraat 52, Amsterdam

    Kissable Screens, a monthly sex positive screening of Cavia, will recall films that were presented at Porn Film Festival Amsterdam 2026. It is a favourable moment to gain a new perspective on Pornography which can be artistic, political, moving, thought-provoking and a catalyst for self-discovery.

    Can you desire someone who isn’t there? Ghosts of the past, people we never met in person, someone who only lives in our memories, frozen in time. Separated from us by oceans, borders, death, break-ups and other foul plot twists of life. How to love them in the face of their silence? Are we still allowed to imagine them naked, continue the conversation, look through the traces they left behind? A smell on our skin, scribbles in the sidelines of a book, a song, a hair, a voice note. Phantom loves we still feel near in their absence.

  3. Avant-Drag! + Q&A + performance by McMorait

    Filmhuis Cavia, Van Hallstraat 52, Amsterdam

    Avant-Drag! + Q&A + performance by McMorait

    Filmhuis Cavia, Van Hallstraat 52, Amsterdam

    Avant-Drag! paints portraits of ten drag artists of varying gender expressions and sexualities who take to the streets of Athens to query, problematise and (yes, please!) undermine social strictures. Employing wildly imagined personas – like riot housewives and Albanian turbo-folk girls – who perform acts as revolutionary as praising abortion and as charming as drawing childish pictures, these artists call for social justice by taking aim at conservatism, patriarchy, patriotism, racism and sexism.

  4. Avant-Drag!

    Filmhuis Cavia, Van Hallstraat 52, Amsterdam

    Avant-Drag!

    Filmhuis Cavia, Van Hallstraat 52, Amsterdam

    Avant-Drag! paints portraits of ten drag artists of varying gender expressions and sexualities who take to the streets of Athens to query, problematise and (yes, please!) undermine social strictures. Employing wildly imagined personas – like riot housewives and Albanian turbo-folk girls – who perform acts as revolutionary as praising abortion and as charming as drawing childish pictures, these artists call for social justice by taking aim at conservatism, patriarchy, patriotism, racism and sexism.

  5. Southern Sorceresses + QA

    Filmhuis Cavia, Van Hallstraat 52, Amsterdam

    Southern Sorceresses + QA

    Filmhuis Cavia, Van Hallstraat 52, Amsterdam

    Southern Sorceresses follows the drift of performances and improvisations by seven queer artists through the streets of downtown SĂŁo Paulo in a cinematic experience that makes visible the persistence of archaic gender and race prejudices in the common imagination. At the heart of this polyphonic narrative is the importance of political resistance through alliances of common struggle between LGBTQIA+ collectives, black people, indigenous people, and homeless workers.

  6. Ouvidor + Q&A

    Filmhuis Cavia, Van Hallstraat 52, Amsterdam

    Ouvidor + Q&A

    Filmhuis Cavia, Van Hallstraat 52, Amsterdam

    In Ouvidor, the largest art squat in Latin America, 120 artists from various countries coexist in a vibrant micro-society in São Paulo, where each of the 13 floors functions like a distinct neighborhood dedicated to a different form of artistic expression. As they resist constant eviction threats from a government with fascist tendencies in Brazil, internal tensions are fueled by Red Bull’s sponsorship of their Art Biennial.

  7. The Watermelon Woman

    Filmhuis Cavia, Van Hallstraat 52, Amsterdam

    The Watermelon Woman

    Filmhuis Cavia, Van Hallstraat 52, Amsterdam

    The Watermelon Woman is a landmark of the New Queer Cinema of the 1990s, a time of queer formal experimentation with cinematic language. These mostly low-budget indie features were characterised by excess, irreverence and the revolutionary cynicism of the AIDS period. The first feature film of Cheryl Dunye, and the first ever feature film directed by a Black lesbian, it stars Dunye as Cheryl, a young Black lesbian working a day job in a video store while trying to make a film about Fae Richards, a Black actress from the 1930s known for playing the stereotypical "mammy" roles relegated to Black actresses during the period. A special screening on a special day!

  8. Pamela fundraiser screening

    Filmhuis Cavia, Van Hallstraat 52, Amsterdam

    Pamela fundraiser screening

    Filmhuis Cavia, Van Hallstraat 52, Amsterdam

    We are honoured to share Shu Lea Cheang’s monumental 1994 sci-fi debut, Fresh Kill, as part of the ongoing fundraising efforts to support our friends and neighbours at Pamela, a queer bar in Amsterdam West.

    Shu Lea Cheang has spent her career creating works that elegantly grapple with the complexities of activism, racial and sexual politics, critical media theory, and erotic exploration. Her first feature, made in collaboration with Sarita Choudhury, Erin McMurtry, Vernon Reid, and Pedro Pietri, among many other cultural icons, shimmers with queer grace amidst a decaying New York of the future. Inspired by Staten Island’s notorious sprawling landfill and the Taiwanese government's nuclear pollution of Orchid Island, Cheang’s work offers us the ecofeminist wisdom we need to survive the grim realities of these times with our hearts and communities intact.

    The screening will start at 18:00 with doors open (and margaritas shaking) from 17:00.

    Let’s not let Pamela slip away!

  9. Carnage for Christmas

    Filmhuis Cavia, Van Hallstraat 52, Amsterdam

    Carnage for Christmas

    Filmhuis Cavia, Van Hallstraat 52, Amsterdam

    Celebrate a queer bloody Christmas with the hilarious, camp horror Carnage for Christmas from Australian trans filmmaker Alice Maio Mackey. When a true crime podcaster returns to her hometown for the first time since transitioning, she discovers that a mysterious urban legend has gone on a killing spree. With her queer group she sets out to investigate.
    Maio Mackey puts her own spin on the long tradition of holiday slashers with the likes of Black Christmas and Silent Night. Only 20 years old when she made this film with a non-existent budget but a wonderfully enthusiastic group of friends, including Vera Drew (director of The People's Joker).

  10. Equation to an Unknown

    By AMFM x PFFA @ Filmhuis Cavia, Van Hallstraat 52, Amsterdam

    Equation to an Unknown

    By AMFM x PFFA @ Filmhuis Cavia, Van Hallstraat 52, Amsterdam

    This restored 16mm print, commissioned by filmmaker Yann Gonzalez in 2016 from the original negative, screens now for the first time in Amsterdam, on loan from the CinÊmathèque française and Gonzalez himself, who will introduce the film in person. Co-programmed with the Porn Film Festival Amsterdam.

    Équation à un Inconnu is at once a defining moment and an obscure episode of gay erotic cinema. Its director, Francis Savel – an artist who worked largely within the margins of 1970s and 80s French New Wave and adult film production – sets his images to a pulsing synth score. In the film, we follow a young motorcyclist through a series of erotic encounters that circle around desire, memory, and the search for another, the “unknown” of the title. The year that followed would bring the first recorded cases of AIDS, giving Savel’s elegy of bodies an unintended prophetic weight.

  11. Kissable Screens: The Garden Cadences

    Filmhuis Cavia, Van Hallstraat 52, Amsterdam

    Kissable Screens: The Garden Cadences

    Filmhuis Cavia, Van Hallstraat 52, Amsterdam

    Jone is ready to fly. She finds herself at the beginning of something new, but before she moves on, there needs to be a closure. Jone is one of Mollies, the queer-feminist collective that had been living for a decade at a trailer park next to Ostkreuz, Berlin. The Garden Cadences traces their last summer before being evicted.

    Director’s note: “In 2021, I made traces of a moment that would otherwise be inevitably lost and filmed Mollies before their imminent eviction. Their long-standing home was torn down the following spring. An aquarium is to be built in its place. For Mollies, living together was not just about seeking a different way of living, but also about the need to form a community that would embrace and empower. The difficulty of trying to find a new place spacious enough to accommodate all nine members crashed with personal frictions between them and they did not survive as a collective. Aalo comes from Finland, Jone from Lithuania, Aoife was born in Dubai. Neo uses no pronouns, several use they/them, several are transitioning. Mollies was constantly shifting in shape and size, their friends and lovers finding a temporary refuge at the trailer park. This is a space of fluidity in more ways than one. It is a film about togetherness, made together, offering a glimpse of queer everyday life led outside the patriarchal-capitalist complex, while also being a record of the time spent together, doing nothing, like beasts. Ultimately, I felt the need to inscribe myself into the film. The post-pandemic years marked the moment when I questioned my own practice of love and grappled with my own gender. The Garden Cadences is also a dialogue with oneself.”

  12. Unbound (preceded by Skate+) + Q&A with directors

    Filmhuis Cavia, Van Hallstraat 52, Amsterdam

    Unbound (preceded by Skate+) + Q&A with directors

    Filmhuis Cavia, Van Hallstraat 52, Amsterdam

    A group of abuse survivors from the ballet world walk out of toxic companies & start a radical, inclusive, supportive new company of their own. Led by a gender fluid ballet insurgent, they fight to reclaim the stage. To succeed, they must start from nothing, face past traumas, fight for justice, & find belief to dance again with defiance and joy.