Baldiga – Unlocked Heart (2024)

Dir: Markus Stein | Germany

Fri 15 Nov – 6:15 PM

A teenager who came to West Berlin from Essen in 1979 determined to become an artistic force, Jürgen Baldiga eked out a living as a cook and rent boy while cultivating an arts practice that, come an HIV-positive diagnosis in 1984, exploded into a frenzied, Dionysian documentation of West Berlin’s heaving queer underbelly. Baldiga’s estate constitutes one of the biggest holdings of Berlin’s famed Schwules Museum (est. 1985, celebrating queer culture and history). Here it provides an extraordinary trove of material to document not just Baldiga’s tragically abbreviated life (aged only 34, Baldiga died with AIDS in 1993), but also the grungy queer mecca that was the Berlin(s) of the 1980s and early ‘90s. Readings from his diaries – regularly written in the self-mythologising third person – are accompanied by newly conducted interviews with friends and intimates, archival footage, re-enactments, a sprinkling of fictional elements, and hundreds of Baldiga’s indelible photographs, making for a wholly transportive trip to the Berlins of yesteryear, and a celebration of a life lived with an accelerated gusto.

The Visitor (2024)

Dir: Bruce LaBruce | UK

Fri 15 Nov – 8:45 PM

Arguably Canadian cinema’s most anarchic agent provocateur, The Misandrists director Bruce LaBruce has been blasting his punk art porn visions into the universe’s most chaotically-inclined cinemas (or grubby VHS players) since the ‘80s. Sometimes they don’t make it: L.A. Zombie was struck from the 2010 Melbourne International Film Festival by overzealous censors. Thankfully, his latest eye-popper snuck in the backdoor unassailed. A sacrilegious exhumation of the still-warm corpse of fellow queer button-pushing pioneer Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (1968), this new crotch twist shifts the engorged drama from Italy to contemporary London, where Bishop Black’s eponymous Visitor emerges naked from a suitcase as a refugee who soon invites themselves into a filthy rich, binary-fucking family’s mansion, seducing them to the cause one-by-horny-one. This NSFW fury was up for the Teddy Best Feature Award at this year’s Berlinale.

A House is Not a Disco (2024)

Dir: Brian J. Smith | USA

Sat 16 Nov – 6:15 PM

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.

The Summer with Carmen (2023)

Dir: Zacharias Mavroeidis | Greece

Sat 16 Nov – 8:45 PM

While enjoying a slow, hot oceanside day on the edge of a cliff near a queer spot in Athens, two thirty-something besties recall the events of a previous summer with a dog named Carmen. They brainstorm a script that aspiring filmmaker Nikitas has promised to turn in imminently. The endearing Demosthenes offers to help but as they knuckle out the details, a funny, sexy, kind-hearted feat ensues. Zacharias Mavroeidis’ charmingly meta comedy is lovingly shot on location with a fantastically cute pooch performance, and the two charming leads, Yorgos Tsiantoulas and Andreas Lampropoulos, are wholly convincing as long-time mates.

Linda Perry: Let it Die Here (2024)

Dir: Don Hardy | USA

Sun 17 Nov – 6:15 PM

Even had Linda Perry only given us What’s Up? – the anthemic megahit she wrote and belted out when fronting one album-wonder 4 Non Blondes – her dykon status would still have been assured. But add to that her work as writer and producer of Pink’s Get the Party Started and Christina Aguilera’s Beautiful, and her work with Dolly Parton on the Dumplin’ soundtrack, and… well, now we’re only just getting started. Don Hardy’s gripping documentary grants us unprecedentedly candid access to its perpetually frazzled subject during a particularly taxing time for her, illuminating the many challenges she has faced in her life and career, notwithstanding all of the triumphs. Brandi Carlile joins Christina and Dolly, and Perry’s ex-wife, actor Sara Gilbert (Darlene in Roseanne and The Conners) among the talking heads in this superb, animation-enhanced tribute to a legendary singer-songwriter-producer who keeps on producing hits for select others, the more she explores what she should be creating for herself.

National Anthem (2023)

Dir: Luke Gilford | USA

Sun 17 Nov – 8:45 PM

Session proudly sponsored by United Airlines

Twenty-one year old Dylan (the excellent Charlie Plummer from Lean on Pete) lives an isolated life of routine in rural New Mexico, working odd construction jobs to help support his little brother and a somewhat absent mother. He accepts a gig working at House of Splendor, a queer ranch a little further out than normal. There he meets the luminous Sky (Eve Lindley) and a diverse group of queer folk who provide him with the space and freedom to explore parts of himself he hasn’t yet found. Premiering at SXSW 2023, the gorgeous debut feature film from photographer Luke Gilford – think Them’s Love Lies Bleeding photo series with Kristen Stewart and Katy O’Brian – expertly pairs himself with one-to-watch cinematographer Katelin Arizmendi to sprinkle no small amount of queer joy upon the rural Southwest, boosted by a swooning soundtrack featuring Perfume Genius and Devotchka’s Nick Urata.

The Astronaut Lovers (2024)

Dir: Marco Berger | Argentina, Spain

Wed 20 Nov – 6:00 PM

Session proudly sponsored by Herbert Smith Freehills

Teddy Award-winning director Marco Berger (Horseplay, MQFF 2022) returns to the queer film festival circuit to continue his focus on masculinity and lust between men with his latest feature, The Astronaut Lovers. Pedro (Javier Orán) travels to the Argentinian coast to spend time with old friends, including recently single Maxi (Lautaro Bettoni). While Maxi is vehemently straight, he is fascinated by Pedro’s queerness – and there surely is quite some chemistry between them. This playfulness between the two men soon shifts as Maxi sets out to make his ex-girlfriend jealous. Can Pedro keep track of what’s real between Maxi and him, and what’s just a bit of fun – is theirs a romance, a bromance or faux-mance? Be sure not just to catch The Astronaut Lovers, but also a provocative new Marco Berger short, The Exchange, in our “Out There” shorts package!

Baby (2024)

Dir: Marcelo Caetano | Brazil, France, Netherlands

Wed 20 Nov – 8:45 PM

When Wellington (João Pedro Mariano) gets out of two years’ juvenile detention to discover his no-good parents have skipped town, the São Paulo teenager refuses to collapse. Falling in with old mates, a chance encounter with forty-something Ronaldo (Ricardo Teodoro) outside a porn cinema leads to a surreal relationship somewhere between lover, father and sex work business. Reborn as Baby, a reclaimed insult, he soon thrives in the role in this deeply humanistic new movie from Body Electric director Marcelo Caetano in which a found family, including Ronaldo’s ex Priscilla (Ana Flavia Cavalcanti) and her girlfriend (Bruna Linzmeyer), recalibrates what it means to belong. Nominated for the Queer Palm at the Cannes Film Festival, far from Ken Loach-like miserabilism, it radiates optimisim set to a sparkling pop score.

Eat the Night (2024)

Dir: Caroline Poggi, Jonathan Vinel | France

Thu 21 Nov – 6:00 PM

This Cannes Queer Palm-nominated thriller from France tales drug dealer Pablo who lives a dual life of war – phasing between the virtual and all too gritty reality. Both of his worlds are on the count down for disaster as a doomsday clock ticks in VR game “Darknoon”, and a gang-land turf war threatens Pablo’s real life and that of newfound love and partner in crime, Night.

Eat the Night comes from dynamic French filmmaking duo Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel as a return to the dark, with dystopian themes of their 2018 breakout hit Jessica Forever. Part thriller, part romance, Eat the Night is not for the faint of heart as we delve into the ‘soft white underbelly’ of France.

Misericordia (2024)

Dir: Alain Guiraudie | France

Thu 21 Nov – 8:30 PM

Described by 3MBS FM’s Film Scores presenter Richard Leathem as “Tom at the Farm with more penises”, Miséricorde – the original French name means mercy – isn’t the latest from Xavier Dolan. Sadly, there may never be another. No, it’s the return to form of Stranger by the Lake writer/director Alain Guiraudie, who casts Félix Kysyl as Jérémie. He’s returned to the village of his youth to pay his respects to the baker who once employed him, and with whom he was perhaps in love. Sometime best friend Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand) isn’t so pleased to see him, acting standoffish when Jérémie asks to stay with his grieving mother (the magnificent Catherine Frot) and shows no signs of leaving. All the while, the village’s various men begin to jostle for the outsider’s attention in an unnervingly erotic tale that leads to skullduggery. If you go down in the woods today, you’re sure of a big surprise.

Teaches of Peaches (2024)

Dir: Philipp Fussenegger, Judy Landkammer | Germany

Fri 22 Nov – 6:15 PM

This Teddy Award–winning documentary portrait follows genderqueer Canadian electro-punk performance artist and producer Peaches on her barnstorming “Teaches of Peaches Anniversary Tour” in 2022. Expertly splicing together exhilarating footage from that tour with rawer footage taken from Peaches’ breakthrough years two decades prior, it’ll come as no surprise to learn that co-director Judy Landkammer was not only this hyperkinetic film’s editor, but Bruce LaBruce’s on The Visitor as well. Now well into middle-age, Peaches’ career has long been abundant in joyously queer, sex-positive musical provocation and in the cultivation of chosen family. This massively entertaining, insightful film demonstrates that the patriarchy-demolishing Merrill Nisker still has plenty to teach us all, as interviews with friends and collaborators Leslie Feist, Chilly Gonzales, Garbage’s Shirley Manson and Peaches’ partner Black Cracker all attest. And lucky us – we’re treated to plenty of eye-popping, behind-the-scenes backstage action too. You came to see a rock show? You’ll get it – and much more besides!

The Visitor (2024)

Dir: Bruce La Bruce | UK

Fri 22 Nov – 8:45 PM

Arguably Canadian cinema’s most anarchic agent provocateur, The Misandrists director Bruce LaBruce has been blasting his punk art porn visions into the universe’s most chaotically-inclined cinemas (or grubby VHS players) since the ‘80s. Sometimes they don’t make it: L.A. Zombie was struck from the 2010 Melbourne International Film Festival by overzealous censors. Thankfully, his latest eye-popper snuck in the backdoor unassailed. A sacrilegious exhumation of the still-warm corpse of fellow queer button-pushing pioneer Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (1968), this new crotch twist shifts the engorged drama from Italy to contemporary London, where Bishop Black’s eponymous Visitor emerges naked from a suitcase as a refugee who soon invites themselves into a filthy rich, binary-fucking family’s mansion, seducing them to the cause one-by-horny-one. This NSFW fury was up for the Teddy Best Feature Award at this year’s Berlinale.

Gay Chorus Deep South (2019)

Dir: David Charles Rodrigues | USA

Sat 23 Nov – 3:45 PM

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.

Reas (2024)

Dir: Lola Arias | Argentina, Germany, Switzerland

Sat 23 Nov – 6:15 PM

One of the most magical movies to berth at this year’s Berlinale – where it was nominated for the Teddy Documentary award – Lola Arias’ form-fracturing marvel is magnificently queer in every way imaginable. This shimmering chameleon of a multicoloured docu-musical features former prisoners depicting not only versions of themselves, but also their jailers. Skipping gaily between the real and imagined, it happily breaks the fourth wall and pulls back the curtain to cheekily include bloopers, script-in-hand. Set in an artfully crumbling, shuttered prison in Buenos Aires that evokes their prolonged captivity in Caseros Prison, a remnant of the rolling military dictatorships of the ‘60s, it’s a surreally neon-hued stage on which this delightfully diverse array of cis women and trans people come together in a fabulous fever dream set to a disco beat replete with smooth Ballroom moves. Emancipation has rarely felt this astoundingly empowering.

Demons at Dawn (2024)

Dir: Julián Hernández | Mexico

Sun 24 Nov – 1:15 PM

Marco is studying to be a nurse; Orlando is a dance student. In Mexico City one night they happen to meet with an instant attraction. Orlando pursues the demure Marco; Orlando doesn’t lack in admirers and sexual conquests, so the realisation that he’s falling for the straight-ish Marco sparks a growing fear of love itself. With the eye of DoP Alejandro Cantú, who has worked with director Julián Hernández on Tattoo of Revenge, Wandering Clouds, The Day Began Yesterday, Atmosphere, et al, the film is exquisitely visually constructed, pushing the usual conformities and clichés of gay love to a swirling, madly obsessive, passionate dance – literally a choreography of romantic cinema. It’s almost 20 years since Hernández threw open the doors of queer Mexican cinema with Broken Sky (2006), the template of loves at first sight and non-verbal desire, delivering once again flawless and fluid bodies, oozing with sexiness with this steaming, sultry package, complete with a strongly Mexican soundtrack and some Bronski Beat surprises. With Hernández regular Luis Vegas (Cobalto 2023) as the very seductive Orlando, and scene stealer Luis Miguel Mata as Elis.

Doppelgängers³ (2024)

Dir: Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian | USA, UK

Sun 24 Nov – 4:00 PM

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!