MELBOURNE QUEER FILM FESTIVAL CELEBRATES 32ND YEAR

The Melbourne Queer Film Festival (MQFF), the largest queer film festival in the Southern Hemisphere, is celebrating its 32nd birthday this year!

After a challenging couple of years, that included the  whole event being cancelled, three days into it, in 2020, thanks to the pandemic. A triumphant return just three months later to present Melbourne’s first film festival as a fully online program. The festival returned to a more traditional format in 2021.

This year’s festival will be sure to have something foreveryone, with MQFF curating an impressive program of local and international drama, comedy, documentary and “everything in between, from boundary-pushing filmmakers across the globe. And it’s all 100% queer!”

Thirty Five Australian Premieres

This leading international queer film festival is screening in cinema from November 10–21 with this year’s festival featuring 49 feature films and documentaries, 12 short film packages, and 35 Australian and four Melbourne premieres!

Just by looking at the extensive program on offer for 2022, you can tell that the Melbourne Queer Film Festival takes its Mission Statement seriously and not only that, they are delivering on that statement!

“We seek to change lives through the experience of shared stories – bringing the best of world queer culture to Melbourne and nurturing the development of new Australian voices.”

One of the films appearing at this year’s Melbourne Queer Film Festival, is Lonesome, the story of country boy Casey, on the run from a small town scandal, and on a mission to see the ocean for the first time.

Lonesome

 

Casey connects with city queer Tib in Sydney, a stranger with a past of his own. When their connection fulfils an unexpressed need they didn’t know they carried, they aren’t quite sure how to explore it.

An intimate, brooding piece of film which is beautifully shot with interesting angles and stunning vistas of Australia’s urban and country settings, Lonesome is not only a visual feast scenery wise but there’s also more than a bit of titillating flesh to be seen, not to mention some hot and steamy sex scenes!

When Star Observer had a chat with one of the actors in the film, Josh Lavery, who plays Casey, he was happy to delve into
the intimacies of making this film, especially the sex scenes, and the body confidence required to shoot them. Lavery has an Instagram account that has a bit of skin showing. He admits that did help him with his confidence levels, with that account even leading to the director discovering him in the first place!

Sex-Positive Film

“Being confident on Instagram helped, that’s how Craig found me for Lonesome as well! I’ve always had this sexpositive attitude and this is why I was so excited about making this film because it is such a sex-positive film. And it’s relatable sex, it’s not watered down to make it more palatable to a broader audience, it’s very very queer, so I like that and I think that aspect of the film really aligned with me as a person.”

Gone are the bad old days, where actors were thrown into the deep end on the first day of shooting and expected to make out with their co-stars, “Absolutely not,” Lavery said. “We worked with an intimacy coordinator and I would say that a huge part of our rehearsals were rehearsing those scenes and it was quite a process!

“We’d start out doing consent exercises, like ‘can I touch your shoulder’ and then slowly we’d work up to permission to touch other in more intimate areas and once we felt safe and comfortable doing that, we knew each other’s boundaries and what felt safe and what didn’t.

Telling Queer Australian Series

“Then we were able to start meticulously rehearsing these scenes so we knew exactly what we had to do.” That must have made the whole shooting process much more relaxed?

“I can’t tell you how good it was having the intimacy coordinator, just someone that was on our side, it didn’t matter what anyone else wanted it was just about what we as actors were comfortable doing and I can’t stress how incredible it was.”

Lavery is passionate about telling queer Australian stories and to his mind, our production output levels are lacking, mainly because there isn’t enough funding allocated to the telling of these queer Australian stories.

He said, “I just want to have more queer Australian cinema made because there’s just not enough. I think the representation is getting better than it’s ever been but I still don’t think we have enough authentic queer stories that are coming out of Australia!”

Lonesome is playing Saturday, November 12 at 9pm at the Village Jam Factory and Saturday, November 19 at 9.15pm at ACMI. Check out the program for Melbourne Queer Film Festival and purchase individual and multi-film passes at mqff.com.au