MQFF Pride Month Screenings 2025
EXPERIENCE ALL THE FEELS WITH MQFF THIS PRIDE MONTH
MQFF returns to the Victorian Pride Centre for a weekend program of the latest premiere titles and our ‘best of’ shorts from Melbourne and Australia. Pride Month is a time to come together as a community, make connections, and celebrate LGBTQIA+ lives and stories.
This year’s Pride Month lineup includes a homage to a legend of ballroom, gay screen icon Alan Cumming in his latest feature, and the best comedy talent from Melbourne. Join us for pre-screening drinks in Victoria’s queer-community-home (the Victorian Pride Centre) and enjoy our curated roller-coaster of emotions, all done with pride.
MQFF Pride Month Screenings
Victorian Pride Centre Theatrette
Fitzroy Street, St Kilda
June 20-21 2025
Screening at Australia’s first purpose-built centre for Australia’s LGBTQIA+ communities. MQFF and the VPC will host you with a fabulous bar topped with snacks and drinks from 6:30pm.
TRAM – Route 96, 16 or 3a to tram stop 134.
The Legacy of Venus Xtravaganza |
Quality Banter: Australian Queer Comedy Shorts |
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| Fri 20 Jun – 7:00 PM
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 . . . Viewer Advice: contains discussions of transphobic violence, homophobic violence and family violence. BOOK NOW |
Sat 21 Jun – 7:00 PM
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. Viewer Advice: contains depictions of homophobic violence and gore. BOOK NOW
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Drive Back Home |
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| Sun 22 Jun – 7:00 PM
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. BOOK NOW |
