Flickerfest Rainbow Shorts Programme Returns
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Australia’s premier international short film festival, Flickerfest, will be returning to Bondi Pavilion in January 2023. The Festival will be celebrating 32 years of screening short films and has had more than 3,200 short film entries received across the world.
Rainbow Shorts Program curator Craig Boreham spoke about the range of LGBTQI+ shorts that were submitted to Flickerfest this year, stating that there had been a “real growth in the quality of films being submitted.”
A Variety of Films
“The big standout this year was the broad range of stories the filmmakers were exploring. Directors are playing with bold imagery, exploring genre more and finding new and exciting ways to talk about the LGBTQI+ experience on screen in compelling ways,” Boreham said.
Boreham described the program of submissions this year, mentioning the variety of films which spans from a “genre defying lip-synch extravaganza from the US, [Starfuckers, Antonio Marziale] to French/Syrian production Warsha that tells the story of a Syrian migrant who finds freedom in an unexpected way high above the cityscape.”
As seen on Mubi, Starfuckers is a film that is “a revenge movie of the queer kind” which follows “an escort that gives his client the illusion he has paid for.” In the film, an evening between established film director (Jonathan Slavin) and an aspiring movie star (Cole Doman) is interrupted, and the running thread of abuse of power in Hollywood is amplified.
Writer and director of Starfuckers, Antonio Marziale, has starred in three other Netflix series: Alex Strangelove, Altered Carbon, and Grendel and spoke to The Queer Review about the inspiration behind the film which was linked to drag performances they’d seen in the past.
“I was mainly inspired by how drag queens carve out space for themselves to create an alter-ego and at certain times renegotiate the circumstances of their place in a patriarchal heteronormative society through drag.
It was so important to me that in this story the individual who had something traumatic happen to them be given all of the agency and that we focus more on them and how they perceive themselves versus focusing on the trauma of what happened”, Marziale said.
A Window Into All The Corners Of The Queer World
Other films in the Rainbow Shorts Program include a first “returning alumni film with April Maxey’s film, Work, which dives into a world of Chicana queer sex workers and is fresh from Sundance Film Festival, and Heartbeat (Michèle Ricarda Flury) which follows a group of young women on a camping trip where friendships are tested.”
When asked if they thought the Rainbow Shorts Program would grow in the coming years, Marziale said yes.
“We love the Rainbow Shorts program because it is a great window into all the corners of the queer world and a snapshot of ideas the filmmakers want to talk about right now,” Marziale affirmed.
Marziale described the cultural impact of film and the vitality of showing queer content on screen, “festivals like Flickerfest offer emerging voices a direct connection to the audiences they want to speak to.”
“Sharing stories is a tradition that is ancient and fundamental and film since its creation has always been an important cultural expression both for creating change and for just simply understanding how we fit in the world,” he added.
Rainbow Shorts Takes Place Friday, January 27, 6.30pm
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