Now in its 7th year, the Geelong Pride Film Festival, presents another diverse program of films at The Pivotonian Cinema, Village Geelong and Platform Arts from 18 – 28 April 2024.
The Geelong Pride Film Festival features a specially curated selection of feature films and short films from Australia and around the world. Some sessions are already sold out. Highlights include:
Equal the Contest
A diverse group of people who cross the spectrum of age, body shape, gender identity, sexuality and skill level come together to courageously challenge notions of what it is to play football, how football is played and who has the right to play it. When a non-binary filmmaker joins a new local women’s footy club in Regional Victoria a simple desire to play becomes a complex journey of inclusion and belonging. An unexpected turn means the team has to fight to play. Their campaign challenges age old sporting traditions and joins the wider movement for gender equity. Centrepiece, Australia, 2023
Days of Happiness
Emma, a talented up-and-coming conductor on the Montreal classical scene, is navigating her toxic relationship with her father and agent Patrick as a great new career opportunity with a prestigious orchestra hangs in the balance. Cellist and single mother Naïlle enters Emma’s life; their budding new romantic relationship offers Emma a new family dynamic. Caught between her career, family, and love, Emma must come to grips with her emotions and finally choose if she will finally live on her terms. Canada, 2023
Fireworks
In the early 80s, in a hot Sicily feverishly following the Italian national soccer team at the Football World Cup, two teenagers, Gianni and Nino, collide on their respective mopeds along a country back road. The collision leads to a deep friendship, and something else too, something that is disapproved of by the families and the village boys. Brave and hungry for life, Gianni and Nino do not care about prejudices and rumours and live freely. A freedom that others do not understand. Based on an incident that kick-started the 1980s gay rights movement in Italy. The story explores first love and the tenderness and courage between those daring to love openly in a time of widespread intolerance. Italy, 2024
Hidden Master: The Legacy of George Platt Lynes
George Platt Lynes is best remembered for his portraits of celebrities and extravagant fashion work, but his heart, passion, and most extraordinary talent lay elsewhere – in his work with the male nude. This work, sensual and radically explicit for its time, has only recently begun being fully discovered and appreciated. Hidden Master uncovers the life of Lynes less known: his gifted eye for the male form, revealing a stunning collection of photography from the 1930s-50s, his long-term friendships with Gertrude Stein and Alfred Kinsey, and his lasting influence as one of the first openly gay American artists. USA, 2023
Hilma
Hilma reveals the life of a woman who posthumously revolutionised the art world as one of the first abstract artists. In the male-dominated art world of the early 20th century, Hilma af Klint, under the patronage of her artist girlfriend and circle of female friends would develop a style that would become a movement all of its own. Hallström’s biopic follows Hilma’s early life, her unconventional love life, and her influences – from the writings of Rudolph Steiner to the Theosophic Movement mystical philosophy. Having remained unknown and unrecognized as the woman who invented abstract painting after her death in 1944, a 2019 Guggenheim Museum exhibition devoted to Hilma af Klint’s work became her first major solo exhibition in the U.S., revolutionizing the art world and art history while displacing Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian as the fathers of Modernism. Sweden, 2022
Isla’s Way
Isla Roberts is an 87-year-old carriage driving legend. She defies labels and in particular refuses the label Lesbian. Susan, her lesbian partner of 40 years, hopes that the sharing of Isla’s story will be a marvellous antidote to the invisibility of older lesbian women. Isla and Susan live together in the Adelaide Hills with two ponies and a dog. Over the course of one year, Isla returns to her remote rural home of her younger years, attends her grandson’s farm wedding, welcomes the arrival of new great-grandchildren and fights to keep carriage driving. Directed by Marion Pilowsky, Isla’s Way is the story of an extraordinary woman who has lived an inspiring life. Australia, 2023
Masquerades of Research
Two short films by Irish artist and filmmaker Padraig Robinson explore the impact of the controversial research of pre-queer sociologist Laud Humphreys. Part I begins in St. Louis in 1967 to give poetic insight into how the civil and social rights movement created the backdrop for his still controversial PhD, Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places. Part II begins tensely in Los Angeles in 1975, where Humphreys is on the cusp of republishing Tearoom Trade in the radically different post-Stonewall and post-Watergate USA.
Norwegian Dream
A Polish man Robert, working at a salmon factory in Norway, is attracted to his colleague Ivar, who is also the son of the factory manager. Trained on the line by Ivar, the two are drawn to each other. The relationship is tested by a factory worker’s strike, the young men grapple with issues of cultural displacement, economic inequity, and sexual identity. Robert who left Poland after experiencing a homophobic attack must choose between love and his newly found comfort with his sexuality or his family’s financial security. Norway, 2023
Strange Way of Life
Pedro Almodóvar’s western drama stars Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal as two gunslingers who reunite after a 25-year absence. A man rides a horse across the desert that separates him from Bitter Creek. He comes to visit Sheriff Jake. Twenty-five years earlier, the sheriff and Silva, the rancher who rides out to meet him, worked together as hired gunmen. Silva visits him with the excuse of reuniting with his friend from his youth, and they do indeed celebrate their meeting, but the following day, Sheriff Jake tells him that the reason for his trip is not to go down the memory lane of their old friendship. Spain, 2023
The Queen of My Dreams
Azra, a lesbian Pakistani woman living in Toronto, is worlds apart from her conservative Muslim mother. When her father suddenly dies on a trip home to Pakistan, Azra finds herself on a Bollywood-inspired journey through memories, both real and imagined, from her mother’s youth in Karachi to her own coming- of-age in rural Canada. Canada, 2023
This year the Geelong Pride Film Festival will feature special Q&As with directors and filmmakers including Mitch Nivalis – Equal the Contest (20 April); and Irish filmmaker and artist Padraig Robinson who will speak about his film Masquerades of Research (20 April).
The Geelong Pride Film Festival runs from 18 – 28 April 2024. For more information and full program, visit: www.gpff.org.au for details.
Image: Equal the Contest (supplied)