Keeping Up A-Queer-Ances

Ah, the Brisbane Queer Film Festival; one of the biggest and most interesting film festivals on our city's cultural calendar. Renowned for its opening night party almost as much as it is its ever-expanding selection of films, the BQFF each year is a phantasmagoric celebration of all things queer.

For the uninitiated, Queer cinema is indeed a celebration of the LGBT experience, but it's also a chance for lesser-told stories to find a home in the hearts of the historically lesser talked-about. Much like post-colonial art and other 'new voice' media, queer cinema is inherently subversive, and so from that place of upturned expectation and its base-line of different 'normalities' very often you'll see comes some really fresh, vital, and exciting cinematic and societal perspectives.

The freedom the characters in the stories of queer films have to explore their relationships with others isn't bound by rigid moral codes and heterosexual taboo; they don't necessarily have to define themselves as one thing over another. John Cameron Mitchell's Hedwig is a great example of this, as is his film Shortbus: a wonderfully un-otherised exploration of sex across all experiences. These films show us men can be with men, and women; or that women can love women, and not in spite of men. New themes can be explored in these stories without a tryst being a film's central conceit, or shock. New dramas can arise out of a more egalitarian film world, as well as new comedies, and new genre-films, too (drag-coms!).

But enough gender studies 101 proselytising, let's get back to BQFF. Opening night looks to be its usual smorgasbord of great: this year the charming Trevor Ashley (of Fat Swan, Hairspray) is leading the post-film party as a salacious impersonation of Liza Minnelli. The opening screening itself is 2012's Keep The Lights On: an American film from director Ira Sachs – a man whose movies are renowned for being deep and inventive explorations of human relationships. Other films showing at this year's festival include the sumptuous black and white Joshua Tree, 1951, an intimate exploration of the lesser-known sides of movie star icon James Dean. Bye Bye Blondie, from France, and provocateur Virginie Despentes – of the ceaselessly controversial Baise-Moi (Rape Me) – looks to find the director tonally a bit more settled than in her debut, and perhaps this time just a little bit more romantic. (Her political voice in a softer cadence is something which I'm particularly fascinated to see.) In Call Me Kuchu, one of the festival's many great documentary offerings, we learn of the story of David Kato, Uganda's 'first openly gay man', and his fight against legislation proposing to make homosexuality punishable by death. From Serbia, the festival brings us Parada; a comedy about an injured pitbull, a gay vet and a homophobic war veteran tasked with protecting Belgrade's gay-pride parade.

A now 13-year-old initiative of the Brisbane Powerhouse, the Brisbane Queer Film Festival this year boasts a staggering 58 films spanning drama, documentary, comedy, and in 2013 a newly added shorts selection. In the words of its director, Sarah Neal: “If you're looking for entertainment, escape or enlightenment in fine company, Brisbane Queer Film Festival is the place to be.”

WHAT: Brisbane Queer Film Festival
WHEN & WHERE: Friday 5 to Sunday 14 April, Brisbane Powerhouse