The dust has hardly settled on this year’s 28th Melbourne Queer Film Festival (MQFF) but program director Spiro Economopoulos is packing his bags and heading to Australia’s red centre.
Invited by the Northern Territory government, the MQFF Roadshow will touch down in Alice Springs for the first time on April 6, bringing a small but perfectly formed three-day sample of this year’s award-winning line-up to the Araluen Arts Centre.
Opening with Jenée LaMarque’s ensemble comedy of errors The Feels and closing with MQFF’s Australian shorts showcase, the program also includes fraught Finnish summer romance A Moment in the Reeds, and a doco on Armistead Maupin’s incredible life. Economopoulos tells SBS Sexuality he’s excited about breaking new ground and bringing queer film to a regional audience that might not otherwise enjoy opportunities to access these stories.
“A big part about what MQFF does is actually experiencing the community element of it,” he says. “That’s important enough in Melbourne, bringing these films together in front of a bunch of queers basically, but I think it’s even more applicable in regional areas like Alice Springs.”
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The MQFF Roadshow is an opportunity for the city’s sizeable queer community to connect with like-minded people. “It’s all about visibility,” he adds.
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Closer to home, MQFF is in a long-term relationship with the Bendigo Queer Film Festival (BQFF, April 27-29). Founded in 2004 by Chris Walters in conjunction with then-MQFF director Lisa Daniels, the heritage gold rush town 150km northwest from Melbourne has been drawing on highlights from the parent fest for 14 years now, with this year’s highlights including award-winning French AIDs activism drama BPM.
Hosted at the La Trobe Art Institute, the line-up also includes the Australian shorts package, a prerequisite that will also screen in Alice Springs. “The key element is promoting Australian queer content and especially this package, which for us has become a bit of a centre-point of MQFF,” Economopoulos says. “Those films are also a gateway into imagining the possibility of being a filmmaker, using these examples as a way of imagining their own queer stories being made.”
Source: MIFF
Imagination and frustration inspired Geelong resident Stephen Ryan to contact Economopoulos, after attending BQFF, and set about planning the inaugural Geelong Queer Film Festival (GQFF, April 13-15).
“I’ve lived in Geelong for about 15 years and that entire time I’ve thought it would be great if there was a queer film festival here,” he says of the central Victorian port city close to the Great Ocean Road. “You can get on a train and there’s lots happening in Melbourne, but there was never really much going on in terms of events for LGBTIQ people here.”
Working in regional economic development for the Victorian Government, though Ryan doesn’t have a background in film, he decided to take matters into his own hands. “I realised that there was no good sitting around complaining, because no one is going to come and give it to us unless we actually get organised and do it ourselves.”
Ryan says there’s been a critical mass of queer community support amassed in Geelong in the last year or so, spearheaded by the founding of umbrella organisation Geelong Rainbow Inc, turbo-charged by the marriage equality survey, and the first Geelong Pride March in January this year. The arrival of host venue The Pivotonian Cinema in 2015, a champion of independent film, also provided the perfect home for the festival.
Drawing on the MQFF program, GQFF adds Australian surfing doco Out in the Line-Up, followed by a Q&A with the movie’s producer and founder of GaySurfers.Net Thomas Castets and local radio presenter Joel Carnegie. “Being very close to Bell’s Beach and the Surf Coast, surfing is really big in Geelong and this documentary is all about the discrimination that the elite men and women have faced in the sport,” Ryan says.
“When you live in regional Australia, it’s important to have these kind of avenues for socialisation, finding acceptance and connection to community,” he adds. “Combatting isolation is a big issue for LGBTIQ people and film festivals are really good at addressing this because, if you don’t know many queer people, you can very easily come along to a film, be amongst people where you know it’s a supportive environment and meet new people. Or, if you are a bit shy, you don’t even need to talk to anyone, you can just enjoy a film.”
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Turning up isn’t even required to feel the benefit. “Just knowing that you live in a town here this stuff happens has an impact on your self-esteem and how you live in a place.”
There was plenty of interest in GQFF preview events including a free screening marking the 21st anniversary of Hettie MacDonald’s South London-set coming out classic Beautiful Thing and a special session of Call Me By Your Name. “Part of these screenings was to build the profile of the festival, but also to build the capability of our brilliant volunteer team,” Ryan reveals. “We learnt a lot from these screenings, and the audiences really loved it.”
He has done his research, noting that many film festivals never make it to their second year. “I was really conscious of not trying to do too much too soon. Spiro and the MQFF board have been really supportive and we’re looking forward to building an ongoing relationship. We’ve already got a lot of support coming forward for 2019, so we’re very confident we’ll become a regular event on the Geelong calendar.”
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