MQFF Presents: Midsumma Movies

To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything! Julie Newmar (1995)

Bunjil Place, Narre Warren
Fri 31 Jan – 7:00 PM

Dir: Beeban Kidron | USA

Now that our Priscilla has turned 30, we can turn our eyes towards that other mid-‘90s, cult classic, drag queen road trip comedy, which is also about to enjoy that same anniversary. For Hugo Weaving, Guy Pearce and Terence Stamp, substitute Wesley Snipes, Patrick Swayze and John Leguizamo; for Alice Springs, think Tinseltown itself.

Vida Boheme (Swayze) and Noxeema Jackson (Snipes) are elite Manhattan queens bound for a drag pageant in Hollywood in a yellow ‘67 Cadillac convertible. After taking hapless drag newbie Chi-Chi Rodriguez (Leguizamo) under their wings, they find themselves stranded in a small Midwestern town, where an almighty charm offensive will be required to win over the sometimes unwelcoming locals.

Director Beeban Kidron (also known for Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004) and, these days, a Baroness, officially) worked with an extraordinary cast – Swayze and Leguizamo were both nominated for Golden Globes – which was boosted by the legendary Stockard Channing and a dazzling array of starry cameos, from Robin Williams and Quentin Crisp to a pre-Drag Race RuPaul and a certain Catwoman of yesteryear…

I’m Not Everything I Want to Be (2024)

Cinema Nova, Carlton
Sat 1 Feb – 5:00 PM

Dir: Klára Tasovská | Czechia, Slovakia, Austria

This testament to a remarkable queer life lived, and for too long unsung, premiered as a Teddy Award contender at the 2024 Berlinale. Klára Tasovská’s documentary celebrates “the Nan Goldin of Czechoslovakia”, Libuše Jarcovjáková, whose artistic career is newly flourishing. For many years, her autobiographical photography was more an existential pursuit for the artist, rather than one acknowledged by the art world.

Her story is extraordinary, from her coming of age amongst the margins of turbulent, 1960s Prague, before taking in periods in West Berlin, Tokyo, Berlin – as the Wall was falling – and Prague again. Jarcovjáková’s diary readings, often accompanied by pseudo-stop-motion flurries of her evocative photography, offer precious insights into queer life during and after the Cold War, from both sides of what was once a great, seemingly insurmountable, divide

Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucumbers (1972)

Cinema Nova, Carlton
Sat 1 Feb – 5:00 PM

Dir: Robert J. Kaplan  | USA

One of the campiest and most unhinged of all queer movie musicals, Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucumbers was restored by the Academy Film Archive in 2022 after scarcely being seen since premiering 50 years prior. Presumed lost for much of that time, it now rates as one of the greatest film rediscoveries in many a long year. How on Earth did something so brilliantly, ceaselessly bonkers as this, and so much fun to watch with a crowd, ever retreat into obscurity?

In one of the earliest lead roles granted to a trans performer, Warhol Superstar Holly Woodlawn (seen in the recently deceased Paul Morrissey’s Trash and Women in Revolt!) puts in a riotous turn as small-town girl Eve Harrington, who quickly finds life in New York City circa 1972 sure ain’t like being in Kansas anymore, as she embarks upon a riotous series of loopy, cartoonish, gag-filled episodes and madcap musical numbers.

Hidden Master: The Legacy of George Platt Lynes (2023)

Cinema Nova, Carlton
Sat 1 Feb – 7:00 PM

Dir: Sam Shahid | USA

Always out to his peers and family, trailblazing American photographer George Platt Lynes (1907-1955) captured the zeitgeist of mid-20th century artistic society in his surreal celebrity portraits and extravagant fashion shoots. But to Lynes there was another creative desire: to advance the celebration of the male nude, and those surviving pictures of his male studies, radically explicit for their time, depict more than a surface homoeroticism but rather a deep, sensuous love for and championing of the male form.

As an art director, Sam Shahid’s portfolio includes remarkable work for Calvin Klein in the early ‘80s, Banana Republic in the ‘90s and Abercrombie & Fitch; who better then to bring Lynes’ stunning photography from the 1930s through to the ‘50s to the big screen, and to uncover his long-term friendships with Gertrude Stein and Alfred Kinsey, in a transfixing documentary celebrating his lasting, if undersung, influence as one of the first openly gay, great American artists.

Woman of… (2023)

Cinema Nova, Carlton
Sat 1 Feb – 7:00 PM

Dir: Małgorzata Szumowska, Michał Englert  | Poland, Sweden

One of the greatest contemporary Polish filmmakers, Małgorzata Szumowska (Mug, 2018, and the Teddy Award-winning In the Name of, 2013), here shares directing duties with brilliant cinematographer Michał Englert (as with 2020’s Never Gonna Snow Again), to tell a story spanning 45 years of beleaguered trans woman Aniela Wesoły’s life, against a backdrop of Poland’s transition from communism to capitalism.

Mateusz Wieclawek and Małgorzata Hajewska-Krzysztofik (a dead ringer for Judith Butler!) are both superb as Aniela at different challenging stages in her life, in a famously Catholic nation staunchly hostile to the gender non-conforming. Augmented by a great turn from Cold War’s Joanna Kulig, this hugely compassionate film doesn’t sugarcoat a lot of harsh Polish realities, but also makes no bones about whom it wishes the audience to feel solidarity with. (Pun intended, per the film’s title, which alludes to Andrzej Wajda’s labour movement-exalting classics, Man of Iron and Man of Marble).

AKOE/AMFI: The Story of a Revolution (2023)

Cinema Nova, Carlton
Sun 2 Feb – 5:00 PM

Dir: Iossif Vardakis | Greece

In 1977 a group of friends created A.K.O.E. – the Greek Homosexual Liberation Movement. The movement spawned a magazine, Amfi, whose offices at the legendary basement on Zalongou Street were to become a place of refuge and organisation for the Greek queer community until 1990.

This astounding documentary presents an insider’s view of the queer rights movement in Greece, from nascence and consciousness-raising to agitating for the rights to exist, to happiness, to love. The movement’s story is told for the first time by director Iossif Vardakis, who was a member of A.K.O.E. from 1985 to ’88, a member of the Amfi editorial team and responsible for the art direction of two of its issues.

His beautiful film features a treasure trove of archival footage, music, animation and great use of talking heads, testifying to the challenging political backdrop to A.K.O.E.’s emergence, intra-community rivalries and community prejudice against trans people, and ultimately to the surmounting of such impediments to progress and self-determination.

Light Light Light (2023)

Cinema Nova, Carlton
Sun 2 Feb – 5:00 PM

Dir: Inari Niemi  | Finland

It’s the spring of 1986, and the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant has been casting an existential pall over a small Finnish village. But there’s a ray of light: a friendship born of emotional blackmail enlivens village life for 15-year-old Mariia (Rebekka Baer), after she falsely reports the new girl at school, Mimi (Anni Iikkanen) as an addict after finding drug paraphernalia in the woods. Mimi demands Mariia masquerade as her friend, and their relationship, begun so antagonistically, comes to assume romantic dimensions… Memories of those heady times come flooding back as, 20 years later, Mariia (now played by Laura Birn) returns home to take care of her ailing mother.

This gorgeous, only semi-sentimental, coming-of-age festival hit is based on the 2011 novel Valoa Valoa Valoa by Vilja-Tuulia Huotarinen, and boasts gorgeous cinematography and an evocative, dreamy, ‘80s-flavoured, Euro-pop soundtrack from Joel Melasniemi.

Avant-Drag! (2024)

Cinema Nova, Carlton
Sun 2 Feb – 7:00 PM

Dir: Fil Ieropoulos | Greece

A burgeoning, boundary-pushing drag scene has been enlivening Athens in recent years. In Fil Ieropoulos’ exhilarating, kaleidoscopic documentary, which enjoyed its World Premiere at the prestigious International Film Festival Rotterdam, you’ll meet a tight-knit clutch of ten defiant, determinedly activistic Athenian drag performers who find solace in one another as they dismantle constructs of gender, ethnicity, religion and sexuality in the highly conservative contemporary Greek context. The Orthodox Church retains a lot of control over the Greek body politic, but the Church’s patriarchal power is far from the only orthodoxy these inspirational drag artistes are hellbent on challenging…

Through the highly politicised antics of Kangela Tromokratisch, Er Libido, Aurora Paola Morado, et al, you’ll discover how the art of drag, operating at a few removes from the mainstream reach of the likes of the Drag Race franchises, can still be a radical force at street level to transform reality and create safe spaces for people marginalised in a too-often hostile society.

Perfect Endings (2024)

Cinema Nova, Carlton
Sun 2 Feb – 7:00 PM

Dir: Daniel Ribeiro  | Brazil

This sultry, delightful crowd-pleaser from Daniel Ribeiro, director of the fondly remembered MQFF 2015 Opening Night film, The Way He Looks, concerns aspiring screenwriter João (Artur Volpi), who’s struggling to realise his cinematic dreams and, not unrelatedly, to keep afloat. After the break-up of a decade-long relationship that João likens to a TV series that was best to end before it jumped the shark, he’s also finding a greatly changed dating landscape a challenge to navigate – even with the help of a pair of perpetually buoyant besties.

As he draws upon his romantic misadventures to enliven his screenwriting, an unexpected side-hustle emerges: directing amateur gay erotica. But will this prove the only domain in which João will find the happy endings he’s so hankering after?

The Wiz (1978)

 FREE EVENT 

Federation Square Forecourt, Melbourne
Sun 2 Feb – 8:00 PM

Dir: Sidney Lumet | USA

This landmark 1978 film adaptation of the Broadway musical of the same name is an all-Black, Afrofuturist reimagining of The Wizard of Oz – and how! With our queen, Diana Ross (soon to record “I’m Coming Out”) as Dorothy, heading an all-star cast including a teenaged, pre-solo career Michael Jackson, legendary singer, actor and civil rights activist, Lena Horne, America’s “poet laureate of television”, Nipsey Russell and iconic comedian Richard Pryor – that’s how!

The legendariness far from ends there, mind you – produced by Universal Pictures and Motown Productions, The Wiz was scored by 28-times(!) Grammy Award-winner Quincy Jones, and boasts a soundtrack of glorious gospel, soul and R&B-infused bangers. Director Sidney Lumet – ever one of the most socially engaged of Hollywood filmmakers, known for 12 Angry Men (1957) and Network (1976) – was among the first Hollywood filmmakers to provide sympathetic, nuanced representations of out gay/bisexual and trans characters in 1975’s Dog Day Afternoon. Here he piloted the production of a film that “in the ‘Emerald City Sequence’ alone has informed everything from the black queer ballroom scene to Beyoncé” (Gerrick D. Kennedy, Los Angeles Times).