This story by Adila Aghayeva originally appeared on Global Voices on December 4, 2025.
This story was produced in partnership with Queerradar.
In Azerbaijan, violations of LGBTQI+ rights, discrimination, and hate crimes are frequently documented in both local and international reports. Alongside a rise in hate speech by state officials, Azerbaijan has ranked among the lowest on ILGA-Europe’s Rainbow Map for many consecutive years — systemic marginalisation that extends into the arts, especially cinema.
In recent years, a new wave of short films has begun to address the issue, offering intimate portrayals of queer life through personal storytelling. Modest in scale but radical in their very existence, these films document lives that have long been erased and, in doing so, begin to write the first chapters of queer cinematic history in Azerbaijan.
In 2017, Azerbaijan joined a grim list of countries, including Chechnya, Indonesia, and Egypt, where LGBTQI+ people faced violent crackdowns. The Azerbaijani authorities orchestrated mass arrests, torture, and fabricated charges against queer citizens. As global attention quickly faded, the crisis slipped into silence. The film “All Monsters Are Human,” by British filmmakers Hugh Davies and Helen Spooner, emerged from that silence, documenting the stories of three queer Azerbaijanis — Roma, Lady Cat, and Lisa — whose lives move between Baku and Istanbul, a common migration route for trans women from the region who are seeking safety.
Through a hybrid form that combines interviews and animation, the film gives visual shape to traumas that are difficult to articulate. The animated segments soften unbearable memories, creating a space where pain becomes perceivable but not voyeuristic. The result is a sensitive and emotionally charged film that resists sensationalism despite being made by foreign directors. Its Western gaze does not objectify its subjects; instead, it amplifies their agency and dignity in the face of systemic violence.
Roma recounts surviving sexual assault and police brutality. Lady Cat continues sex work, at once a form of both survival and erasure. In one of the most moving sequences, the memory of Kristina, a trans woman killed in Istanbul, is reconstructed through her mother’s recollections. The filmmakers travelled to Azerbaijan to speak to her, revealing the unbearable contradiction between maternal tenderness and social cruelty: Kristina, once chained by her father, is remembered as someone who would share her last piece of bread.
The first homosexual character in Azerbaijani cinema appeared only in 2014, in the comedy “My Name is Intigam,” directed by Emin Abdullayev. As in much post-Soviet cinema, queerness was permitted only as caricature – an instrument of irony, ridicule, or fear. For decades, mainstream film reinforced heteronormative ideology by relegating queer figures to punchlines, ensuring they could never be seen as full human subjects.
Even today, there are no mainstream Azerbaijani films that positively portray LGBTQI+ lives, and international queer cinema remains largely absent from local screens. Yet, anxiety about the “spread” of queer themes has already reached the film community.
“There has been overt propaganda of homosexuality and sexual minorities in world cinema in recent years, and I have been worried about this for a long time,” said Ayaz Salayev, a respected director and state-honoured art worker, in an interview with local media. “If Azerbaijani cinema follows the Western path and makes such films to win awards, it could deal a big blow to national cinema.”
In an article for Yeni Musavat titled “A Homosexual Film Industry Has Been Emerging All Over the World. What Is the Goal?”, film critic Sevda Sultanova argued that the West’s struggle for gender equality has limited academic freedom and debate. “The organisers of the Berlin Film Festival removed the gender principle, replacing Best Actor and Best Actress awards with gender-neutral ones,” she claimed. “Thus, one of the world’s most influential festivals violated the rights of actors and actresses under pressure from sexual minorities.”
Against this backdrop, the appearance of non-binary and trans authors who tell their own stories marks a significant shift from being looked at to looking back. These filmmakers, many of them graduates of the Azerbaijan State University of Culture and Arts, are reclaiming cinema as a space of resistance and self-creation. Their works, often produced with symbolic budgets, are less about technical polish and more about the audacity to exist on screen.
While earlier one-off activist films, such as “Sebastian” (2017) by LGBTQI+ activist Samad Ismayilov, offered rare glimpses into queer life, a younger generation is now shaping a more sustained body of work. These artists are developing what can be described as a queer gaze – one that challenges normative representations, foregrounds LGBTQI+ subjectivities, and constructs alternative visual languages for what mainstream culture rejects.
Vusala Hajiyeva turned her own life story into “Bunny Decides to Go,” portraying the pressures she faced in Azerbaijan and the circumstances that ultimately forced her to relocate to Tbilisi, Georgia. The film received significant international attention, screening at nearly twenty film festivals following its world premiere at the Oslo Fusion International Film Festival. Hajiyeva also directed “A and 24 Others” (2022), revisiting the 2017 LGBTQI+ crackdown, and the shorts “Anyone from Istanbul” (2024) and “Leave the Room, Make a Mistake” (2024).
“My main purpose in making this film was to analyse what had happened to me on a personal level and to look at the years after my transition from the outside,” she explained. Using personal archives, photographs, and intimate handheld camerawork, Hajiyeva reconstructs her early memories — wearing her mother’s clothes in secret, playing with her cousins’ dolls — situating them within a broader journey of self-discovery. Feelings of loneliness and isolation are visualised through a shift from a chaotic family dining table to a minimalist, solitary one. “Home is not always a comfort zone. Sometimes home can turn into hell,” she says in her voiceover.
Two sources of strength remain for her: her partner and rap music. The rabbit motif emerges from these relationships: her mother’s first gift was a toy rabbit, while her partner remembers losing a beloved real rabbit from childhood. The symbol becomes a metaphor for fragility and flight. Rap music becomes her second refuge: protest, expression, a rhythm of survival. She briefly abandoned it due to “dysphoria and fear,” but returned to it after a violent attack on her home. Threatening calls from relatives and hostile stares in public ultimately forced her to flee to Tbilisi overnight: “When everything around you becomes unsafe, escape becomes the only option.”
While not ideal, Tbilisi offers relative freedom. The film ends on a hopeful note, with an image of a small girl walking through Baku with a confident stride, ignoring the stares around her, moving forward toward a new life.
Trans screenwriter and director Miray Deniz, another graduate of the Azerbaijan State University of Culture and Arts, is among the few consistently foregrounding LGBTQI+ experiences. Her earlier film “Sunshine for My Body” portrayed a lesbian couple, a trans woman seeking family, and a gay teenager navigating relationship difficulties.
Her film “Queer Destiny: Avaz Hafizli” examines the life and legacy of 23-year-old blogger and LGBTQI+ rights defender Avaz Hafizli, who was murdered by his cousin on February 22, 2022 “for disgracing the family name.” Both the funeral and the subsequent court proceedings revealed the depth of homophobia in Azerbaijan: friends were barred from attending the trial, the hate crime dimension was ignored, and although Hafizli’s mother demanded the harshest punishment, his brother publicly forgave the perpetrator. As mentioned in the film, following pressure by friends and activists like Ali Malikov, the killer received a nine-and-a-half-year sentence.
A QueerRadar investigation found that between 2013 and 2023, at least 15 LGBTQI+ people in Azerbaijan were attacked with weapons and 12 killed. These figures, however, are likely underreported due to the absence of proper investigation and the lack of a hate crime classification in national law.
Deniz's film reconstructs Hafizli’s life through interviews with his mother, friends, and colleagues, blending them with archival footage. His activism, his constant presence at protests, and his efforts to document trans murders place him at the heart of Azerbaijan’s queer struggle. Yet, his murder was framed by some as “a deserved death,” a narrative echoed in pro-government media.
The film chronicles how hate speech fuels violence and endangers lives. Although Hafizli repeatedly reported threats, officials ignored him. His suicide attempt, also related in the film, underscores the psychological toll queer Azerbaijanis often endure; it also recalls the 2014 suicide of activist Isa Shahmarli, who hanged himself using the rainbow flag — another life pushed to the brink.
Even in death, discrimination persisted for Hafizli, who was denied a proper burial and a gravestone. As journalist Nurlan Libre noted in the film, some family members want the grave to “disappear.” In the face of such attitudes, Judith Butler’s concept of “grievability” — the idea that some lives are not seen as worthy of mourning — becomes painfully visible.
Mehriban Karimova, whose background is in long-term photojournalism and photography, addresses prejudice and discrimination against transgender women in the film “Home Within,” which was screened at the Oslo Fusion International Film Festival and the Sevil International Women’s Documentary Film Festival in Azerbaijan.
Examining home as both a physical space and an emotional state, the film follows Karmen, a 20-year-old student living in her friend’s apartment. Having begun her transition while living in a dormitory, Karmen sees home as a place of safety, authenticity, and warmth — but those qualities become fragile. She recalls feeling truly at home only in her grandmother’s house, an early sanctuary she did not want to leave.
To find her “inner home,” Karmen has had to sacrifice her “outer home.” Although she now says she feels comfortable in her friend’s apartment, she also recounts receiving a sexual proposition from a former landlord who offered to lower the rent in exchange for sex — an offer that later came from others as well. For her, home has transformed into a space filled with conditions, limitations, and danger. Her bright personality is overshadowed by traumatic memories. The film shows how even basic needs, such as walking freely on the street, become challenges for queer people.
Although Azerbaijan has no identifiable “New Queer Cinema” movement, these independently made films are beginning to fill the void left by decades of silence. They challenge post-Soviet conservatism and heteronormative cinematic language by reclaiming the power of looking — what feminist and queer theorists call the queer gaze. This gaze also interrogates the meaning of home, pushing beyond the physical to explore belonging, safety, and identity.
A striking throughline in these works is the exploration of home as both a refuge and a site of danger. For Hajiyeva in “Bunny Decides to Go,” home is a place that must be left behind to survive, yet it remains deeply entwined with memory and emotional attachment. Hafizli’s story in “Queer Destiny” reveals how, without family protection, even home becomes unsafe, culminating in fatal violence. Karimova’s “Home Within” examines home as an emotional and social construct, revealing the compromises, dangers, and exclusions that trans people face even within seemingly ordinary domestic spaces.
Taken together, these films portray a generation searching for the meaning of home in a society that denies them safety and recognition. They transform personal struggles into collective narratives, illustrating how survival, memory, and the quest for belonging are intertwined with the creation of queer cinematic histories. By mapping the contours of home, both lost and imagined, these films chart a collective history of queer life in Azerbaijan, preserving memory where official records fail.
For this generation of artists, cinema is not merely a call for visibility; it is an act of documentation, defiance, and remembrance. Together, they continue to create an alternative archive — one where pain, memory, and identity coexist without apology, and where the very act of making films becomes a form of survival.
(DS)
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