The Backyard Docs Film Festival returns to Pittsburgh from September 25 to 28, and this year’s lineup promises a deeply moving slate of films that center identity, memory, and queerness, particularly within the context of home. Formerly known as the Rust Belt & Appalachia Documentary Film Festival, this year marks the fifth annual installment and the largest to date, making it the biggest nonfiction film festival ever held in Pennsylvania.
With the 2025 theme “Stories of Home,” the four-day event will showcase 11 short films, three feature-length documentaries, three workshops, and several after-parties across venues including Point Park University, the Parkway Theater, Melwood Screening Room, and CMU’s McConomy Auditorium.
A highlight for LGBTQ+ audiences is the closing night film, Tripoli / A Tale of Three Cities, directed by Raed El Rafei, a Pittsburgh-based queer filmmaker. Screening Sunday, September 28 at CMU, the film is a poetic, hypnotic journey through the director’s hometown of Tripoli, Lebanon. Through an artful exploration of queer identity in the Arab world, El Rafei crafts what the festival calls an “urban symphony,” weaving memory, place, and selfhood into a transcendent cinematic experience. The screening is presented in partnership with Reel Q and Screenshot Asia, further rooting it in Pittsburgh’s vibrant film and LGBTQ+ communities.
The festival also features two short film programs that amplify queer voices:
- “Telling Our Stories” (Friday, September 26 at Parkway Theater) includes Talking Walls by Philadelphia-based filmmaker Marcellus Armstrong, an artistic reflection on how queer memories imprint on physical spaces, and Tessitura by Lydia Cornett and Brit Fryer, a doc that explores the fluid interplay between voice, character, and gender in opera.
- “Made in PA” (Saturday, September 27 at Melwood Screening Room) presents Amish Country Queer by Colleen C Brady, a documentary centered on Brady Pappas, a trans non-binary artist navigating queer joy in rural Lancaster County. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers, moderated by Steph Strasburg of PublicSource and Hansen Bursic, the festival’s director.
“I am so proud of the queer storytelling at this year’s festival,” said Bursic, a local filmmaker and advocate for LGBTQ+ representation in documentary film. “These stories challenge audiences’ expectations and remind us that, whether you’re from small-town Pennsylvania or the Middle East, LGBTQ+ people are everywhere.”
What began in 2020 as a humble backyard screening has grown into a powerful cultural platform for nonfiction filmmakers across the Rust Belt and Appalachia. And for queer audiences in Pittsburgh and beyond, this year’s Backyard Docs Film Festival offers a vital space for connection, representation, and creative exploration.
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