[Answered ]-Why doesn't django like my dictionary?

You can’t do this sort of indirect variable resolution in Django’s template language. It will always interpret e_quals.req_id as e_quals["req_id"] – ie as a literal key.

You’ll need to create a simple template filter:

@register.filter
def dict_get(my_dict, key):
    return my_dict.get(key)


{{ e_quals|dict_get:req_id }}