If you’re excited about the return of the Queer Screen Film Festival and its smorgasbord of LBTQ+ goodies – including a drive-in Priscilla screening – then do we have some bonus round good news for you. The Dendy Newtown will also run a five-week Rainbow Retrospective of awesome queer cinema from September 24.
Kicking off with schlocky cult classic The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the late, great and fabulously fish-netted and corseted Tim Curry has Susan Sarandon, Barry Bostwick and pretty much everyone else in the palm of his latex-gloved hands in the barmy B-movie musical treat where sexuality is an all-you-can-eat buffet.
If you’re in the mood for swooning romance, the line-up has plenty to get flushed over. There’s Timothée Chalamet and his impossibly floppy hair mooning over a chisel-jawed Armie Hammer in Call Me By Your Name, or Our Cate bedazzling Rooney Mara in Todd Haynes’ impeccable drama Carol. Céline Sciamma took home the Queer Palm at Cannes last year for the lush Portrait of a Lady on Fire, and Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight is like poetry turned into a movie. Or if you want things a little bit dirtier, literally, then get mired in the mud of a blasted English moor with Francis Lee’s heart-swollen God’s Own Country, one of our absolute faves of recent years.
Kick it up a notch with the beguiling eroticism of French fancy Stranger by the Lake, or local hook-up app thriller Sequin in a Blue Room. Australia also fields Ana Kokkinos’ classic Christos Tsiolkas adaptation Head On, and seminal HIV/AIDS crisis story Holding the Man.
Both Tangerine and A Fantastic Woman are brilliant films about indomitable trans women. Break your heart all over again when cowboys Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal fall head-over-heels, giving us all the feels in Brokeback Mountain, or take off for Paris in activist celebration BPM. Or if you need a hearty chuckle, fly for The Birdcage.
For the full program and to book tickets, head here.
It's rainbows all round. Glow up as the Queer Screen Film Festival returns.
