Melbourne Queer Film Festival Awards The 2025 Short Film Prize
Image: Image: MQFF Instagram
Melbourne Queer Film Festival (MQFF) has crowned Mohammad Awad and their project Flight Risk as the winner of the 2025 Pitch, Pleez! competition, awarding the filmmaker $10,000 in funding to bring their powerful short film to life.
Now in its seventh year, Pitch, Pleez! is MQFF’s signature initiative supporting emerging LGBTQIA+ creatives.
Each year, filmmakers submit proposals for short films, with selected finalists presenting live pitches to an audience and a panel of industry judges.
Since its launch in 2019, the program has awarded $60,000 to Australian LGBTQIA+ storytellers, bolstering queer representation across fiction, documentary, and web series formats.
This year’s competition saw five finalists compete for the top prize, with Awad’s deeply personal and nuanced story standing out.
Flight Risk, inspired by Awad’s lived experience, explores the intersection of identity, absurdity, and resilience as a BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ individual.
In addition to the funding, the film will premiere at the Melbourne Queer Film Festival Opening Night in November and Awad will receive an All-In Pass to the 2025 festival.
“I am so eternally grateful to MQFF for supporting a story about joy, resilience and humanity,” Awad said.
“We rarely get to see these stories on our screens, and I am so excited for us to make it and you to see it.”
In a first for the competition, the judges also awarded a $5,000 runner-up prize to Welcome To The Cyber Rodeo, a bold and imaginative project by Jim Muntisov and Mark Day.
The extra funding was made possible through the Melbourne Queer Film Festival and generous donors inspired by the exceptional standard of entries.
Melbourne Queer Film Festival CEO David Martin Harris praised this year’s submissions: “We have been astounded by the diversity and artistic merit. Our finalists represent just a small portion of the remarkable talent out there. We are proud to uplift queer voices in Australia.”
The judging panel included figures from across the industry, such as Paul Horwell (Victorian Pride Centre), Davey Thomson (VicScreen), award-winning filmmaker William Duan, 2024 winner Ava Grimshaw-Hall, and MQFF Program Director Ro Bright.
The 2025 finalists also included Promise Me You’ll Tell Her by Celeste Diep and Bryan Huang, Eagle by Max Pollard and Tavis Pinnington, and The 6 Guys an Immigrant Trans Person of Colour Will Date in Melbourne by Dax Carnay-Hanrahan and team.
The 2025 Melbourne Queer Film Festival will run from November 13 – 23.
More details can be found at www.mqff.com.au.
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