Crystal Queer Film Club at Happy Out Coffee, Belfast

What to Expect

Crystal Queer Film Club is a recurring LGBTQ+ film night hosted at Happy Out Coffee, an east Belfast cafe on the Newtownards Road. The organisers billed this return date as “Crystal Queer Film Club is back!”, confirming it as an ongoing series rather than a one-off. The film chosen for this screening is Paris is Burning (1991), the influential documentary chronicling the closing years of New York’s ballroom scene and the lives of the marginalised queer people, largely Black and Latino, at its centre, exploring sexuality, race, gender and class through the era’s drag balls and voguing culture. It is a fitting choice for a club built around community and conversation as much as the film itself, screened in the relaxed, cafe-style setting Happy Out is known for rather than a conventional cinema.

Paris is Burning has become one of the most widely referenced queer documentaries of its era, credited with bringing ballroom culture, and terms like “reading,” “shade” and “voguing,” to a much wider audience, and it remains a natural anchor film for a community-run queer screening series. Running a film club out of a cafe rather than a cinema keeps the format informal and conversation-friendly, in keeping with the small grassroots queer screening nights that have become part of Belfast’s east-side cultural scene alongside its bars, galleries and community spaces.

Good to Know

• Date and time: Friday 7 August 2026, 7pm to 9pm.
• Venue: Happy Out Coffee, 72 Newtownards Road, Belfast BT4 1GW.
• This screening was showing as sold out on Eventbrite at time of research; the club runs periodically, so watch Happy Out Coffee’s and Eventbrite’s listings for the next date.
• Tickets, when available, are booked through Eventbrite; no advance price was published on the listing.
• The venue is a working cafe, so expect a small, informal audience rather than cinema-style seating.

Getting There

Happy Out Coffee is on the Newtownards Road in east Belfast, close to the Portview Trade Centre and CS Lewis Square, a short bus ride from the city centre along the Newtownards Road corridor. Titanic Quarter and Central train stations are both within a short taxi journey for anyone travelling from further afield.