Housekeeping for Beginners, 2023

Drifter, 2023

This year’s Queer Lion winner at Venice and North Macedonia’s Oscar candidate is none other than the third feature from outstanding Melbourne-based filmmaker, Goran Stolevski, director of 2022’s Of an Age and You Won’t Be Alone. This boisterous, cinéma vérité-style dramedy is set in a makeshift queer household in Skopje, subject to constant, farcical comings and goings of queer and Romani folk galore. Anamaria Marinca anchors the film as Dita, a woman who had never sought to be a mother but has to raise her Romani girlfriend’s two troublemaking daughters, hopefully with assistance from housemate Toni, whose young, new Romani boyfriend seems to have taken up residence too.

Twenty-something Berliner Moritz (Lorenz Hochhuth) wants to settle down and go for bike rides with his boyfriend, but it’s this attempt at emotional connection that precipitates him getting dumped in a city that’s all about letting it all hang loose. And so he surrenders, drifting into the darkest corners of techno-booming clubs where anything goes sexually, and both moral hectoring and the gender binary are hurled through blacked-out windows. Writer/director Hannes Hirsch’s sex-positive dance wears its kinks as a badge of honour in this charged portrait of Berlin club life.

How to Tell a Secret, 2022

Commitment to Life, 2023

Session proudly sponsored by Thorne Harbour Health

How to Tell a Secret is a ground-breaking documentary exploring stigma, silence and the struggles of coming out as HIV positive in contemporary Ireland. Although protease inhibitors revolutionised treatment since 1997, many (far too many) young men continue to endure ignorance perpetuated by a conservative Irish society. A true hybrid of documentary fusing theatre and film, it weaves real-life narratives with a powerful call to action for the compelling (U=U) campaign: “Undetectable = Untransmittable,” HIV transmission can be halted.

Los Angeles in the 1980’s. The world is about to change as a young doctor discovers the first warning sign of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. While the virus and history unfolded as we know it, Commitment to Life examines Hollywood’s fight for LGBTQIA+ justice. The invaluable activist work of some of Tinsel Town’s biggest stars – including Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson and David Geffen – is brought into the spotlight using archival footage and first-person interviews. From individual determination to the collective might of ACT UP and The AIDS Project Los Angeles, this documentary tribute looks at a city that helped support, advocate for, and strengthen a community.

L’immensità, 2022

Chocolate Babies, 1996

Penelope Cruz pulling off spectacular moves while wearing fabulous 70’s fashion should be all you need to know to snap up tickets to this technicolour marvel. But newcomer Luana Giuliani is the real star of the show, magnificently depicting young trans teenager Adri. For all his loving mother’s attempts to support him, it’s only when Adri meets Sara in a traveller’s camp beyond the reeds at the edge of his suburban home that he truly feels seen in this lilting love song to finding your people. It’s also a heartfelt ode to Italian director Emanuele Crialese’s personal history, having announced that he is a trans man at last year’s Venice Film Festival, where this luminous film was nominated for both the Queer and the Golden Lion.

It’s 1996, and in the wake of the AIDS crisis, an unruly gang of “black faggots with a political agenda” take to the streets of New York. A radio blares that this “gang of self-proclaimed raging atheist, meat-eating, HIV-positive, coloured terrorists” ambushed closeted councilman Melvin Freeman, holding him hostage while demanding a free needle exchange and an AIDS hospice. Stephen Winter’s long-overlooked film is cinematic activism, furiously exuberant in an era where politicians are “deadlier than the virus”. A cuckoo of the 90’s and how the epidemic left Gen X orphaned and adrift in a society that couldn’t care less.

Monster, 2023

Passages, 2023

When tween-aged Minato starts to behave strangely, his mother, Saori, suspects the school has something to do with it. Saori begins a relentless campaign to expose Hori’s problematic teaching practices and the school that appears to be covering it up. But Minato and his newest friend have a different tale to tell. Yet as the story unfolds through the eyes of various characters, nothing is as it seems. Acclaimed director Hirokazu Koreeda tenderly brings to life Yuji Sakamoto’s layered screenplay. With its Cannes debut this year, the film was awarded Best Screenplay and the Queer Palm.

Director Ira Sachs turns his attention from his native New York to a very French affair set in gay Paree in this Teddy Award-nominated whirlwind of tempestuous relationships. MQFF fave Franz Rogowski (Great Freedom) plays Tomas, a wildly unpredictable German filmmaker who ditches his sweet-natured English artist hubby Martin (Ben Whishaw) in favour of new passions with Agathe, a schoolteacher played by Adèle Exarchopoulos (Blue is the Warmest Colour). Emotional mayhem ensues when he then ricochets back and forth between them in a real bad boyfriend take on polyamory that pushes all the right/wrong buttons.

Runs in the Family, 2023

All of Us Strangers, 2023

Session proudly presented by ME Bank

River has a once-in-a-lifetime chance to compete in a drag competition and win the funds to finally pay for top surgery, and nothing is going to get in his way — but his plans are upended when his father gets a call from Monica, his long-lost ex-girlfriend… and the mother River never knew. Just when you thought the road trip tale had been done to death, this surprising South African film will delight you with the intimacy and freshness of its father–son dynamic. As they venture across country to rescue Monica from rehab, they break laws, social norms, and sometimes each other’s hearts — but the film always returns to the tenderness at its core.

All of Us Strangers tales Adam, a listless screenwriter (Andrew Scott, Fleabag’s “hot priest”) and Harry (Aftersun’s Paul Mescal) who seem to be the only tenants of a Ballardian London high-rise. A burgeoning relationship between them lifts Adam’s spirits; when not with Harry, he takes to visiting his childhood home where his parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell) are there to greet him, surely not a day older than when they died tragically in Adam’s youth, in the mid-‘80s. Premiering at this year’s Telluride Film Festival, its fusion of gothic romance and magic realism, and superb performances across the board, immediately garnered huge Oscars buzz.

Gays Will Be Gays – Shorts Package

Laugh-Out-Proud – Shorts Package

This collection highlights some of the finest big gay shorts around.

Sessions proudly sponsored by Herbert Smith Freehills

Need a little LOL in your life? We’ve got you sorted with these laugh-out-loud shorts.

Femme, 2023

Australian Shorts & Awards

Misfits star Nathan Stewart Barret slays as Jules, a dazzling London drag artist who sashays across the stage in full-Ballroom mode as mighty alter ego Aphrodite. But a homophobic hate crime postshow one terrible night leaves them licking wounds both physical and psychological, unable to peform. However, this is no victim narrative, far from it. Directorial duo Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping’s crackling feature debut is a fierce reclamation of power, spinning a gripping Hitchcockian cat and mouse game. A devastating neo-noir spun out on the rain-lashed streets of south London, its erotic spiral will leave you shaken and stirred.

Join us to celebrate the brightest and best Australian queer filmmakers. MQFF’s Australian Shorts & Awards highlight the richness of storytelling and the breadth of original talent working in Australia today.

MQFF and the City of Melbourne are proud to present this selection of short films. Following the screening, we will announce the winners of our jury awards.

All of Us Strangers, 2023

The Chambermaid, 2022

All of Us Strangers tales Adam, a listless screenwriter (Andrew Scott, Fleabag’s “hot priest”) and Harry (Aftersun’s Paul Mescal) who seem to be the only tenants of a Ballardian London high-rise. A burgeoning relationship between them lifts Adam’s spirits; when not with Harry, he takes to visiting his childhood home where his parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell) are there to greet him, surely not a day older than when they died tragically in Adam’s youth, in the mid-‘80s. Premiering at this year’s Telluride Film Festival, its fusion of gothic romance and magic realism, and superb performances across the board, immediately garnered huge Oscars buzz.

This period-masterpiece which exhibits a narrative complexity that can only come from real-life experience, is set just prior to World War I. 15-year old Anka leaves her poverty-stricken Slovak hometown for Prague to work as a maid for a wealthy family amidst the breakdown of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Anika is to serve Resi, the family’s slightly sadistic daughter, who is betrothed to marry well. At polar opposite ends of the class ladder, the women slowly grow very close. A sapphic drama set in an age when unconventional relations are all that could exist.

Cora Bora, 2023

Our Son, 2023

You know her as the world’s most wildly negligent (and hysterically funny) PA in Hacks, or perhaps from her side-splitting skits on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. Now Megan Stalter’s stepping into the spotlight as the star of Ingrid Goes West actor and Disengaged director Hannah Pearl Utt’s screwball comedy about a bisexual musician trying to make it big in LA. When her girlfriend moves on, she has second thoughts, though not before sleeping with a flat earther: “He doesn’t believe in science, but he’s got that big dick.”

Red carpet queen Billy Porter knows how to strike a Pose, and Dracula Untold baddie Luke Evans can sink his teeth into any project. Which is why it’s fab to see them bounce off each other Kramer vs. Kramer-style as divorcing dads drawn into an acrimonious custody battle, with their eight-year-old son stuck in the middle. Debuting at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, it went on to pick up Best Director for Bill Oliver at FilmOut San Diego for its deft handling of a difficult situation and the vagaries of middle age.

Equal the Contest, 2023

Offside, 2006

At a time when sports governing bodies, from grassroots to elite level, have been falling over themselves to deny access to participation to trans and gender-diverse people, here’s non-binary filmmaker Mitch Nivalis sounding a countermanding clarion call, per their film’s logline: “When the rules exclude you, rewrite them.” In this gentle and personal agitprop film arguing for the universal right to participate in sport, Nivalis attaches cameras to their body in a filmmaking masterstroke, the better that we feel, as viewers, that we’re participating too.

Iranian women soccer fans travel to a World Cup qualifier match in Tehran despite it being illegal for them to be spectators by disguising themselves as boys. Will they be able to fool the guards? Even at a time when many of us are glowing over the women’s game, after a successful World Cup right on our doorstep, it’s a telling reminder of the power of sport to connect us. As transgressive as it is powerfully humanistic, the film took home the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize from the 2006 Berlinale.