Django filter many-to-many with contains

I know this is an old question, but it looks like the OP never quite got the answer he was looking for. If you have two sets of ManyToManyFields you want to compare, the trick is to use the __in operator, not contains. So for example if you have an "Event" model with a ManyToMany to "Group" on field eventgroups, and your User model (obviously) attaches to Group, you can query like this:

Event.objects.filter(eventgroups__in=u.groups.all())

The simplest approach to achieve this would be checking for equalty over the whole instance (instead of the id) in the ManyToManyField. That looks if the instance is inside the many to many relationship. Example:

module.workflow_set.filter(trigger_roles=self.role, allowed=True)

Have you tried something like this:

module.workflow_set.filter(trigger_roles__in=[self.role], allowed=True)

or just if self.role.id is not a list of pks:

module.workflow_set.filter(trigger_roles__id__exact=self.role.id, allowed=True)