by Liam Heitmann-Ryce-LeMercier
After eight years as Director of Queer Screen’s annual Mardi Gras Film Festival, Lisa Rose will step down this year – and leave behind a legacy of LGBTQ+ storytelling on the silver screen and beyond.
This year’s festival showcases nearly 150 entries, across narrative features, documentaries, and short films. The theme uniting all of the films is one of union, coming together to share queer stories of all backgrounds and inspirations.
“Audiences – and the world – could use a little bit of love right now,” Lisa says, just days after the re-election of Donald Trump, whose removal of anti-discrimination protections for transgender citizens is a particularly sharp example.
Lisa’s time at Queer Screen began in 2012, when she started volunteering while working a sales and service role elsewhere. However, she does proudly admit, “I am very Quentin Tarantino-esque in the fact that I did work at a video store, back in the nineties and early 2000s.”
With a passionate interest in queer stories and representation, energised by her volunteer work with Queer Screen, an epiphany eight years ago drove Lisa to realise that her passion needed to become a career.
Around this time, a vacancy for festival director became available. She applied, and has been in the position ever since.
Above all, her love of cinema forms the centre of everything she does. “Watching a film in the cinema: the lights go down, the sound… You can really escape, really put yourself in the shoes of someone else for two hours.”
The emotional connection that she feels in this way is unique to the experience of cinema, Lisa says.
“When you’re reading a book or looking at a painting, it’s just one medium. But the fact that screen covers so many different elements, I think, is one of the reasons why I really connect with it.”
She recalls a “lightbulb moment” in her queer awakening, aged 18 or 19, when she rented a lesbian film from Canada, When Night Is Falling, while working at the video store with her then boyfriend.
They watched the film together, only for Lisa to immediately rewind the video the moment her boyfriend left.
“It was not long after that,” she reflects, “that I no longer had a boyfriend. It really was the film that made me realise there were people like me, who were having those feelings.”
A particular triumph in her tenure, Lisa was able to programme a restoration of the film at last year’s Mardi Gras Film Festival. “Back in the nineties,” she posits, “it was a lot harder to find that kind of community and representation, so that really helped me come out. I think queer cinema still has the power to do that now, for many people.”
As the Festival celebrates its 32nd event in 2025, there is much to reflect on as Lisa sees her final year as director. A pinpoint highlight, she says, came at Mardi Gras Film Festival #27, where she opened the international roster of films with Australian-made entry Ellie and Abbie (and Ellie’s Dead Aunt).
“The thing about opening with an Australian film,” Lisa says, “it’s not so much about the industry, but opening with a queer film is a really great thing to do because our audience is often the most diverse.”
She attributes this to the novelty factor of the festival’s opening night. It was a huge achievement for Lisa to look into the crowd that night and see so many men watching a queer drama, given this demographic would not consciously seek out such a story.
“So many of them came out, like, That was great!” she recalls. “It ended up winning the Audience Award, which was amazing. Putting the film in a slot where it has the ability to elevate and to have people opening their eyes, to see a film they probably would not have chosen to — that will be one of my highlights. Getting people to step outside their identity to experience life in someone else’s shoes.”
In a role that she describes as all-consuming, Lisa asserts that there is no end to the number of things that could be done to make each festival better. In particular, locking-in the final programme of films each year is an increasingly fearsome task.
“It is becoming even more of a challenge now, because it’s such a competitive market with streaming services, and other festivals, and all the distribution. For a long time, we were the ones championing that,” she says.
“The most challenging aspect has been trying to convince people of the importance of why our festival still exists, why they should be selecting their queer film to play for a predominantly queer audience.”
As she leaves behind a celebrated near decade-long run as director of the Mardi Gras Film Festival, Lisa Rose takes with her a passion for cinema and the firmly-held belief in seeing the world from a queer point of view.
The Queer Screen Mardi Gras Film Festival is on 13 – 27 February in cinema and On Demand Australia-wide 28 February – 10 March 2025. For more information, click here.
