Queer Screen is calling on cinema lovers to come together at the 32nd Mardi Gras Film Festival in Sydney from 13 to 27 February. Highlights from the program will be available to stream, on demand, around the nation from 28 February to 10 March 2025.
As we come together to celebrate our collective love of queer cinema, Queer Screen will also be farewelling Lisa Rose, who is moving on. Our longest-serving Festival Director, Lisa has been at the helm for eight years. Prior to accepting the role, she was a volunteer Board Director (and Co-chair of the Board) for five years.
“Come for the love of cinema, the love of queer films, and the love of community,” said Festival Director Lisa Rose. “The film industry has changed dramatically throughout my time with Queer Screen. The volume of LGBTQIA+ content we see, as well as how and where we see it, continues to evolve.”
“Yet the sense of belonging that comes when the lights dim and a room full of queer people experience a queer story together remains a constant. Even when a film has the audience divided, the feeling of community that envelops us is unifying.”
The 2025 Festival line-up includes almost 150 of the world’s best LGBTQI+ films, presented across 72 sessions at Event Cinemas (George Street and Hurstville), Dendy Cinemas Newtown, and Ritz Cinemas Randwick. Special events at the State Library of NSW and additional screenings at The Rocks Laneway Cinema and Bank Hotel complete the program.
The Festival opens on Thursday 13 February with Young Hearts – an adorable, crowd-pleasing, coming of age tale set in rural Belgium, where 14-year-old Elias is navigating his burgeoning feelings for new neighbour, Alexander, with the support of his loving family.
To close the Festival on Thursday 27 February, charming French comedy-drama Somewhere In Love also sees the world open up for its main character, fifty-something single mother Nicole, whose unexpected romance with the beguiling Nora offers some respite from her fractured relationship with teenage son, Serge.
Queer Screen is thrilled to be hosting the world première of In Ashes – a raw debut from Denmark-based filmmaker Ludvig C. Poulsen, about an awkward twenty-something who is struggling to get over his ex, and getting hooked on hook-ups in the process.
A total of twenty MGFF25 feature films are Australian Premières, including Drive Back Home – a darkly funny film in which two estranged brothers (Alan Cumming and Charlie Creed-Miles, The Fifth Element) are trapped on a road trip in 1970s Canada with a taxidermied pug.
Three Kilometres to the End of the World, which won the Queer Palm at Cannes and was in the running for the Palme d’Or, has been hailed as a masterpiece. With restrained tension, nuanced performances and stunning cinematography, the film follows a young man’s fight for justice after a homophobic attack in his rural Romanian hometown.
Other standout premières include Lilies Not For Me – a lyrical English period drama about a romance between a novelist and a doctor who believed he could “cure” their homosexuality, and Layla, set in London’s present day queer club scene, where a British-Palestinian drag performer meets and falls for a strait-laced marketing executive.
An unorthodox love triangle unfolds under the shadow of the AIDS epidemic in To Live, to Die, to Live Again – a moving French melodrama about the power of chosen family. In Love in the Big City, a decade-spanning and vibrant South Korean comedy-drama, a closeted gay man and an outspoken woman become life-long friends
Winner of the Berlinale Teddy Jury Award in 2024 (and from the director of MGFF fave And Then We Danced), Crossing follows a retiree’s search for her runaway niece in vibrant Istanbul. An intersex runaway (writer River Gallo, in a star-making performance) flees from the New Jersey mob with help from a mysterious cowboy (Australia’s own Murray Bartlett, The White Lotus) in Ponyboi.
David Cook’s Heart of the Man follows a young boxing prodigy coming to terms with his sexuality must battle between fulfilling his father’s dream and becoming his own man, while prolific low-budget Aussie filmmaker Alice Maio Mackay’s take on the festive season in grisly neon slasher, Carnage for Christmas.
A heartwarming documentary spanning from the 1940s to today, Unusually Normal follows the lives of a family comprising two lesbian grandmothers, four lesbian mothers and one lesbian granddaughter.
I’m Your Venus is a cathartic ode to Venus Xtravaganza, murdered trans star of 1990 ballroom documentary Paris Is Burning. Overflowing with love for its subject, it focuses on her two families (biological and ballroom) as they honour her legacy.
Queer Screen’s strong documentary program also features profiles of singer/songwriter Ani De Franco (1800-ON-HER-OWN), artist Jürgen Baldiga, who chronicled West Berlin’s 1980s radical queer scene (Baldiga: Unlocked Heart), lesbian feminist Sally Gearhart, an activist in San Francisco in the 1970s and ‘80s (Sally!), and Black trans singer Jackie Shane, who rose to stardom during the 1960s (Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story).
To coincide with the Australian premiere screening of Bruce David Klein’s new documentary Liza: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story – a dazzling profile of an enduring gay icon and Hollywood survivor – Queer Screen are thrilled to present CABARET on the big screen. Winner of eight Oscars, the film remains as timely now as ever.
A young teacher falls into a destructive path of all-consuming obsession when a passionate and tumultuous love affair is cut short in darkly sexy Brazilian drama Streets of Gloria. Swaggering butch Renuka’s instant chemistry with timid wannabe rapper Devika gives way to romance as they rebel against patriarchal expectations in The Shameless – an extraordinary, haunting drama that premiered at Cannes.
Wickedly funny satire, Kaye Adelaide’s The Rebrand follows lesbian influencer power couple Thistle and Blaire as they commission a documentary about themselves to salvage their image after being cancelled, while Lauren Neal’s Under the Influencer – a pulpy, micro-budget thriller, follows a Black lesbian artist who seeks comeuppance upon discovering a cunning white curator has been exploiting her.
This is becoming a habit! Following the success of last year’s The Sound of Music sing-a-long, we’re reprising the fun-filled event with nun other than Whoopi Goldberg’s Sister Act on the screen, accompanied by sinful shenanigans from the Sisters and Brothers of The Order of Perpetual Indulgence, Sydney.
Australia’s richest queer short-film competition, My Queer Career, will see eight entries battle it out to win over $16,000 worth of cash and in-kind support. From activists to artists and beyond, QueerDOC Shorts will put a human face to an array of remarkable true stories.
The 32nd Mardi Gras Film Festival runs in cinemas from 13 – 27 February, and on demand from 28 February – 10 March 2025. For more information and full program, visit: www.queerscreen.org.au for details.
Images: Young Hearts (film still) | Drive Back Home (film still) | Heart of the Man (film still) | Streets of Gloria (film still)