New Farm Queer Film Festival
Opening Night
Thursday, 3 October - 7:00pm
Crossing
Georgia · 2014 · 102 min
Director: Levin Akin | QLD Premiere
Join us for NFQFF's Black Carpet Opening Night. Arrivals at 6:30pm for drinks on the black carpet & a screening at 7pm.
Lia (a mesmerising Mzia Arabuli), a retired teacher living in Georgia, made a promise to find out what happened to her long-lost niece Tekla. When Lia learns from Achi (Lucas Kankava), a neighbour, that Tekla might be living in Turkey, they set off together to find her. In Istanbul, they discover a beautiful city full of connections and possibilities; but looking for someone who never intended to be found is harder than they thought. Until they meet Evrim, a lawyer fighting for trans rights. As Lia and Achi weave their way through the city’s backstreets, Tekla starts to feel closer than ever.
Closing Night
Wednesday, 13 October - 6:30pm
Ponyboi
USA · 2024 · 105 min
Director: Esteban Arango | Australian Premiere
Join us for NFQFF's Black Carpet Closing Night. Arrivals at 6pm for drinks on the black carpet & a screening at 6:30pm.
Unfolding over the course of Valentine’s Day in New Jersey, a young intersex sex worker must run from the mob after a drug deal goes sideways, forcing him to confront his past. Inspired by River Gallo’s short film, Ponyboi explodes onto the screen in a bold, edgy, and campy cinematic thrill ride. Co-starring Dylan O’Brien (Teen Wolf) and Murray Bartlett (The White Lotus), this neon-drenched tale reimagines the LGBTQIA+ return-home narrative and the classic Jersey mobster story, delivering a riveting crime narrative with heartfelt moments of tenderness.
Showing Times
Sitcom
- France · 1998 · 80 min
- Director: François Ozon
Showing Times:
Friday, 4 October – 7:00pm
Blending the satirical edge of Luis Buñuel and the macabre perversions of Pasolini’s Teorema, the debut from France’s enfant terrible is a provocative, wild ride. The story follows an upper-class suburban family abruptly confronted with the younger brother’s discovery of his homosexuality, the elder sister’s suicide attempt and sadomasochistic tendencies, and the intrusion of a free-spirited maid and her husband. And it all started with the arrival of an innocent-looking rat.
The People's Joker
- USA · 2023 · 92 min
- Director: Vera Drew
Showing Times:
Friday, 4 October – 8:45pm
Sunday, 6 October – 9:10pm
Monday, 7 October – 6:15pm
This autobiographical trans coming-of-age tale reimagines the Joker as a queer icon. With legal support, director Vera Drew finally presents her much-anticipated directorial debut, two years after it was pulled from the Toronto International Film Festival due to pressure from Warner Brothers. The People’s Joker follows an unconfident, closeted trans girl as she moves to Gotham City to make it big as a comedian by joining the cast of UCB Live, a government-sanctioned late-night sketch show.
A Portrait of Love
- Australia · 2023 · 90 min
- Director: Molly Reynolds
Showing Times:
Saturday, 5 October – 4:30pm
For over twenty years, Archibald Prize-winning artist Craig Ruddy and his partner Roberto Meza Mont filmed their life together to share with friends and family. They documented events big and small, from celebrations and travel to the inner workings of a significant artist, illustrating a vibrant, joyous life filled with love. To tell their story, their friend, documentarian Molly Reynolds (My Name is Gulpilil), spent months immersed in Roberto’s footage and crafted her most intimate film to date. The film is a rich portrait of life, love, and loss.
Sahela
- Australia · 2023 · 93 min
- Director: Raghuvir Joshi
Showing Times:
Saturday, October 5 – 6:30pm
Tuesday, October 8 – 6:30pm
Set within the vibrant Indian community of Parramatta, Sydney, Sahela is a love story between a gay man and his wife, executively produced by Dev Patel. Struggling under the weight of Indian familial expectations and ingrained gender norms, Vir and Nitya’s paths intersect at a critical breaking point, prompting Vir to disclose his true sexuality to Nitya. This revelation causes a rift between the couple, casting a cloud of societal disgrace over their family’s deeply held cultural values.
Close To You
- USA · 2023 · 99 min
- Director: Dominic Savage
Showing Times:
Saturday, 5 October – 8:20pm
Wednesday, 9 October – 8:30pm
Elliot Page stars in this moving coming-of-age drama, his first film role since coming out. Sam (Page) hasn’t been home since his transition. After four years in Toronto, he takes a long-dreaded trip back to his hometown for his father’s birthday. Once there, he confronts unresolved wounds and reconnects with an old flame. Official Selection: Toronto International Film Festival.
Backspot
- Canada · 2023 · 93 min
- Director: D.W. Waterson
Showing Times
Sunday, 6 October – 1:30pm
Talented and driven cheerleader Riley dreams of joining the Thunderhawks, an elite professional cheer squad. When she and her girlfriend are given the opportunity to join, new pressures from a demanding head coach (Evan Rachel Wood, Westworld) and Riley’s pursuit of perfection start causing her life to unravel. As Riley’s anxieties reach a breaking point, so too does her desperation to achieve athletic success. Equal parts compelling character-driven drama and an incredible display of athleticism, Backspot is a welcome addition to the queer cheerleading canon.
Water Drops on Burning Rocks
- France · 1998 · 90 min
- Director: François Ozon
Showing Times:
Sunday, 6 October – 3:30pm
Water Drops on Burning Rocks adapts an unproduced play by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Ozon’s favorite filmmaker. In the story, Franz, a naïve 19-year-old, is seduced by a smug-yet-alluring 50-year-old businessman, Leopold, and quickly moves into his apartment. Set in 1970s Germany, their cozy relationship soon sours as Leopold becomes cranky and argumentative. When Franz’s buxom blonde girlfriend reappears, followed by Leopold’s elegant and enigmatic ex, things get funnier, steamier, and a lot more complicated.
Scala!!!
- UK · 2023 · 96 min
- Director: Ali Catterall & Jane Giles
Showing Times:
Sunday, 6 October – 5:20pm
Wednesday, 9 October – 6:30pm
Saturday, 12 October – 2:45pm
Amid post-punk Britain, London’s Scala cinema became a safe haven for an emerging queer youth culture. It’s stories of wild all-nighters recounted by attendees including John Waters, Peter Strickland, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, and more. An inspiration for creatives, this documentary tells the riotous inside story into aworld of drug use, gay cruising, and al things you’d never think you’d see at the cinema.
Satranic Panic
- Australia · 2023 · 80 min
- Director: Alice Maio Mackay
Showing Times:
Sunday, 6 October – 7:20pm
When Max, trans queen Aria’s found brother, is ruthlessly slaughtered by a shadowy cult in a ritual to summon demons, two friends follow a mysterious note promising answers and hit the road. Together they will slay demons, perform at drag gigs, make uncertain allies, and uncover a conspiracy of prejudice and self-hatred, one that leads closer to home than they’d imagined. Satanic Panic is a bloody, demon-infested road movie about embracing one’s identity and the power of chosen family, with biting wit, killer drag, and incredible tits.
Caught By The Tides
- China · 2023 · 111 min
- Director: Jia Zhangke
Showing Times:
Monday, 7 October – 4:00pm
One of Chinese cinema’s most revered contemporary filmmakers, Jia Zhangke returns with his new Cannes competition entry. Jia’s latest film reunites him with his wife and muse Zhao Tao for this decade-spanning feature, filmed across twenty years. Opening with the construction of China’s Three Gorges Dam project – the subject of his 2006 Venice-winning drama Still Life – and leading into post-Covid life, Jia’s exploration of modern isolation in China is free-flowing and poetic.
The Devil's Bath
- Austria · 2024 · 121 min
- Director: Veronika Franz & Severin Fiala
Showing Times:
Tuesday, 8 October – 8:30pm
Friday, 11 October – 6:45pm
Set in Austria, 1750, Agnes (portrayed by electronic musician Soap&Skin) doesn’t feel at home in her husband’s world. A shocking act seems to be the only way out. Based on historical records, this profound and disturbing psychogram of a woman, from the directors of Goodnight Mommy and The Lodge, won the Silver Bear Jury Prize for cinematography at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival.
Problemista
- USA · 2023 · 104 min
- Director: Julio Torres
Showing Times:
Thursday, October 10 – 6:30pm
Sunday, October 13 – 1:15pm
Tilda Swinton, Isabella Rossellini, Greta Lee (Past Lives), and Catalina Saavedra (Rotting in the Sun) star in this mind-bending comedy from director Julio Torres. Alejandro (Torres) is an aspiring toy designer from El Salvador, struggling to bring his unusual ideas to life in New York City. As time on his work visa runs out, a job assisting an erratic art-world outcast becomes his only hope to stay in the country and realize his dream.
T-Blockers
- Australia · 2023 · 75 min
- Director: Alice Maio Mackay
Showing Times:
Thursday, October 10 – 8:40pm
When ancient parasites rise from beneath a small town, taking the most fearful and susceptible as hosts, a young trans filmmaker finds herself the only one who can sense the possessed and rally the resistance before the horror escapes and spreads.
Criminal Lovers
- France · 1999 · 96 min
- Director: François Ozon
Showing Times:
Friday, 11 October – 8:00pm
François Ozon’s transgressive first three films, newly restored. Their idea of foreplay was murder… After a perverted impulse drives them to kill, Alice (Natacha Régnier) and her boyfriend, Luc (Jérémie Renier), drag the body into the woods, only to find themselves hopelessly lost—much like the fairy-tale plight of Hansel and Gretel. Starving and with no hope of being found, they chance upon a dilapidated cottage where a hulking man takes them prisoner and proceeds to feed Luc’s sexual appetite.
Totally F***ed Up
- USA · 1993 · 79 min
- Director: Gregg Araki
Showing Times:
Saturday, 12 October – 4:45pm
Gregg Araki’s Teen Apocalypse Trilogy, restored in 4K.
Across fifteen jagged episodes, Totally F**ed Up* plunges into the lives of a group of queer, disaffected Los Angeles teenagers who form a makeshift family as they navigate desire, heartbreak, societal and familial rejection, and the alienation of growing up gay in an era of relentless moralizing. Both a defiantly raw anthem of outsiderhood and a furious reckoning with all-American homophobia, Araki’s answer to the 1980s teen comedy captures youthful angst with an immediacy that still resonates.
The Doom Generation
- USA · 1995 · 83 min
- Director: Gregg Araki
Showing Times:
Saturday, 12 October – 6:30pm
Gregg Araki’s Teen Apocalypse Trilogy, restored in 4K.
Gregg Araki takes a road trip to hell in this wild, meth-and-fast-food-fueled joyride through the margins of a menacing American wasteland. When they inadvertently link up with a dangerously alluring drifter (Johnathon Schaech), a chilled-out Cali bro (James Duval) and his spiky, foul-mouthed girlfriend (Rose McGowan) find themselves on an increasingly violent, kinky, and darkly comic journey in which erotic tensions rise along with the body count. Araki employs boldly stylized lighting to create a heightened sense of unreality in a shocking, shoegaze-soundtracked chronicle of young lives careening toward oblivion.
Nowhere
- USA · 1997 · 83 min
- Director: Gregg Araki
Showing Times:
Saturday, 12 October – 8:15pm
You can practically smell the pheromones wafting off this kaleidoscopic odyssey, which finds director Gregg Araki crossing soap-operatic elements with blasts of science fiction, indie-kid cool, and shiny pop-art subversion. On the day when the world is foretold to end, a group of terminally horny, disillusioned, zonked-out teens in Los Angeles see their lives explode in a glitter bomb of drugs, sex, death, and alien abduction. Bisexual lust, vaporizing Valley girls, sinister televangelists, nipple-ring S&M, murder by Campbell’s-soup can—Araki folds it all into an anarchic orgy that brings his Teen Apocalypse Trilogy to an explosively caustic close.
Crossing
- Georgia · 2014 · 102 min
- Director: Levin Akin
Showing Times:
Sunday, 13 October – 11:00am
Lia (a mesmerising Mzia Arabuli), a retired teacher living in Georgia, made a promise to find out what happened to her long-lost niece Tekla. When Lia learns from Achi (Lucas Kankava), a neighbour, that Tekla might be living in Turkey, they set off together to find her. In Istanbul, they discover a beautiful city full of connections and possibilities; but looking for someone who never intended to be found is harder than they thought. Until they meet Evrim, a lawyer fighting for trans rights. As Lia and Achi weave their way through the city’s backstreets, Tekla starts to feel closer than ever.