The short film Woodpecker, directed by Tanju Ozdemir, came out as part of the Vancouver Queer Film Festival's 38th year, which ran from September 10-20. The film relates to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal of Reduced Inequalities, for its focus on the barriers to the main character’s free expression, as a gay Kurdish asylum seeker.
Central to this year's VQFF are themes of belonging, generosity, and the power of queer community to, from a VQFF press release on August 13, 2026, "nourish one another."
For Woodpecker, main character Cihan, a gay and Kurdish asylum seeker in the United States, must hold his sexuality at an arm's length. We are welcomed first with a scene of the camera, presumably representing Cihan, watching people eat from outside the street outside a restaurant, watching people walk down a city block, contrasted with clips of fingers being scanned, which we can also assume are Cihan's.
It is after this opening scene, that we are welcomed to a full view of Cihan on the same day of his asylum hearing. He wears a t-shirt with "gay" in braille (that seemingly no one else in his life seems to be able to read) and he dances openly, swinging his hips and reaching his arms all the way out, while setting up his uncle's restaurant to open. Everything is going well, until while shooing a familiar bird from an indoor light fixture, a crowd of acorns come falling through the ceiling. From that moment, Cihan’s day takes a turn away from his carefree dancing that we witnessed when we first meet him, and ends with a tense encounter.
The Vancouver Queer Film Festival is the leading 2SLGBTQIA+ film festival in British Columbia, Canada. It is run by Out On Screen, a queer non-profit that began the first version of what is now the Vancouver Queer Film Festival as the "First Vancouver Lesbian Film Festival" in 1988 as a small gathering of friends. Today, it is a widely celebrated festival run across theatres in the Vancouver.