With MQFF 2024 in full swing, we took the opportunity to do our final round of reviews and recommendations including spotlighting a great new local film that is screening now around Australia. ‘Strange Creatures’ tells the story of Nate, a proud pansexual man who used to be close with his big brother Ged but something bad went down and the siblings haven’t spoken in years. Summoned to suburban Melbourne to celebrate their mum’s birthday, she promptly dies overnight, and they’re forced to work...

The Melbourne Queer Film Festival is Australia’s oldest and largest queer film festival and returns from November 14 to 24 with a program that celebrates the way sound and vision have been a source of inspiration and transformation for LGBTQIA+ communities and everyone across the world. MQFF Program Director Cerise Howard and MQFF Chief Executive Officer David Martin Harris joined us on the show in October to give us the scoop on this year’s festival and the incredibly diverse program on...

We go to great lengths to highlight the diversity and representation on offer in LGBTIQA+ cinema and for this program we looked at two very different films that showcase this perfectly. ‘Audrey’ is a new Aussie dark comedy coming to cinemas in November that will have you laughing and gasping at its in your face look at life in the suburbs for a family with big ambitions and a few queer secrets in its closet. We were joined by its director Natalie Bailey to talk about her extensive 25+ year...

With spooky season upon us, we thought it was a good time to look at some of the latest supernatural and scary content on offer including a new First Nations lead Australian psychological horror that will be in cinemas from this Halloween. ‘The Moogai’ tells the story of Sarah and Fergus, a hopeful young Aboriginal couple who just welcomed their second baby into their family after a very traumatic birth. In what should be a joyous time in their lives becomes sinister when Sarah starts seeing...

If you listen to Out Takes regularly, you know we love a film festival and one at the top of our list is MQFF a.k.a the Melbourne Queer Film Festival. It returns this year from November 14 to 24 with a program that celebrates the way sound and vision have been a source of inspiration and transformation for LGBTQIA+ communities, and everyone across the world. MQFF audiences will be treated to 42 features and 19 documentaries throughout the festival, and in what is becoming an annual tradition...

When it was announced that the latest film from the incredibly talented Melbourne based Academy Award winning filmmaker Adam Elliot was the opening night film for the 2024 Melbourne International Film Festival, it was met with much excitement and the screening was incredibly well received by audiences and critics. With ‘Memoir of a Snail’ coming out in cinemas on October 17, we were delighted and honoured to speak with Adam about the film, his career and much more, along with reviewing this...

At Out Takes, it’s no secret we love highlighting local queer cinema and the talent behind it, so for this program we were delighted to spotlight one of our very own team members who’s new film is having its Australian premiere at this year’s Greek Film Festival. Demetra Giannakopoulos is not only our co-host but also a talented filmmaker and with ‘Love Rewind’, she brings her debut feature film to the big screen this October. This heartfelt story was made in Melbourne and is set against the...

With so much content coming our way on our small and big screens, we took this opportunity to put together a mixed bag of reviews and recommendations for some new releases and welcomes the return of a film festival that is all about accessibility and celebrating people with a disability. We started off with ‘Will & Harper’, a new Netflix documentary that has received a lot of attention due to the involvement of Will Ferrell and the subject matter, specifically looking at the friendship...

For this Out Takes we said Ciao to the St Ali Italian Film Festival which is returning to cinemas this September and October across Australia. We took a look at some of the films on offer, including the gorgeous coming-of-age story ‘The Beautiful Summer’ that follows Ginia, a young working-class woman in Turin navigating the throes of burgeoning adulthood amidst a tumultuous backdrop of pre-WWII Italy, and ‘Gloria!’, which tells the music-fuelled story of an overlooked maid at a Venetian...

When we got the press release about ‘Buried’ it ticked so many boxes that we knew we needed to feature it on the show. This five-part Melbourne-based series brings us the school run drop-off from hell; after single mum Abi accidentally kills a cyclist on the morning school run, her to-do list gets a lot more complicated as she tries to juggle the battle of everyday parenting with the disposal of a corpse. Over the course of one not-so-average school day, Abi must navigate a suspicious rival...

For this Out Takes, we went back to the future to focus on a new local lesbian coming of age rom-com series set in a video store in the 90’s that has just hit Netflix and we took a look at the legacy of an Australian queer film classic about drag queens, fabulous frocks and a bus in the desert. First up was ‘Videoland’, a very funny, quirky and queer Aussie production that centres on teenage video store clerk Hayley who is furtively working her way through a handwritten list of queer films...

In this episode of Out Takes we bring you two extended highlights of interviews with a filmmaker and a distributor in the LGBTIQ filmmaking space. First up is Onir, a fearless gay Indian filmmaker. Onir has been making queer films in India for over 20 years, including My Brother…Nikhil which was one of the first mainstream Hindi films to deal with AIDS and same-sex relationships, and the films I Am, and Pine Cone. Our interview with Onir arose from a short film he co-directed titled Nandini...

For this Out Takes we review AMERICAN PARENT which is screening as part of this year’s QueerScreen Film Festival in its online offerings. AMERICAN PARENT is a tender, heart-warming film about a lesbian couple raising a toddler amid financial and professional uncertainty. We are delighted to interview one of its lead actors KRISTEN BUSH. We review I SAW THE TV GLOW which stars JUSTICE SMITH and BRIDGETT LUNDY-PAINE as two troubled high school students whose connection to their favourite TV...

In this Out Takes we are all about the Melbourne International Film Festival with two in depth interviews. First up we chat with TRACIE LAYMON the writer and director of the film BOB TREVINO LIKES IT which is a gorgeously touching film that tells the story of lonely 20-something Lily Trevino, who unexpectedly forms a close bond with a grieving, childless man named Bob Trevino, who shares the same name as her self-centred father, and how this unexpected friendship, filled with encouragement...

For this Out Takes we review two short films. NANDINI one of the short films within the 2024 INDIAN FILM FESTIVAL OF MELBOURNE opening night film MY MELBOURNE, an anthology of four unique diverse stories based on true incidents themed around the four pillars of diversity – sexuality, gender, disability, and race. NANDINI is a story about Indraneel, a queer Indian man and his estranged father who reunite in Melbourne to complete a ceremonial ritual, exploring their fraught relationship and the...

We are known for celebrating representation and diversity on Out Takes so we embraced the chaos and threw everything in to this one! We turned a very queer eye to the 2024 Olympics and celebrated the record number of LGBTIQA+ athletes competing this year along with the glitz, glamour and Gaga/Celine of the opening ceremony. Then it was our review of Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman’s latest screen collab’ that has the world turning out in droves to enjoy the camp spectacle of ‘Deadpool &...

For this Out Takes, we reviewed two documentaries that looked at the long-term cultural impact of the mid 90’s films ‘Showgirls’ and ‘Kids’ which continue to spark discussion nearly 30 years after their release and the controversy they unleashed on the world. First up was ‘You Don’t Nomi’, which looks at Paul Verhoeven’s ‘Showgirls’ which in 1995 was met by critics and audiences with near-universal derision and then traces the film’s redemptive journey from notorious flop to cult classic, and...

For this Out Takes, we were excited to herald the return of the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival by turning the spotlight directly on to three local filmmakers presenting queer focused short films in this year’s program that offer further proof of the high quality content being produced around Australia. Our first guest was delsi who’s film ‘FEMME’ explores what it means to be a queer femme person in modern Australia through the perspectives of 13 queer people and looks at some of the...

For this Out Takes, we were doing our best Daft Punk impression and going around the world and back again looking at the line up for two international film festivals that are back on in Melbourne this July and August and the return of a film related program to the JOY airwaves that shares a lot in common with our show. First up, we turned the spotlight on full for the program announcement for the 2024 Melbourne International Film Festival (fondly known as MIFF in these parts) and were joined...

For this Out Takes, we highlighted two film festivals on in Melbourne this July and provided some great queer First Nations recommendations to enjoy this NAIDOC week. First up was the return of Marion Pilowsky to discuss her wonderful documentary ‘Isla’s Way’ that we first covered last year for MQFF and is now back screening as part of this year’s Melbourne Documentary Film Festival. We also revisited our interview with Rachael Antony, the director of the Bob Brown documentary ‘The Giants’...

As has become tradition on Out Takes over the past few years, we used this show to rate, review and recommend a very diverse range of films and television for you to check out this winter on the big and small screen. From queer coded classic movies to brand new TV shows, there is literally something for everyone to enjoy. We also threw in an encore presentation of our June 2023 interview with the fabulously funny Nina Oyama and Tom Ballard to celebrate their three well deserved Logie...

For this Out Takes Extra, Demetra spoke with Lesflicks CEO Naomi Bennett for our June 2024 Pride Month special and in this extended interview also covered a wide range of topics from favourite lesbian films, representation, the challenges of distributing and promoting a queer film and much more. Naomi Bennett is the CEO of Lesflicks, the home to the largest collection of authentic sapphic stories of any online streaming service in the world.

While our queer friends in the Northern Hemisphere are celebrating Pride Month in the sun, we’re shivering down under wishing we were there too and wondering what celebrating Pride in June means for us and what it means for what we’re seeing on our small and big screens. We’re pleased to let you know that this June we’ve found two new channels that not only bring you great queer content during Pride season but all year ’round. Our special guests were Hannah Barnes, the Director of Unscripted...

While our friends in the Northern Hemisphere are celebrating Pride Month in the sun, we’re shivering down under wishing we were there too and wondering what celebrating Pride in June means for us and what we’re seeing on our small and big screens. We’re pleased to let you know that this June we’ve found two new channels that not only bring you great queer content during Pride season but all year ’round. Our special guests were Hannah Barnes, the Director of Unscripted & Original...