Here’s Your First Look at The Stunning 2024 Melbourne Queer Film Festival Program

Melbourne Queer Film Festival (MQFF) returns in 2024, to delight, entertain and educate Melburnians from November 14 – 24. 

With this year’s theme of ‘Formative Sound and Vision’, the program celebrates the way sound and vision has been a source of inspiration and transformation for our community. 

What would LGBTQIA+ culture be without the profound impact of what we see and what we hear, coalescing to create beauty, fear, learn lessons, identity. “The gift of sound and vision”, as David Bowie once put it, has helped shape queer identity and lives for generations. 

Here’s a sneak peek at some of the jewels of the 2024 Melbourne Queer Film Festival program.

Melbourne Queer Film Festival 2024 sneak peek

LADY LIKE

RuPaul’s Drag Race has launched countless careers but thrown just as many folks overboard. British-born, US-based Lady Camden – AKA Rex Wheeler – a veteran of season 14, is one of the survivors.

This intimate documentary, the feature debut of director Luke Willis, follows Wheeler’s journey from the Royal Ballet in London to drag, experiencing personal tragedy, and tackling the emotional aftermath of the notorious Drag Race ‘villain edit’.

Lady Like pulls the curtain back on what it truly takes to become an indomitable performer.

ANY OTHER WAY: THE JACKIE SHANE STORY 

Jackie Shane, a rising star in 1950s Nashville became a sensation in ‘60s Toronto, with a huge camp hit single in Any Other Way – but then Shane mysteriously disappeared.

This stirring, award-winning documentary which shares the extraordinary story of a pioneering Black trans performer of exceptional talent and stage presence, who in no way hid her queerness, and refused to be anyone but her authentic self.

CLOSE TO YOU

Close To You is a heartfelt exploration of identity and belonging, following Sam, a trans man who returns to his hometown for his father’s birthday after years of distance.

Confronting family dynamics, lost love and the emotional impact of his transition, the film goes beyond personal transformation, redefining the meaning of love and acceptance.

Written and directed by Dominic Savage and starring Elliot Page in his first leading role as a trans man, Close To You draws from Page’s lived experience.

THE VISITOR

Canadian Bruce LaBruce has been blasting his punk art porn visions into the universe’s most chaotically-inclined cinemas since the ‘80s.

The Visitor is a horny, NSFW fury set in contemporary London, where Bishop Black’s eponymous Visitor emerges naked from a suitcase as a refugee.

It invites itself into a filthy rich, binary-fucking family’s mansion, and seduces them one by one. 

MQFF 2024 is November 14 – 24. Film Passes are on sale now ahead of the full program launching on October 16.

Find out more at mqff.com.au.