A House is Not A Disco (2024)

Dir: Brian J. Smith | USA

This feature length doco by Sense8 actor Brian J. Smith is both a celebration and a meditation of the Fire Island Pines community. Set within the iconic queer beach town located 50 miles from NYC, A House Is Not a Disco presents a vibrant kaleidoscope of intimate stories shared by locals and newcomers who reflect on the island’s rich history and its role as a “homo-normative” haven for self-expression and liberation. Spend time with the edgy to the eccentric who live, work or will pursue a season (or two) of completely uninhibited pleasure. From epic party highs through to the height of the AIDS crisis, Fire Island is a community bonded by joy, sadness, freedom, experience and connection.

A Portrait of Love (2024)

Dir: Molly Reynolds | Australia

When Archibald Prize-winning artist Craig Ruddy was cruelly taken way too soon due to complications from COVID-19, his long-term partner in love and business, actor Roberto Meza Mont (Candy), was devastated. Padding around their Byron Bay hinterlands home surrounded by his lover’s viscerally tactile portraits – including Cathy Freeman, Warwick Thornton, Bruce Pascoe and the late, impossibly great David Gulpilil – he was a lost soul looking for some way to commemorate their incredible love for one another. Along came friend and filmmaker Molly Reynolds (My Name is Gulpilil), who hit upon crafting this moving tribute to a creative force that burned so bright using only Mont’s smartphone footage and his poetic elegy as narratorial connective tissue. You’ll need plenty of tissues at the ready.

Carnage for Christmas (2024)

Dir: Alice Maio Mackay | Australia

Australian filmmaker and extraordinary trans woman Alice Maio Mackay is an unstoppably anarchic punk powerhouse, pumping fiercely queer horror movies out at a rate that would make even the late, great Rainer Werner Fassbinder look a little lazy tbh. She had a double bill in last year’s MQFF program – Satranic Panic and T-Blockers – and has another wild ride ready for us in Carnage for Christmas, edited by none other than Vera Drew (The People’s Joker). Hallmark could never, as true-crime podcaster Lola (Jeremy Moineau) returns to her country town for the first time since transitioning only to Miss Marple that shit when a sick Santa-costumed serial killer lets loose on the local LGBTQIA+ community. Only the murderer picked the wrong folks to mess with, in a sass-packed slasher where the final girl and her gang fight back like it’s brat summer.

Desire Lines (2024)

Dir: Jules Rosskam | USA

The cinematic form is no more bound by a binary than gender, as autoethnographic artist, academic and filmmaker Jules Rosskam (Transparent) adeptly underlines with his exhilaratingly sexy and smart hybrid docufiction film Desire Lines. The fictional component centres on Iranian-American transman Ahmad (Aden Hakimi) and follows his tentative exploration of transmasculine history via a meet-cute with younger trans man Kieran (Theo Germaine) in Chicago’s LGBTQI+ archive. But when the pandemic crashes the party, closing the city’s bathhouses with echoes of the HIV/AIDS crisis, a time slip of sorts opens a documentary door to real-life heroes, in new interviews and archival footage including author and activist Lou Sullivan, the pioneering transmasc hero.

Doppelgängers³ (2024)

Dir: Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian | UK, USA

Dr Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian is a French, London-based, powerhouse polymath of Armenian and Algerian descent. In the SETI Institute’s Designer of Experiences’ latest film, her goal is to “imagine diasporic and queer ecofeminist futures”… in space! To which end she embarks with two lookalikes who represent divergent aspects of her own heritage and lived experience – Lucia Kagramanyan is an Armenian musician; Myriam Amroun, an Algerian curator – upon an expedition to the Astroland Interplanetary Agency’s Mars simulation in a remote, deep cave in Spain, to explore whether the colonisation of space can be… decolonised?

Interviews with a dizzying array of experts – from Armenian queer activist Lilit Martirosyan to astrophysicists, a botanist, an aquanaut, planetary scientists and more – are peppered throughout to speak to the film’s fundamental enquiry: can the experiences of the past help us imagine a future in outer space free from the traumas we’ve encountered, and continue to encounter, on Earth? (And free from Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, et al…) With music from Pussy Riot and Colin Self!

Gay Chorus Deep South (2019)

Dir: David Charles Rodrigues | USA

If there’s one thing the angelic-voiced San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus can sell, it’s an old tune that feels as fresh as the day it was first sung when it’s barrelling through their lungs. Which is why we’re replaying Sundance New Frontier alum David Charles Rodrigues’ gorgeous documentary Gay Chorus Deep South as part of MQFF’s musically-minded program for 2024. Following the California-based gents – many of whom banded together during the HIV/AIDs crisis – as they go on tour through some of the southern states least likely to support LGBTQIA+ rights, they’re led by stalwart choir head Tim Seelig. A former Texan who felt driven out of town by his sexuality, his tender guidance of the group through rocky times in the aftermath of Trump’s 2016 election win reveals the film to be as much about the journey of personal healing as it is changing hearts and minds.

Heart of the Man (2024)

Dir: David Cook | Australia

Queer Australian First Nations filmmaking is still rare in 2024, so this directorial debut of Butchulla man, David Cook, shot in Brisbane and featuring a predominantly LGBTQIA+ and Aboriginal cast, is cause for celebration.

Chris Wundurra (Parker Little) is pushed by his intimidating father, Sammy – played by writer-director David Cook – to train for the national boxing title he didn’t himself attain, a failure connected to tragic events that robbed Chris of his mother and Sammy his wife. Sammy’s obsession with his son following this path encounters resistance, however, when Chris starts to question his sexuality and finds himself more oriented towards pursuing treading the boards at a local theatre than stepping into the ring.

In the Room Where He Waits (2024)

Dir: Timothy Despina Marshall | Australia

Star of stage and screen Daniel Monks (Pulse, MQFF 2017, Kaos, National Theatre Live’s The Seagull) embraced the horror genre with maniacal glee thanks to a memorably mean supporting role in queer Instagram-influenced slasher Sissy. But the spotlight’s squarely on his towering talent in Timothy Despina Marshall’s goosebump-inducingly spooky debut feature. Set during lockdowns, this psychological chiller casts Monks as Tobi, an Aussie actor cast in a US production of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie. But when the death of his estranged father summons him home for the funeral, he’s plagued by a disturbing presence while languishing in hotel quarantine. Is Tobi truly alone, or is something much more sinister lurking within these four walls? Listen out for a cameo from Gold star Susie Porter.

Kuch Sapney Apne (2024)

Dir: Saagar Gupta, Sridhar Rangayan | India

Co-writer/director duo Sridhar Rangayan and Saagar Gupta return for the follow up to their 2018 breakout, multi-award-winning hit Evening Shadows with this big-hearted, big-songed international melodrama that showcases contemporary Indian filmmaking fused with modern pop. Kartik (Satvik Bhatia) and Aman (Arpit Chaudhary) are in a closeted relationship unbeknownst to their respective families. When Kartik moves overseas to study, he has a fling with an amorous local, Stefan (Theodor Wickenbergh), which sends shockwaves through their relationship. Meanwhile, back in Mumbai, all is not as it seems with Kartik’s family as revelations are soon to surface. Tackling themes of love, family, bigotry and acceptance knows no borders – Kuch Sapney Apne is big on drama, big on songs and, most of all, big on heart.

Lesvia (2024)

Dir: Tzeli Hadjidimitriou | Greece

The Greek island of Lesbos gifted its name to the international term for women who love women, going all the way back to its famous daughter, Sappho, who penned countless poems to them and also lent her name to the cause. Flash forward a few thousand years, and it remains a cultural outpost for the free of spirit, as this beautifully drawn, lyrical documentary by local filmmaker and photographer Tzeli Hadjidimitriou outlines. Featuring a wealth of talking heads who have called the idyllic farming village of Eressos home, it details how lesbians of all stripes and every corner of the globe have flocked to this place since the ‘70s, transforming it in their wake, even if some of the locals have been less than impressed. You’ll feel the sand on your feet and the warm waters’ tender caress.

The Life of Sean DeLear (2024)

Dir: Saagar Gupta, Sridhar Rangayan | India

Formerly fronting L.A. post-punk band Glue, multidisciplinary queer Black artist Sean DeLear (sounds like “chandelier”) packed a helluva lot into a mere 52 years of life. Upon their passing from cancer in 2017, who better to pay tribute to their life’s sprawling, polymath, gender-fluid magnificence than Viennese filmmaker Markus Zizenbacher, whom “Seandy” entrusted with their archive? A companion piece to DeLear’s posthumously published, unfiltered, highly explicit teenage diaries, I Could Not Believe It, Zizenbacher’s film has a frantic punk energy, collaging materials galore from DeLear’s handheld video diaries and featuring interviews with fashion designer Rick Owens, actor and Bongwater founding member, Ann Magnuson, and Seandy’s former housemate, cult actor Susan Tyrrell (an Oscar nominee for 1972’s Fat City). While DeLear is sadly no longer with us, we can still learn from their example – this film delivers an object lesson in living life large, with multi-intersectional, punk rock aplomb!

The Queen of My Dreams (2023)

Dir: Fawzia Mirza | Canada

The Queen of My Dreams is a vibrant exploration of identity, love and cultural connection infused with the lively spirit of a Bollywood musical. This semi-autobiographical film from debut writer-director Fawzia Mirza follows Azra, a queer Muslim graduate student living in Canada in 1999 with her non-Muslim girlfriend, Miriam. When family tragedy hits, Azra must return to her motherland of Pakistan where she’s confronted with childhood memories and the friction of growing up with a conservative mother – but perhaps they’re not so different, after all. Through the dual performances of Amrit Kaur, the narrative weaves between 1969 Karachi and 1999 Toronto, revealing the intricate bonds between mothers and daughters desperately seeking to define their own identity and decide their own path.

Where in the Hell (2024)

Dir: Laramie Dennis | USA

Lesbian prop-master Casey (Cam Killion) is abandoned by her girlfriend after a fight at a run-down motel, at the height of COVID-19 lockdowns in California. What’s worse, her girlfriend has taken not only her car, but her dog as well. She teams up with unemployed actor Alan (Joohun Lee) on a road trip to an audition in Canada. Casey is bitterly cynical while Alan is blindingly optimistic, which makes for a hilarious odd-couple road movie. Featuring beautifully shot landscapes, Laramie Dennis’s laidback debut feature film draws on, and queers, the work of Sam Shepard, and will delight fans of offbeat indie comedies à la the ‘90s works of Hal Hartley and Alison Anders.

Australian Shorts

MQFF’s Australian Shorts & Awards highlight the richness of storytelling and the breadth of original talent working in Australia today. MQFF are proud to present this selection of short films. Following the screening, we will announce the winners of our jury awards. The winner of the City of Melbourne Award for Best Australian Short will also qualify as MQFF’s official selection for the Iris Prize — the largest prize for queer short films worldwide.

Black Pride Shorts

From a dance work told entirely in Aboriginal language – Yankunytjatjara – to a thriller set in Lagos or a jazz bar in the US, these staunch stories shine a light on Black voices.

Featured Queer Shorts

Several of the most extraordinary animated, musical and experimental shorts appear before features in this year’s program; here they’re all bundled together for your viewing and listening pleasure.

Freak Out! Shorts

Booooo! This frightfully queer dungeon’s worth of spooky stories unleashes the scariest stuff, from sentient lampposts attacking possessed spirits to the end of the world.

Gender Journey Shorts

Gender splendour abounds in this exciting collection compiling exhilarating short stories that take great joy in celebrating resilience and upending the hoary old binary.

Love is Love Shorts

Prepare to swoon as these heart-full stories of queer joy explore love on the apps from a neurodiverse perspective, the poetry of love and reconnecting to what was lost.

One World Shorts

Wed 20 Nov – 8:45 PM

Skipping gaily from a rural Japanese village to a baking hot Athens and following a Hong Kong activist resettled in the US, this collection highlights connection.

Out There Shorts

Are you impossible to shock? Challenge accepted! This weird and wonderful collection of the surreal, silly and sexy is designed to push your buttons.

Out(Look) Shorts

From Myanmar to Germany, Brazil to Iran and on, this fascinating round-the-world ticket offers spectacular viewing for hungry minds set on exploring.

Queer Lives Shorts

Vogue balls, orgies and US politics, oh my! Truth can often be queerer than fiction, so settle in for these daring documentary shorts sourced from across the LGBTQIA+ spectrum.

Sound of Music Shorts

Can you feel the beat deep down in your bones? Then get up and boogie to this swinging collection of shorts that have music and dance thrumming in their soul.

We Are Family Shorts

Whether navigating sperm donorship, parental responses to transitioning or caring for elderly parents, the beauty of rainbow families lies at the heart of all these shorts.

Wide Horizons Shorts

From a Turkish tailor’s shop to graffitied streets in Argentina via Berlin apartment hunting and a poetically sexy Croatian animation, this window on the world is wondrous..