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Celebrating its 32nd year, the Queer Screen’s Mardi Gras Film Festival has grown into one of Australia’s largest film festivals of any kind and one of the top five queer film festivals in the world. It is highly regarded by filmmakers all over the world, and is the most important platform for promoting LGBTIQ titles to distributors and exhibitors in this territory. It is Queerguru’s favorite fest in the Southern Hemisphere, and we are so thrilled to now be one of their Media Sponsors for 2025
As is our custom we have studied this year’s program in great detail to come up with OUR TOP PICKS OF MUST SEE MOVIES. One proviso though, this time the QUEERGURU team simply couldn’t agree on just 10 films, so we have split the list into two parts. Here’s the second part in alphabetical order:
Liza Minnelli by Emmy-nominated Bruce David Klien is a wonderful new doc in which he maintains a fine balance in his profile of the legendary performer without resorting to making this anything remotely like a Hollywood puff-piece.
Klein grabs your attention for the start as he and his crew are setting up an interview with the star herself. She may look her age (78) and seems still shaky suffering from her past addictions, but she is as sharp as hell directing everyone with precise details from the make-up artist to the unseen director behind the camera on how to get the best angle/shot. As she often reminds people she is after all the daughter of the Oscar-winning director Vincent Minelli aside from the fact her mother was major gay icon Judt Garkabd… Strangely enough, Liza’s life is the stuff that they made films out for her mother to star in …… once of course they had completely sanitized it and made it squeaky clean. After all, as the title says it is…. A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story.
Written and directed by Benjamin Howard, Riley is a beautiful coming-of-age tale set in contemporary, suburban Southern California.
Life appears good for middle-class high-school football athlete Dakota Riley (Jake Holley). Under the watchful eye of his ambitious, ex-league player, coach/father, Carson (Rib Hillis), he’s successful, has a large group of friends, a close family, and a girlfriend, and is doing well in his senior year at high school. He’s in control of all areas of his life except one, his sexuality. He’s gay but tries his best to deny it to himself. He maintains a façade with his girlfriend and his friends, and teammates in the locker room, but his youthful raging hormones get in the way, especially when surrounded by his ripped team-mates wearing very little. We follow Riley as he navigates his way through the turmoil to try and live authentically and find peace with himself
PS You may also want to check out QUEERGURU’s interview with filmmaker Benjamin Howard HERE
SEBASTIAN. Writers are always advised to ‘Write about what you know.’ Aspiring twenty-five-year-old Scottish writer Max, (the handsome Ruaridh Mollica), is living in London and working on his first novel, a story about a sex-worker, Sebastian. He’s good-looking and ambitious, energetically forging his career and soul. To improve the authenticity of his work he creates an online escort profile and starts seeing clients himself, as his alter-ego Sebastian, and writes about each gig afterward. His potential publisher is impressed with his work, which he credits to interviews with sex workers. This third feature from Finnish Mikko Måkelå, confirms him as one of the most exciting queer filmmakers today
PS You may also like to check out Queerguru’s interview with filmmaker Mikko Måkelå,
Grayson Horst’s captivating tale starts with Michael (screenwriter Michael Doshier) a gay 30-something-year-old business admin assistant who actually dreams of making music all day instead. He’s a solitary soul who may not still be a virgin but he’s been single, and rather aimless, for some time now. In his spare time, he hangs out all the time with his best girl ‘friend’ (Tristan Carter-Jones) but she is now dating her girlfriend (Jess Gabor) so he is beginning to feel uncomfortably like a spare wheel
However he has a chance encounter at a club one night with a gay couple (Tommy Heleringer and Stanton Plummer-Cambridge) who have an ‘open marriage’ and this is about to change everything. There is an immediate physical attraction between the three of them, but also a very definite mutual hesitancy on how they should proceed
What A Feeling: when Andrew Hebden reviewed this for Queerguru he described it as a Jolly Germanic Lesbian Romcom. And added “It’s not often we get to put those three words together in a sentence that doesn’t include ‘Never have I ever’
Marie Theres known as Resi (Caroline Peters) is a German doctor living and working in Austria with her wealthy husband Alexander (Heikko Deutschmann). It is their anniversary dinner with friends and he has just come back from his first tree-hugging men’s retreat. While there not only has Alexander rediscovered himself but he has also discovered he no longer wishes to be married to Resi. Alexander announces it to Resi and all her friends over the schnitzel. In a devastated drunken delirium Resi staggers towards home on her own but decides to stop off at a bar she has never noticed before – the Pussycat Club. There she recognizes Fa (Proschat Madani) who had almost run her over in her van the morning prior. Fa is beautiful, studious, and charismatic. An Iranian immigrant who is a carpenter by day, with a coterie of married female customers who can’t get enough of her handyperson skills, and an open mic night slam poetry rapper in the evening.
Roman Zabarauskas is one of a rare breed. Not only is he a queer filmmaker in Lithuania, a country not exactly well-known for its LGBTQ cinema, but he has a refreshing approach to powerful storytelling. This is just his 4th feature (we loved The Lawyer his 3rd film) but it shows a maturity and a remarkable curiosity of how queer stories should be told.
Kudos to Zabarauskas for his choice of making a queer film that not only focuses on older men but one that attempts to analyze such a profound relationship and is devoid of the usual melodrama….. and also keeps us thoroughly entertained at the same time. It’s a great addition to the canon of queer cinema
Fourteen-year-old Eli (Lou Goossens) is growing up in a nice European family and has the loving care of his grandfather who owns a farm somewhere in the Netherlands. One day, he is aware they have new neighbors, afterwards at school he meets Alexander (Marius De Saeger) and learns he and his immediate family come from Brussels. Alexander and Elias enjoy each other’s company, they bike in beautiful surroundings and eat wild cherries by the river. Alexander reveals he is into boys and Elias’s certainties begin to crumble.
Grandfather invites Elias to visit The Ardennes, a place in his heart he cherished with Elias´grandmother. In that idyllic place confessions are made and Grandpa advises Elias to follow where his heart leads.
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