XPOSED Films Against War is a film series in collaboration between XPOSED Queer Film Festival and the antimilitarist collective No More War. This is the second edition of the film series. The films showcase queer perspectives on militarism, war and colonialism.

In this multifaceted program, the filmmakers express how bodies are oscillating between autonomy and state control, their relation to war and freedom. In the contrast-rich and cinematic Ponay (or You Are Not F***ing Welcome) (2024), a queer person becomes entangled in the bureaucracy of the gender binary, trying to get an exemption from the military draft. In I carry them in me (2025), the filmmaker thinks about mines and bodies. Batería (2016) has the camera cruising through an abandoned military fortress, guided by voices of the ones that have been here before. Aliens in Beirut (2025) tells the story of a person returning to Beirut and falling in love, before a catastrophe takes place.

All films will be shown in their original language with English subtitles.

content warnings: queerphobia, Beirut explosion, mentioning of war

Ponay (or You Are Not F***ing Welcome)

Hesome Chamamah, Thailand 2024, 26 '

Cherry is one bureaucratic checkmark away from obtaining a gender identity exemption for the military draft: they ‘just’ have to travel from Bangkok to their family home in Thailand’s deep south to get a residency document. On this final stretch, not only do they have to deal with their conservative family’s outright rejection and abuse, but even those who do recognise their queerness harbour misplaced expectations towards how Cherry performs their gender.

I carry them in me

Angelik Ustymenko, Germany 2025, 5'

This film is an attempt to explore healing among the constant rupture.

Batería

Damian Sainz, Cuba 2016, 15'

The ruins of an ancient military fortress outside Havana have become a clandestine gay cruising spot. The old walls and the rubbles give shelter not only to Cuban male homosexuals, but also to a culture of resistance and socialization.

Aliens in Beirut

Raghed Charabati, Lebanon, Canada 2025, 16'

ALIENS IN BEIRUT blurs reality and fiction, exploring alienation and desire at home. The film recreates life in the fateful summer of the 2020 Beirut Port Explosion as a Lebanese immigrant in Canada returns to Beirut in search of roots, only to fall for a stranger by the sea. Told through romance and fraught family ties, the film appears to be about queerness in Lebanon but shifts into a story of survival. In the end, the explosion cares for nobody - leaving behind snippets of unerasable desire.