Overview
In 2015, Brisbane celebrated the arrival of a new film festival. In 2016, the boutique, curated fest doubled in size. Marking its third year in 2017, Queensland Film Festival is back and once again bigger than ever, serving up an 11-day cinema showcase complete with 62 features and shorts, including 46 Australian premieres.
Taking place from July 13 to 23, QFF 2017 boasts straight-from-Cannes hits, local flicks, tributes to Australian hits and a festival-first collaboration with Brisbane's Gallery of Modern Art, in what's shaping up to be a feast of filmic fun. Indeed, the event kicks off with Hong Sang-soo's Claire's Camera, which doesn't only hit Brisbane fresh from the biggest film fest in the world, but is set there as well, starring this year's Oscar nominee Isabelle Huppert. Bookending the fest is Gillian Armstrong's 1982 comedy-musical Starstruck, with the iconic Aussie director in attendance.
In between, the lineup of films — which will largely screen at QFF's long-term home of New Farm Cinemas — will deliver the kind of eclectic array of international cinema that you won't see elsewhere in Brisbane. That includes the Kristen Stewart-starring Certain Women, which hasn't hit the city's screens despite a release down south, as well as Robert Pattinson at his very best in crime thriller Good Time.
Hong Sang-soo pops up again with Berlinale best actress winner On the Beach Alone at Night, Amat Escalante's The Untamed will gift attendees a slice of erotic alien social realism (yes, that's a thing), and, after showing his murder mystery mini-series P'tit Quinquin in 2015, Bruno Dumont's musical Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc comes to QFF from Cannes Director's Fortnight. If you've spotted a musical trend, you're right — and a retrospective screening of Chantal Akerman's Golden Eighties, plus '80s-infused mermaid camp cabaret The Lure, are also among this year's QFF highlights.
Other standouts include enlivening fireworks documentary Brimstone & Glory, Raoul Peck's must-see race relations doco I Am Not Your Negro, and queer romance The Ornithologist, as well as Japanese auteur Sion Sono up to his over-the-top tricks with Antiporno, cult-focused sci-fi/horror The Endless, provocative terrorist thriller Nocturama, and Grace, Who Waits Alone, the debut feature from Brisbane's own Georgia Temple. In addition to a shorts session at the Institute of Modern Art, and an editing panel and screening at QUT, the festival will also serve up a four-film focus on Czech filmmaker Juraj Herz at GOMA. Cinephiles, prepare for a busy July.
Queensland Film Festival runs from July 13 to 23 at New Farm Cinemas, the Gallery of Modern Art, the Institute of Modern Art and Queensland University of Technology's Creative Industries precinct, with a pre-festival screening taking place at the Karawatha Forest Discovery Centre on June 24. To view the full program or buy tickets, head to the festival website.