There’s a Star, 2023

Who’s Queen? – Shorts Package

Samuel LeBlanc, a young transgender musician, undertook an artistic approach to find a queer community in his native Acadia, nestled in the far northeastern corner of North America. During his wanderings, he discovers, behind the heteronormative rural landscapes, people determined to live their differences without having to leave their hometown or deny their cultural identity to get there. Documentary filmmaker Julien Cadieux shares these stories of beauty and community acceptance in this musical documentary that glistens with pride.

MQFF stands with our drag queen superstars in celebrating their art through these fabulous short films.

Gays Will Be Gays – Shorts Package

Runs in the Family, 2023

This collection highlights some of the finest big gay shorts around.

River has a once-in-a-lifetime chance to compete in a drag competition and win the funds to finally pay for top surgery, and nothing is going to get in his way — but his plans are upended when his father gets a call from Monica, his long-lost ex-girlfriend… and the mother River never knew. Just when you thought the road trip tale had been done to death, this surprising South African film will delight you with the intimacy and freshness of its father–son dynamic. As they venture across country to rescue Monica from rehab, they break laws, social norms, and sometimes each other’s hearts — but the film always returns to the tenderness at its core.

HEALED, 2023

L-Word – Shorts Package

In Meghan Weinstein’s 2023 thriller HEALED, a former popstar and her pregnant wife are unsuspecting subjects in a shady medical experiment, undergoing bizarre treatments under the guise of an unconventional holistic retreat. Promised a technology-free, meditative, and isolated getaway, the couple’s relationship is tested as the line between reality and nightmare begins to blur under the influence of their host, Georgia. The lovers have to unravel the conspiracy behind the wellness retreat before the healing is irreversible in this captivating psychological drama.

This shorts collection goes out to all the women-identifying and loving fans.

Chasing Chasing Amy, 2023

Silver Haze, 2023

Kevin Smith’s hugely successful 1997 rom-com Chasing Amy saved trans filmmaker Sav Rodgers’ life, he says, notwithstanding that, by his own reckoning, it “holds a complicated and controversial history in [the] queer film canon.” In the wonderful Chasing Chasing Amy, Rogers documents his coming-of-age and gender transition offset against his evolving relationship with Smith’s film. Leaning into nuanced discussions around the complexity of sexual identity and fluidity in Chasing Amy, Rogers speaks to Smith and Joey Lauren Adams (Amy herself), queer icon Guinevere Turner and others, de-romanticising and yet enriching his relationship to the film.

The incredible Vicky Knight once again delivers a powerhouse performance in this working-class British slice of social realism that reconnects her with Dirty God writer/director Sacha Polak. Knight picked up a Jury Prize at this year’s Teddy Awards for her turn as Franky, a nurse trying to turn her life around, but carrying a lot of anger over the scars her body holds following an unexplained fire that razed the pub she grew up in. But will dumping her boyfriend and falling in with in-patient Florence offer the way out she desires?

Shape, 2023

Frightfully Queer – Shorts Package

“The gay community celebrates equality? That is the biggest load of bullshit.” Roger Ungers’ insightful documentary explodes the harmful, nigh-on impossible body image standards gay men are bombarded with in glossy magazines, on social media and hook-up apps. Eviscerating a hierarchy favouring white over people of colour, perfectly sculpted abs over more common figures and looking down on those who embrace femme identities or are older, it also speaks to one gymgoer who looks the part but battles body dysmorphia doubts.

Get ready to watch through your fingers with these nightmarish shorts.

Swallowed, 2022

Out-There – Shorts Package

It’s Ben’s last night in a small town in Maine before heading to Los Angeles to pursue his porn career, so his best friend Dom arranges a going-away present. The present? A drug run. Dom wishes to send Ben off with cash to keep himself afloat in LA by simply having the two deliver a package across the border. But things take a turn and spill out of control when the package appears to be far more dangerous than they thought. This indie body horror flick is one for the Cronenberg fans and will have you squirming in your seat.

Delve into a world of boundary-pushing shorts that’ll make you think.

Centrepiece – Marinette, 2023

The Judgment, 2023

Marinette Pichon is one of the most influential women’s players of “the beautiful game” and a French lesbian icon, to boot. In this compelling rags-to-riches biopic, we follow her from a hardscrabble childhood in a troubled home to her stop-start rise to prominence as one of the greatest players ever to grace a soccer pitch, whether in France, where she has long been agitating for greater conditions for women footballers, or in the United States, where there is something more akin to a level playing field for men and women.

In writer/director Marwan Mokbel’s second feature, a gay Egyptian couple return from America for a family emergency. In this unstable environment, their relationship, unbeknownst to their families, threatens to unravel under anxiety, unease, and suspicion. Convinced that a family member knows about their more-than-just-friends relationship, self-proclaimed atheist Mo is thrust into a spiral of terror and shame. A domestic thriller, with universal terrors that feel vital to be portrayed on screen at present.

Birder, 2023

Drifter, 2023

Kristian Brooks is a drifter of a different kind, a ‘birder’ from Vermont who ingratiates himself with fellow campers at a queer nudist camp called Lotus Lake in New Hampshire – a sex positive retreat in the woods. It’s a verdant escapist fantasy where psychologists, wellness coaches, body workers, thruples, bisexual couples and drag artists can feel free to free range, sexually. With couple couplings, fetish and campfire hookups and a spot of fishing thrown in the mix, love amongst the trees turns dark and pretty twisted when Kristian the birdwatcher is around. In this erotic thriller serial killing satire on consensual politics, it’s not the bears in the woods you need to worry about.

Berliner Moritz (Lorenz Hochhuth) wants to settle down and go for bike rides with his boyfriend, but it’s this attempt at emotional connection that precipitates him getting dumped in a city that’s all about letting it all hang loose. And so he surrenders, drifting into the darkest corners of techno-booming clubs where anything goes sexually, and both moral hectoring and the gender binary are hurled through blacked-out windows. Writer/director Hannes Hirsch’s sex-positive dance wears its kinks as a badge of honour in this charged portrait of Berlin club life

All the Colours of the World are Between Black and White, 2023

Passages, 2023

Amidst the hustle and bustle of vast Nigerian city Lagos, motorbike-riding courier Bambino finds himself increasingly drawn into the gentle orbit of handsome photographer Bawa. But in a country where homosexuality is punishable by death, the first blushes of what may well be a budding romance must be closely guarded within a veil of halting secrecy. Filmmaker Babatunde Apalowo shockingly witnessed a close friend lynched for living his truth, and that terrible shadow informs this beautifully lensed, achingly delicate dance.

Director Ira Sachs turns his attention from his native New York to a very French affair set in gay Paree in this Teddy Award-nominated whirlwind of tempestuous relationships. MQFF fave Franz Rogowski (Great Freedom) plays Tomas, a wildly unpredictable German filmmaker who ditches his sweet-natured English artist hubby Martin (Ben Whishaw) in favour of new passions with Agathe, a schoolteacher played by Adèle Exarchopoulos (Blue is the Warmest Colour). Emotional mayhem ensues when he then ricochets back and forth between them in a real bad boyfriend take on polyamory that pushes all the right/wrong buttons.

Fireworks, 2023

The Lost Boys, 2023

Prolific Italian screenwriter and actor Giuseppe Fiorello has landed his first directorial role with Fireworks (Stranizza d’amuri). 1982 in a sun soaked Sicilian coastal town at the beginning of summer. Two young boys form a friendship that, to them, can move mountains. Gianni (Samuele Segreto) and Nino (Gabriele Pizzurro) attempt to navigate their growing love for each other without shame in the conservative town. When they both start working for Nino’s father, shooting fireworks, suspicions are afoot and their families step in. Fiorello’s debut feature earned him a Silver Ribbon (Nastro d’argento) for Best New Director.

Inside a Belgian youth correctional facility, seventeen-year-old Joe anxiously waits for the judge’s approval of his release. Both excited and apprehensive about his return to society, Joe’s thoughts of freedom are quickly derailed by new neighbouring inmate William. The prison’s strict no-touch policy and general oppressive conditions become an unexpected site of intense passion and romance for the two detainees. But as Joe’s release date approaches, he must decide between love and liberty.

Since the Last Time We Met, 2023

Bumping into the love of his life on the streets of Buenos Aires should feel joyous for Victor. But David his first and only love, broke his heart when he ghosted him 15 years ago, a cruelty exacerbated by Victor’s honourable decision not to speak about their secret relationship, leaving him to grieve in silence with no shoulder to lean on. David’s now married to a woman, but thinks nothing of falling back in with his former lover on the down-low which Victor, despite his reservations, cannot resist.