MQFF Pride Month Screenings 2025

The Legacy of Venus Xtravaganza

Quality Banter: Australian Queer Comedy Shorts

MQFF’s Pride Program opens with a special event to celebrate the legacy of Venus Xtravaganza, the global icon who rose to fame in the 1991 documentary Paris is Burning.

Venus was tragically murdered before the Paris is Burning was released, and now, decades later, I’m Your Venus picks up a trail gone cold as her two families—biological and ballroom—come together to honour her legacy.

This moving documentary comes at time in USA history where transgender rights are digressing, invoking the decades old USA protest cry “Voguing is not a crime! Murder is”. Here Venus’s legacy reminds us that Voguing is an act of resistance as well as an artform.

Gather to pay tribute to Venus with an in-conversation with community and short film screening to be announced soon!

“I want a car. I want to be with the man I love . . .
I want a nice home away from New York
I want to get married in church in white . . .
I want to be a professional model behind cameras.
I want this. This is what I want and I’m going to go for it.”
— Venus Xtravaganza, from Paris Is Burning

Viewer Advice: contains discussions of transphobic violence, homophobic violence and family violence.

MQFF bring you six of Australia’s most celebrated queer comedy shorts, selected to cover all the feels. We’re talking bittersweet, romantic, awkward and downright deranged shorts filled with quality queer banter. Featuring festival favourites, a MQFF Audience Choice and Pitch, Pleez! winner, as well as the world premiere of a DIY short by punk surrealist Kim Mills.

Viewer Advice: contains depictions of homophobic violence and gore.

Drive Back Home

BAFTA, two-time Emmy and Tony, and an Olivier Award actor, writer, presenter and producer, Alan Cumming, is no stranger to queer audiences. He returns to star in Michael Clowater’s Drive Back Home as the louche Pearly, who is bailed out of a Toronto prison where he landed for the only kind of public indecency worth the risk by his estranged and cantankerous brother, Weldon, played by Charlie Creed-Miles (The Fifth Element, 1997 and Harry Brown, 2009).

It’s 1970, it’s winter, and our siblings embark on a 1,000-mile road trip home to New Brunswick in a truck as shaky as their relationship, stalked by a family history of unspoken regrets and small-town porch-talk. Based on the actual events of his grandfather and great uncle, writer-director Clowater lets this hysterical and heart-warming narrative unfold at its own pace across the frozen Canadian landscape – an effort that earned the film 2024 Best Canadian Narrative Feature (Audience Choice Award) at the Calgary International Film Festival and play across the international film festival circuit.

“There is an undeniable, gentle warmth to Michael Clowater’s Drive Back Home that defies the frozen Canadian winter backdrop.” – The Queer Review.

“Four and a half stars. Michael Clowater has fashioned a film that is both a very Canadian film and a time capsule for the entire world at the time in its treatment of the gay community.” – In the Seats.

Viewer Advice: contains depictions of graphic homophobic violence, homophobia, family violence and an attempted suicide.