Jacki Weaver’s New Film To Debut This Weekend
This weekend Queer Screen Film Festival in Sydney and Melbourne Queer Film Festival will be debuting the new feel good film Stage Mother starring Jacki Weaver, Lucy Lui and Adrian Grenier alongside Maya Taylor and legendary drag performer Jackie Beat.
The film centres on Maybelline, played by Jacki Weaver, a conservative Texas church choir director whose estranged son, a gay San Francisco club owner, suddenly dies from a drug overdose. Though what Maybelline doesn’t know at the time, is that she has inherited her son’s gay bar.
“I’m proud of the film because the LGBTQI community has been close to my heart for many years, and I think it tells a beautiful story, a love story basically, and it’s about forgiveness and acceptance and it’s just heart breaking when her son dies.” Jacki Weaver told Star Observer in an exclusive interview earlier this week.
Stage Mother successfully explores a narrative that too many of us can relate to – about how family can be so quick to disown us the moment we ‘come out’, and how that rejection or simple fear of rejection can often lead to much bigger crises. Yet despite exploring such personal and fraught terrain, the film is also an exuberant drag comedy, that in 2020 when many of us are so desperately missing our nights out, brings us back just that little closer to those magical and safe night-time spaces.
Sydneysiders will be lucky enough to catch the film as a double feature alongside seminal The Adventures Of Priscilla, Queen of The Desert at the Skyline Drive-In in Blacktown on Saturday. While those of us still stuck at home in lockdown need not worry about FOMO, as Stage Mother will be available to stream on demand through the MQFF website on Saturday Sep 26 and Sunday Sep 27 as Spiro Economopoulos MQFF Program Director tells us.
“We are thrilled to be screening this delightful culture clash drag comedy Stage Mother for our audience. The film features Australian acting royalty Jacki Weaver and is directed by renowned Canadian filmmaker Thom Fitzgerald who whose feature film Cloudburst MQFF screened for opening night back in 2012.”
Tickets to Saturday night at the Skyline Drive In are selling fast, for more info and tickets head to the Queer Screen website, or to stream the film on demand this weekend, you can book via the MQFF website.
Star Observer’s interview with Jacki Weaver will feature on the cover of our October editions, out next Thursday, October 1.
