Our Guide To Mardi Gras Film Festival

Everlasting Love comes billed as "Spain's answer to Stranger By The Lake", but it's more like Stranger By The Lake crossed with We Are What We Are. It haunts a spooky Catalan forest cruised not just by bear-ish men, but itinerate gangs of creepy teens who abduct wayward youths, indoctrinate them into their ranks via loving mutilation, and seem like sure suspects in a spate of grizzly local murders. Marcal Fores' follow-up to his surrealist talking-teddy-bear nightmare Animals is just as singular, an artful mash-up of animal attraction, nocturnal terror, doom-laden synth outbursts, and trips to indie-rock shows; culminating with Sonny & The Sunsets playing in its woods under handwritten, blood-spattered credits.

Everlasting Love is the sure cinematic standout at the 23rd Mardi Gras Film Festival, but it isn't the sole piece of inspiring cinema. There's also Fort Buchanan, an odd reel of grainy celluloid from French-based American expat Benjamin Crotty. It's a queer take on 'army wives', with the left-behind partners — all cooped up in one remote base — sexually pursuing whoever else is around, gender or orientation be damned. Crotty sourced the dialogue from soap opera close captioning, cut it up, and stuck it in his actors' mouths, the mix of mumblecore naturalism and tonally off words giving Fort Buchanan a sense of wonderful absurdity.

Also highly recommended is That's Not Us, an American indie that sends three couples — one gay, one lesbian, one straight — to one beach house for a weekend. That set-up suggests sitcom hijinks and convenient conflict, but William Sullivan's film shows a thoughtful, complex, considered study of relationships, touching on the way any partnership can ebb and flow by way of colliding neuroses.

Elsewhere, there's all manner of other films programmed for the MGFF, including screenings of Finding Nemo and In Bed With Madonna. The fest opens with Summertime, a piece of bourgeois arthousery from Catherine Corsini, in which Izia Higelin plays a country lass who falls into the budding feminist movement, and into bed with Cecile de France, in 1971 Paris. Another high profile pic is Addicted To Fresno, the latest black comedy from Jamie Babbit, in which Judy Greer and Natasha Lyonne play odd couple siblings whose cover-up of an accidental homicide is loaded with hijinks.

The Firefly is a creaky Colombian film that uses dramatically tidy tragedy to bring together Carolina Guerra and Olga Segura, who look less grief-stricken, more like they've just walked off the runway. Departure is a polite, toffee English take on adolescent obsession, set in the French countryside and starring the kid who played the schoolboy Turing in The Imitation Game. And the direly earnest, painfully stagy Beautiful Something features plenty of hot young flesh, but in an era of abundant porn, its supposedly 'steamy' sex scenes are so unconvincingly simulated as to seem ersatz, almost quaint.

The fest's many documentaries include Remembering The Man, essentially the backstage guide to the real life star-cross'd queers behind the Holding The Man story; Ecco Homo, Lynn-Maree Milburn and Richard Lowenstein's loving, critical portrait of St Kilda scenester and self-mythologising fabulist Troy Davies; Drag Becomes Him, a life-and-times chronicle of RuPaul's Drag Race Season Five winner Jinkx Monsoon/Jerick Hoffer (which features one of cinema history's definitive on-screen pisses); and Scrum, a local look at the men of "the greatest gay rugby club in the world", the Sydney Convicts.