by FilmInk Staff
Five Star Cinemas are proud to announce the program for the 4th annual New Farm Queer Film Festival (NFQFF).
Running from Oct 2-12 at New Farm Cinemas, the festival will present premiere screenings of award-winning titles from Sundance, Berlin, Cannes and Locarno, and brand-new restorations.
The festival will open with the QLD Premiere of Twinless, an audience award winner at Sundance.
Highlights presented in the festival’s Spotlight strand include The Little Sister (Cannes – Best Actress winner), Dreams (Sex/Love) (thematic ‘Oslo trilogy’, Dreams won Best Film at Berlin) and Nineteen (produced by Luca Guadagnino).
This edition of the festival will introduce the After Dark festival strand, presenting audiences three bold and daring films, best viewed late.
Opening Night: Twinless | USA | dir. James Sweeney | QLD Premiere Tickets include a drink on arrival.
Dylan O’Brien and director and co-star James Sweeney shine in this queer bromance comedy about two grieving twins. An ingenious, unpredictable, and hilarious crowd favourite from Sundance. Equal parts darkly funny and melancholic, the less you know going into Sweeney’s slippery narrative the better. Roman (O’Brien, Ponyboi QFF24) returns to his hometown for the funeral of his identical twin, Rocky. Rocky was extroverted, intelligent, gay, and adored by many – Roman’s exact opposite. Untethered from his other half, Roman finds support in the form of a twin bereavement group. It’s here that he sparks an instant connection with Dennis (Sweeney), who reminds him of his late brother. A friendship for the ages, the chemistry between Dennis and Roman has an almost too familial quality to it. Unlike anything before it, this duplicitous gem will have you gagging in your seat. No spoilers!
Spotlight: Dreams (Sex Love) | Norway | dir. Dag John Haugerud QLD Premiere
Johanne, 17, has written a novel in which a high school student falls in love with her newly arrived French teacher, Johanna – an intimate bildungsroman of sexual awakening, budding obsession and eventual flirtation that, in the specificity of its details, appears to blur fact and fiction. Unbowed by any notion of shame, Johanne shares the story with the two most important people in her life: her single mother, Kristin, and grandmother Karin, herself a published poet. Startled by this daring work, Kristin and Karin begin to wonder if its events are real or fantasy. But as they attempt to uncover the truth, they are forced to face the lack of passion in their own lives.
Winner of the Golden Bear for Best Film at this year’s Berlinale – the first Norwegian film to ever claim the top honour – Dreams (Sex Love) marks the final chapter in Dag Johan Haugerud’s Sex/Love/Dreams trilogy (all screening at NFQFF). Hailed for its uniquely sensitive depiction of a transformative first crush, as well as its intelligent exploration of writing, inspiration and the power of taking control of one’s own narrative, this achingly empathetic film makes for a brilliant culmination to Haugerud’s disarming cinematic triptych.
Hot Milk | UK | dir. Rebecca Lenkiewicz | Australian Premiere
Rose (Fiona Shaw) and her daughter Sofia (Emma Mackey, Sex Education) journey to a Spanish seaside town to meet an enigmatic healer. As Sofia embraces an affair with an alluring stranger (Vicky Krieps, Phantom Thread), tensions with her overbearing mother threaten their fragile bond. Based on the novel of the same name by Deborah Levy, Hot Milk is the directorial debut of Ida & Disobedience screenwriter Rebecca Lenkiewicz.
The Little Sister | France | dir. Hafsia Herzi | Australian Premiere
This year’s Cannes Queer Palm and Best Actress winning film showcases a remarkable breakout performance in this deeply moving portrait of a French-Algerian woman attempting to reconcile her sexuality with her cultural identity. Grounded by astounding lead performances, Hafsia Herzi’s film gently navigates the internal conflict between sexuality and religion. Fatima (incredible newcomer Nadia Melliti ) is at the precipice of graduating high school. She dresses and acts like “one of the boys”, but gets into a fight one day when her sexuality is challenged. The altercation triggers an emotional asthma attack for Fatima – which serendipitously leads to an unexpected meet-cute with a Korean nurse, Ji-Na (Ji-Min Park, Return to Seoul). While she dives into the dating apps, partaking in chatty drinks and steamy hook-ups, Fatima slowly falls in love with Ji-Na. But she is compelled to find a way to square this newfound love – for Ji-Na, for herself, and for dating women – with her Muslim faith.
Love | Norway | dir. Dag Johan Haugerud | QLD Premiere
While travelling by ferry – a popular cruising destination in more ways than one – a commitment-shy doctor has a life-changing brush with contemporary hook-up culture. Marianne (Andrea Bræin Hovig) is a urologist at an Oslo hospital, tasked with delivering prostate cancer diagnoses to male patients. Reluctant to seek out any serious relationships, she lets her friend fix her up with a date on the nearby peninsula of Nesodden, just a short ferry ride away. When she meets work colleague Tor en route and he confides that he uses the cruise as a hotspot for Grindr hook-ups, Marianne begins to wonder if a random sexual encounter of her own might be a way to bring some frisson to her life, and to distract from the spectre of death that looms over her day job. But as she and Tor each discover, nothing is ever simple in the realm of sexual intimacy. Premiering in Competition at Venice, the second part of Dag Johan Haugerud’s Sex/Love/Dreams trilogy is an exploration of the differing expectations that are imposed on people of varied sexual orientations, and that individuals place upon themselves.
Allowing its themes to unfold via meticulous character development – a skill Haugerud has honed over his parallel career as a novelist – Love expertly interrogates the centrality of sex to the human experience.
Misericordia | France | dir. Alain Guiraudie | QLD Premiere
Alain Guiraudie (Stranger by the Lake) returns with the sharp, sinister, and slyly funny thriller MISERICORDIA. In the autumnal, woodsy village of Saint-Martial, Jérémie (Félix Kysyl), an out-of-work baker, has returned to his hometown after the death of his beloved former boss, The Baker. When Jérémie asks to extend his visit, he begins to insert himself into his mentor’s family’s life, including The Baker’s kind-hearted widow Martine (Catherine Frot) and venomously angry son Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand). When Vincent disappears, an investigation takes place amongst the carnal world of violence and eroticism that emanates throughout Jérémie, the town, and its inhabitants.
Nineteen (Diciannove) | Italy | dir. Giovanni Tortorici QLD Premiere
Produced by none other than Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name, Challengers), Nineteen chronicles the restless sexual and intellectual awakening of a young man. Nineteen-year-old Leonardo (a remarkable Manfredi Marini) is eager to leave home and his native Sicily behind, and strikes out for bustling London, where a business degree awaits him. But, finding that he doesn’t feel a connection to the city nor his studies, he heads back to Siena, with a mind to study Italian literature instead. There, he quickly falls in love with the classics – even as he struggles with academia’s rigidity and self-sabotages every romantic interaction. Don’t expect a neat coming-of-age arc from this bold and spirited debut from Giovanni Tortorici, in which star Marini seems wholly at ease, balancing youthful charm and adolescent acrimony.
After Dark: Our After Dark strand presents three films best viewed late – two from new voices, and a new restoration from a must-see filmmaker, are challenging and enticing films: soon to be cult-classics.
Baby | Brazil | dir. Marcelo Caetano
São Paulo’s streets can offer danger or opportunity, and for Wellington (aka Baby), they deliver both. After being released from a juvenile detention center, 18-year-old Baby
(Joã o Pedro Mariano) finds himself alone and adrift, without any contact from his parents and lacking the resources to rebuild his life. He encounters Ronaldo (Ricardo Teodoro), a mature and handsome sex worker, who takes him under his wing and teaches him new ways of surviving. Gradually, their fiery relationship turns into a conflicting passion, oscillating between exploitation and protection, jealousy and complicity, and as he’s drawn further into Ronaldo’s world, Wellington must decide what he really wants from life.
Dead Lover | USA | dir. Grace Glowicki | QLD Premiere
A lonely gravedigger who stinks of corpses finally meets her dream man, but their whirlwind affair is cut short when he tragically drowns at sea. Grief-stricken, she goes to morbid lengths to resurrect him through madcap scientific experiments, resulting in grave consequences and unlikely love.
Ma mère | France | dir. Christophe Honoré
Recently restored in 2K, we present a rare screening of Christophe Honoré’s transgressive and divisive Ma mère. One of the most audacious queer filmmakers working today, Honoré’s daring and taboo second feature adapts Georges Bataille’s controversial posthumous novel. Not for the faint of heart! Somewhere in the Canary Islands, promiscuous mother Hélène (Isabelle Huppert, The Piano Teacher), cool and in charge, and her pious Catholic teenaged son Pierre (Louis Garrel, The Dreamers), just back from boarding school, discuss his father’s infidelity. But when the family patriarch dies in a car crash, Hélène launches into a wild series of parties, gradually involving her son in her debaucherous nights out.
Official Selection: The Offical Selection of this year’s festival includes new works featured at Berlin, SXSW & Locarno. We spotlight a quirky pair of films from Georgia, a thematic trilogy of Oslo-set dramas, a contemporary non-binary feature from the US, a Catholic lesbian romance from Slovenia, and a restored classic of ’90s Australian indie.
Gondola | Georgia | dir. Veit Helmer | QLD Premiere
In the Georgian mountains, a cable car connects a village with a smaller town in the valley. Iva started working for the cable car as a conductor and is now in charge of handling the gondolas. While one gondola goes up to the village, the other goes down to the valley. Halfway down, the gondolas meet every half hour. This is exactly the moment when Iva and Nina, the conductor of the other gondola, meet each time. Where at the beginning only collegial greetings were exchanged, over time a flirtation develops. What follows is the big love and stress with the boss.
Holy Electricity | Georgia | dir. Tato Kotetishvili Australian Premiere
In this absurdist Georgian comedy, a pair of grifters who scheme to get rich find unexpected love and self-acceptance. When young Gonga and his cousin Bart find a suitcase full of rusty crosses in a scrapyard, Bart gets the idea to turn them into neon crucifixes and sell them door-to-door to the gullible inhabitants of Tbilisi. Their crusade through the suburbs of the city becomes a quest for love and friendship.
Little Trouble Girls | Slovenia | dir. Urška Djukić | QLD Premiere
Catholic school choir practice becomes the catalyst for a teenage girl’s sexual awakening in this lush, emotionally resonant coming-of-age story. Not long after naive 16-year-old Lucia joins her Slovenian Catholic school’s all-girl choir, she’s taken under the wing of fellow alto Ana Maria, an extroverted senior student. Queen bee Ana Maria and her popular group enlighten Lucia on the essentials of girlhood that their strict religious education doesn’t cover: they try on lipstick, practise kissing and compare their experiences of puberty (although Lucia shyly admits that her own period hasn’t started yet). When the girls’ nascent desires come to a head on a weekend trip for intensive choir rehearsals, their precarious adolescent friendship is thrown off balance. Taking its title from a Sonic Youth song and taking home the Perspectives sidebar’s FIPRESCI Prize at the 2025 Berlinale, this sensual feature debut from award-winning filmmaker Urška Djukić gives us a fresh, frank feminine perspective on coming of age. Surreal imagery, verdant time-lapse photography and evocative sound design plunge us into the heady confusion of Lucia’s blossoming sexuality, inevitably entangled in Catholic guilt, social initiation rites, hormonal urges and crises of faith.
Love & Other Catastrophes | Australia dir. Emma-Kate Croghan
Emma-Kate Croghan’s rom-com about five university students and their intertwined sexual and academic crises captures all the chaos and energy of 1990s Melbourne. Mia (Francis O’Connor, Mansfield Park), an ambitious film studies student, finds herself entangled in a web of relationships and miscommunications. Her housemate
Alice (Alice Garner) is a frustrated perfectionist, four years late with her thesis and looking for a man to fit her rigorous relationship criteria. Their search for love and a new housemate transcends the boundaries of the University and their respective disciplines. As the day ends and the party begins events begin to unscramble in unexpected ways.
Omina Vincit Amor… Love Conquers All!
Outerlands | USA | dir. Elena Oxman | QLD Premiere
Asia Kate Dillon (Billions) and Lea DeLaria (Orange is the New Black) star in this poignant, introspective drama about a cash-strapped non-binary nanny. Cass (Dillon) juggles work as a nanny, waiter and dealer to make ends meet in San Francisco. After a one night stand with co-worker Kalli (Louisa Krause, Superman), Cass agrees to watch her 11 year-old daughter Ari while she’s out of town. More Peter Pan than Mary Poppins, they bond over a shared love of video games. But when Kalli drops off the grid it resurfaces abandonment issues for both Ari and Cass. Inspired by writer-director Elena Oxman’s own deeply personal journey, Outerlands explores the quiet ache of adulthood through the lens of childhood memory.
Sex | Norway | dir. Dag Johan Haugerud | QLD Premiere
Two Oslo co-workers – a chimneysweep and his manager – are ostensibly straight middle-aged men with wives and children. Yet, in long on-the-job conversations, they open up to one another about recent experiences that have challenged their conceptions of gender and sexuality: for one, a random first sexual encounter with a man; for the other, dreams of inhabiting the body of a woman. These experiences create ripple effects in their lives, from how each man relates to his sons to how each is understood by his wife. Premiering to acclaim at Berlin, the first entry in novelist-turned-filmmaker Dag Johan Haugerud’s Oslo trilogy (Sex/Love/Dreams) is a thoughtful, sensitive exploration of masculinity and identity. There’s no sex in Sex – just nuanced, intimate discussions in which deftly penned dialogue unpacks deep themes like support vs judgement, the fragility of our self-concepts and the place sex holds in responsibility-laden adult lives.
