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.

IN-CONVERSATION
Decolonising Black & Brown Sites of Resistance – looking back to move forward. 

To celebrate Venus Xtravaganza’s legacy in connection with the new documentary I’m Your Venus, MQFF is thrilled to announce a very special in-conversation.

Elyssia Wilson-Heti (FAFSWAG) in-conversation with Mikha Diesel (the House of DIESEL), and Angel Furia (mother of the House of Furia).

How do we as a community continue to build on our resistance movements – sit in the present, move into the future and remember the past? Venus is an ancestor; how do we continue to honour her and dismantle the institutional frameworks of harm she navigated? How do we as recipients of cultural spaces birthed by Black and Brown, trans and queer bodies, how do we ensure that we don’t perpetuate harm? There is deep entanglement of all the issues the community faces and these often collide in real time – this is reflected in the documentary I’m Your Venus.

As one of the pioneering producers from the ballroom community in Tāmaki Makaurau Aotearoa and now retired aunty Elyssia Wilson-Heti will facilitate a conversation about how we continue to decolonise these spaces with members of the ballroom community here in Naarm.

Gather to pay tribute to Venus with this in-conversation with community.

“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 Miles.

Bringing the banter is award-winning comedian Anna Piper Scott – our hostess with the absolute mostess. Kicking off the laughs, Anna brings her scathing wit and comedy prowess to our Pride Month line-up.

Anna Piper Scott is a Melbourne-based writer, performer, director and producer, with over a decade of experience in the arts. She’s won awards at festivals all over Australia, performed at the Edinburgh Fringe, written for the ABC and made her screen acting debut in Safe Home on SBS. Most recently, she directed Em Rusciano’s smash hit Outgrown stand up tour. When she’s not busy making shows, Anna enjoys reading books, watching horror movies and ruining dinner parties by getting political.

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.