News
Presenting the 2026 Lolly & Audience Award Winners!
by Xposed
Over a decade ago, XPOSED introduced its friendly competitive side with the Lolly Awards! The awards were born out of a passionate night of love between a Lola and a Teddy Award, bringing together the extraordinary in queer experimental filmmaking. We know that competition is not nice, and we often debate whether to keep the awards. Here are three reasons for doing so: awards give visibility to filmmakers and their films, thus ultimately supporting queer voices in film distribution. Each Lolly Award comes with a €250 cash prize, which is our small financial contribution to future filmmaking. And by inviting a film jury, we create the space and experience for queer cinephiles to intensely discuss films over four days, while the audience gets to participate with our voting forms after each screening!
The 2026 winners are…
Film Synopsis
In a wide field, beside the night market where the pagoda festival has taken place, there is a 65-year-old gay person, performing old songs on a shaky theatre stage underneath the spotlights. She has covered wrinkles and smile lines with thick makeup. Her performance and dance are as active as that of a youngster. She is the second generation and the leader of the Thunder Birds troupe, which was established 50 years ago, Mommy Soe aka Phyu Hnin Mg. It is the first and only entrepreneur artist group capable of making the conservative Myanmar society accept them in the 1980s, in the socialist time ruled by U Ne Win. There were a lot of people who accepted, loved and came to watch them. But there were also a few who threw rocks violently, shouted and mocked them: ‘Homo! Faggot!’. When there was no dancing stage, Mommy Soe worked as an assistant make-up artist in her friend’s beauty salon.
Jury Statement
Many would argue that cinema rests on one fundamental principle: show and don’t tell. But in real life, ambiguity can be difficult to hold. We seek clarity, because naming things can bring us ease. But on the silver screen, the most powerful films invite us into something else, a collaboration. They ask us to create meaning alongside the filmmaker. Our winner does exactly that, and it is no small achievement. This film embraces that space fully. Without any dialogue, it immerses us generously in a world that is watery, soothing, elegant, tender, poetic and bursting with colour. A queerer world that feels, quietly, hopeful. In the strange and uncertain in which we live, hope is something that we as a jury deeply appreciated. Our winner of the Lolly First Prize is Como Nasce Um Rio — How a River Is Born by Luma Flôres.
Lolly Award - 2nd Place
by Bart Seng Wen Long
Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand, UK, 2025, English, 15 min
Jury Statement
The second prize goes to a film masterfully weaves a variety of materials, juxtaposing archival research, local newsreel, Western film production, colonial-era propaganda film surrounding rubber plantations, with modern day rubber fetish through the narration of a Singaporean in rubberwear. When the representation of history and collective trauma mediated through colonial eyes and large corporation collide with feverish desires and personal encounter with foreign playmates, they altogether conjure up a plurality of crises and confront the audience with striking senses of urgency, be it personal or collective.
For the originality and complexity of the film, the jury is proud to award the second prize to Bart Seng Wen Long’s Emergencies.
Lolly Award - 3rd Place
by Levon Babayan and La Fille Renne
France, 2025, French, 6 min
Jury Statement
The third place of the Lolly Awards is a tender reclamation of our bodies, of trans bodies. About finding them in one another and finally making us feel that it’s safe to be in them, explore them, pleasure them, love them.
It does that without needing much time or any dialogue, but with impactful, poetic, sensual, to-the-point imagery, editing and words. This film really convinced us in its artistic simplicity, its collective approach to an often individualised subject matter and its raw honesty & directness. We’re happy to announce that the 3rd Price of the Lolly Award goes to Our Joyful Endings by Levon Babayan and La Fille Renne.
For the originality and complexity of the film, the jury is proud to award the second prize to Bart Seng Wen Long’s Emergencies.
Honorable Mention
by Vladyslav Plisetskiy
Ukraine, 2025, 39 min
Jury Statement
The Honorable Mention goes to a film that understands war as something that slowly settles into everyday existence, shaping bodies, language, relationships, and entire communities over time. The camera moves through this condition with an attention to what accumulates rather than what begins or ends, returning again and again to the question of how life continues when conflict is no longer an interruption but the very structure within which it unfolds. What distinguished the film for us was the way it builds a collective memory out of many overlapping registers of image and voice. A society that is constantly negotiating itself. Openness to hostility; solidarity to violence. The film does not smooth these contrasts out. Instead, it allows them to remain tense, sometimes extending uncomfortable encounters long enough for their weight to fully register.
From this accumulation emerges a work that is at once intimate and political, holding both registers without hierarchy or resolution. Within the same frame, grief and desire, exhaustion and celebration, resistance and absurdity circulate without settling into a single narrative line. For the clarity and sensitivity with which it transforms this unstable coexistence into cinematic form, and for the way it holds space for radical queer presence amid ongoing war, the jury is proud to award the Honorable Mention to What You Will Do When the War Continues? by Vladyslav Plisetskiy.
Our 2026 Lolly
Award Jury
Huei-Yin Chen
Huei-Yin Chen is a curator, writer and researcher. She has been involved in curatorial practices since 2014. She joined the programming team at Women Make Waves Int’l Film Festival Taiwan (WMWIFF) in 2017, and currently works as the Curator of WMWIFF. She also served as jury for various film festivals and as preliminary selection committee for Taiwan International Documentary Festival since 2022. She has independently curated and co-curated programs for Queer East, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, and more. Her interests include expanded cinema, gender in film and film historiography. Her writings can be seen in Film Appreciation Journal, Taiwan Documentary E-Paper, Funscreen, Film Comment, etc.
Jad Salfiti
He/Him
Based between London and Berlin, Jad Salfiti is a British-Palestinian journalist covering culture and politics. He has written for The Guardian, The Nation and Al Jazeera English. His video work includes Germany’s Palestine Problem, which won Best Use of Video at the 2023 WAN-IFRA Digital Media Awards Middle East. He previously co-hosted ARTE’s Europe Weekly and was a Queer Palm juror at Cannes in 2024.
Ashe Schaub
She/They
Ashe Schaub is a filmmaker, photographer and programmer. She is part of the MOIN Film Fund’s Talent Program, studies Film & Media Arts in Flensburg and is based in northern Germany. Her work evolves around the visibility, futures and pasts of queer, trans & black identities, the questioning of power structures and search for queer forms and aesthetics. During her studies she also researched trans representation in popular horror films and the purpose of destruction in anarcha-feminist films. Ashe’s short films and music videos were shown at numerous festivals throughout Germany. The documentary shortfilm FLENSBURG SÜSSBITTER, which she co-directed as part of a 5 person directing collective deals with a city’s lack of colonial reckoning. It premiered at Nordische Filmtage Lübeck and was awarded the German Youth Film Award, among other honors. She selected and programmed for Filmfest im Stadthafen Rostock, Kurzfilmtage Flensburg and as part of the queerfeminist art-collective bilderbanden.
Dan Sokoli
He/Him
Dan Sokoli is a sociologist, activist, and co-founder of Dylberizm, the world’s first Albanian-language queer media platform, as well as the founder of Prishtina Queer Festival, a cultural platform dedicated to celebrating queer art, memory, and resistance. With expertise in gender, sexuality, and human rights, he leads projects that bridge activism, storytelling, and cultural production. Passionate about archiving human experiences, he is a co-author of Stories of Resistance, a collection of Albanian queer stories, and Why Is Cultural Heritage Being Destroyed in Kosovo?, an analysis of institutional care for cultural heritage in Kosovo. He is currently leading pioneering work documenting queer lives during the Kosovo war. A great enthusiast of films, he has served as a jury member at the Cherry Pop Festival in Zagreb and has organized film screenings across Kosovo, Albania, Montenegro, and the United Kingdom. He strongly believes in the power of community and collective solidarity as forces of resistance and transformation.
