17 Jul Queer Screen Film Fest Archive
Some of the previous Queer Screen Film Fest and QueerDOC program guides are available to view below.
Queer Screen Film Fest 2025
The 12th Queer Screen Film Fest (QSFF) took place at Event Cinemas George Street from 27 to 31 August 2025, presenting a bold and dynamic program that highlights emerging voices, international excellence and community celebration.
Queer Screen Film Fest 2024
In 2024, Queer Screen hosted its 11th Queer Screen Film Fest. The festival continues to grow with 35 fresh films, representing every continent in the world. It spanned 5 days in Sydney, and 7 days on-demand nationwide. Several of the titles premiered at major festivals including Cannes, Berlinale, Venice, SXSW and Toronto. Alongside screenings, we hosted Q&A sessions with local and international guests, and awarded our highest prize pool in the history for Pitch Off! at $20,000 alongside the Gender Matters Taskforce.
Queer Screen Film Fest 2023
In 2023, Queer Screen celebrated its 30th year and the 10th Queer Screen Film Fest. The festival has grown from 7 films in its first edition to an incredible 37 films across 20 unique programs. It spanned 5 days in Sydney, 3 days in the Blue Mountains, and 12 days on-demand nationwide. The program featured acclaimed films from Cannes, Berlinale, Sundance, Venice, and more. Alongside screenings, we hosted parties, panels, Q&A sessions, and awarded $10,000 to Lizzie Cater for her short film “Sara” in the 6th Queer Screen Pitch Off edition.
Queer Screen Film Fest 2021
Through the great COVID-19 lockdown of 2021 we absolutely loved having the opportunity to bring the world to Australian audiences! We loved sharing films from 17 countries, in 18 different spoken languages, and hosting no less than 22 Australian Premieres! A record breaking audience joined us in our very first 100% On Demand festival and watched over 40 LGBTIQ+ features, documentaries and shorts. Thank you to our guests and filmmakers who joined us for our live Q&A events and Pitch Off event. And thank you to the patrons who joined the great online world to come together for trivia night and the halfway hangout via Zoom. Thanks also to our filmmakers who continue to make, create and reflect a little bit of us on screen.
Queer Screen Film Fest 2020
It’s no secret that 2020 was a challenging year for the global community, but with it came opportunities to create new ways of delivering a world class film festival to the widest audience possible, and the 8th Queer Screen Film Fest was officially our largest ever. With more films, more screens and the biggest audience we have ever had! 41 films, 29 Australian premieres, 6 online Q&As featuring 17 international guests, 6 local filmmaker pitches, 2 in-cinema screenings, our first Drive-In double feature, and audience members in every state & territory!
Queer Screen Film Fest 2019
The 7th Queer Screen Film Fest was our biggest to date! With 29 LGBTIQ films from 12 countries, including 22 Sydney Premieres over 5 days, we saw record breaking crowds flocking to a range of films which were set to set your soul and heart aflame. We were joined by the delightful Nikki Si’ulepa (writer/director) and Rachel Aneta Wills (producer) from Same But Different: A True New Zealand Love Story at the Australian Premiere screening. Director Laurie Lynd from Killing Patient Zero presented his incredibly insightful documentary and stayed for an extended Q&A hosted by ACON. And we saw another successful Pitch Off! as seven contestants pitched their projects to a panel of experts, vying for a $10,000 cash prize, which William Duan took home for his short film TUĪ NÁ.
Queer Screen Film Fest 2018
QSFF19 was 11 sold-out films and events, 29 beautiful LGBTIQ films across 15 sessions, Rainbow Families Screening in Sydney Park, the special guest performances and emotional screening of George Michael Freedom: The Director’s Cut, the Australian Premiere of Sydney made film Nothing To Lose, a super fun Auslan Interpreted Q&A with Take That Superfan Dara and film producer Rita Walsh, our international guest Arshad Khan and Queer Screen’s first ever Queer Screen Pitch Off, and our highest attended QSFF to date!
Queer Screen Film Fest 2017
The 5th Queer Screen Film Fest was an amazing week! Over 4,000 people, 14 features, 6 shorts,1 filmmaker event, 9 sold-out sessions, 9 Australian premieres, 3 free screenings, 1 outdoor screening and 5 festival guests including Zachary Booth, star of opening night film After Louie!
Queer Screen Film Fest 2016
The 4th Queer Screen Film Fest was expanded to include screenings in Canberra and the Blue Mountains, as well as a popular and fun free screening of Inside Out in Sydney Park.
The opening night film was the brilliant Other People by Chris Kelly, and was one of many films to sell out. Another highlight was 2 screenings of Almost Adults, which included a visit by star Elise Bauman. With 4000 people in attendance, two encore screenings, and loads of award winning films, this was our largest QSFF yet.
Queer Screen Film Fest 2015
The 3rd Queer Screen Film Fest featured several Australian Premiere screenings, an Australian Showcase presentation of a new LGBTI film by Tony Ayres, some massive star-studded Hollywood dramas, and the best queer docos from around the world. Attendance was 4,000 people
The opening night film was the tender and interesting Boulevard staring Robin Williams in his final dramatic role. Perhaps even more hotly anticipated was closing night film, Freeheld starring Ellen Page and Julianne Moore. Both nights sold out, as did many others of the 12 screenings including Grandma and Tab Hunter Confidential.
Queer Screen Film Fest 2014
The 2nd Queer Screen Film Fest expanded to include 11 sessions of great films and had an attendance of 2,200 people.
The highlight of the festival was opening with Teddy Award winning film The Way He Looks, directed by Daniel Ribeiro, who attended the screening. He also hosted an amazing free event discussing his work and the transition from short films to award-winning features.
Other great screenings included a scratch-and-sniff screening of John Water’s Polyester, Desiree Akhavan’s Appropriate Behavior, and a special screening of Pride, by Matthew Warchus.
Queer Screen Film Fest 2013
The inaugural Queer Screen Film Fest screened 7 films over 4 fantastic days with our favorite inner-west venue partners, the Dendy Newtown and the Newtown Hotel. The line up took audiences from Cannes winners, to sneak previews and retrospectives. Two such winners were our opening and closing night films Stranger by the Lake (Queer Palm Award and Un Certain Regard for Best Director) and Lawrence Anyways from Xavier Dolan (Queer Palm and Un Certain Regard Award for Best Actress, Suzanne Clément).
The festival was a success with 6 of 7 films sold out. Queer Screen Film Fest has since become a fixture of Queer Screen’s annual calendar.
queerDOC 2010
The last year of queerDOC saw the worlds only queer documentary film festival go out with a bang. The festival opened with I Shot My Love, a confronting look at the relationship between Tomer Heymann, a Jewish man whose grandfather escaped Germany during WWII, and Andreas, a German Dancer who believes his family had ties to the Nazi Party. The documentary is shot beautifully and captures an inspirational portrait of a relationship that transcends prejudice, resentment and fear. Le Tigre: On Tour(dir. Kerthy Fix) was another highlight from the last queerDOC. The documentary follows Le Tigre, an iconic band which grew from the ashes of the Riot Girl movement, on their last ever tour.
queerDOC 2009
Queer Screen’s 2009 QueerDoc was a weekend of some truly great and eye-opening documentaries. Punch Like a Girl, dirs. Maya Gallas and Justine Pimlott, follows three of Sully’s Gym’s best female boxers as they compete for the title of best boxer. In It Came from Kuchar(dir. Jennifer M Kroot), shifts through the archives of George and Michael Kuchar’s seminal films from the underground film scene of New York in the 60s. In Edie and Thea: A Very Long Engagement (dir. Gréta Olafsdóttir and Susan Muska), the history of the queer community in the states is told through the personal narrative of Edie and Thea’s relationship which started in pre-Stonewall New York and has lasted through the gay rights movement.
queerDOC 2008
Queer Screen’s 2008 queerDOC had a truly international theme this year, screening more international films in the eleven-day festival than any other preceding queerDOC festival. This year opened with a screening of The Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela(dir. Olaf de Fleur). This globe-trotting documentary follows the Filipina ‘ladyboy’, Queen Raquela’ from street-worker in Cebu to internet celebrity in Paris.
The festival came to a close withFootballer Under Cover(dir. David Assmann and Ayat Najafi), a documentary which follows a largely lesbian Berlin soccer team travel from Germany to Tehran to play the Iranian’s women’s soccer team, who have never been allowed to play with an international team before.
queerDOC 2007
The twelve documentaries which made up queerDOC 2007 were drawn together in a collection we called, ‘Wonders of Nature’; this festival was a celebration of the miraculous and marvellous that can be found anywhere.
One such example is John Waters, who is the subject of the documentary, John Waters: This Filthy World. The documentary follows his career as a director from his early work in the 1960s to some of his greater classics. Sydney filmmaker Poppy Stockell’s Searching 4 Sandeepwas another standout from the festival. The documentary follows Poppy’s search for love on the internet and the relationship she develops with Sandeep, an Anglo-Indian Sikh in the British Midlands.
queerDOC 2006
Queer Screen’s sixth queerDOC film festival was titled queerDOC06: Seeing Inside the World Outside. The festival opened with Pic Up the Mic(dir Alex Hinton) which traces the San Franciscan underground queer hip hop scene from its early days in the 1990s to its current explosion, exposing how some are defying the music industry’s most homophobic genre. This year also saw the inclusion of a special event, a screening of The Line of Beauty(dir. Saul Dibb). This Australian premiere of the BBC’s queer adaptation of Alan Hollinghurst’s book, The Line of Beauty, saw the festival come to an end after a week of queer documentaries
queerDOC 2005
Queer Screen’s 2005 queerDOC was a short but great festival. With only ten documentaries, the festival covered everything from the creation of queer communities to queer family life.
Gay Sex in the 70’s (dir. Joseph Lovett) combines interviews with activists and queer personalities with remarkable archival footage to show how the New York gay community started.
Little Man (dir. Nicole Conn) is the emotional story of Nicolas, a baby born 100 days premature. This extremely intimate documentary follows his mothers as they confront challenges they never thought they would face.
queerDOC 2004
Queer Screen’s forth queer documentary festival went off to a good start with The Tasty Bust Reunion(dir. Stephen Maclean). This is the story of Australia’s Stonewall, 463 queers who were having a great time in the Tasty nightclub ten years ago, until a large contingent of Melbourne’s finest cops busted in to disturb the night’s festivities.
The six-minute-long documentary Transgression(dir. Dean Francis) had its world premiere at queerDoc04. The documentary follows a 19-year-old student at Sydney University who was born male but identifies female. In six minutes it says as much about gender identity as many films do in ninety.
queerDOC 2003
Queer Screen’s third queerDOC had over twenty-five documentaries screened in only three days. This year the festival opened with a selection of non-fiction films with a lighter touch. Homemade History – The Home Movies of Ken Garrahy(dir. Robert Herbert) was the first to be screened. The film was a compilation of footage from Sydney’s camp society in the 1960s.
Screened alongside it was Matzo Maidels, (dir. Jenni Olsen, Julie Dorf & Monica Nolam), a series of short clips of lesbian erotica from 1927 with comic commentary and the short mockumentary, Teaching Teo, a short and comic take on how to raise a child Berkley-lesbian style.
queerDOC 2002
The 2002 queerDOC opened Ruthie and Connie: Every Room in the House(dir. Deborah Dickson). The documentary, which has won best documentary at the Seattle Film Festival, the Miami Gay and Lesbian Film Festival and the Nashville Film Festival, follows the story of two women, Ruthie and Connie. Both were respectable housewives, active members of their Jewish community in Brooklyn and raising their respective children with their respective husbands… until they fell in love.
Also opening the festival this year was the short Australian documentary, Your Brother, My Tidda(dir. Kelrick Martin). The film tells the story of two Aboriginal men coming out to their families and living with HIV.
queerDOC 2001
Queer Screen’s 2001 queerDOC screened several interesting documentaries on a wide variety of topics. Some of the standouts included: Undetectable (dir. Jay Corcoran), an eye-opening documentary which follows six HIV positive women and men as they take different paths in their treatment.
The popular documentary, Out in Nature: Homosexual Behaviour in the Animal Kingdom(dirs. Jessica Menendez, Bertrand Loyer and Stephane Alexandresco) is a ground-breaking look at a subject which scientists have deliberately overlooked.
queerDOC 2000
Queer Screen’s first queerDOC commenced with a screening of Paragraph 175(dir. Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman). This emotional and moving film explores a subject that had been largely ignored by historians: the persecution of gay and bisexual men under the Nazi regime. The film features several interviews with survivors who share their stories of detention, torture and reintegration alongside never before seen archival footage.
This year also saw the immensely popular documentary,The Brandon Teena Story(dirs. Susan Muska and Greta Olafsdottir) on which the Academy Award-winning film, Boys Don’t cry, was based. The film follows the story of the attractive and charismatic Brandon Teena who arrived in Falls City, Nebraska in 1993. Three weeks later his ‘true’ identity was revealed as female and he became the victim of many transphobic crimes.