This year’s prize pool was valued at over $16,000 in cash and in-kind support, with awards including Emerging Performer, Emerging Filmmaker, Best Screenplay, Best Film and the Audience Award.
Photography by Sharon Hickey
Queer Screen has proudly announced the winners who are creating LGBTQIA+ cinematic excellence as part of the 33rd Mardi Gras Film Festival.
This year’s award winners include the recipients of My Queer Career and the Queer Screen Completion Fund.
Since 2016, the Queer Screen Completion Fund has aimed to provide Australian LGBTIQ+ filmmakers with financial support to complete production on narrative features and documentaries.
This year’s recipients were selected by a jury including Bobby Romia, Kath Shelper and Greg Waters.
The winners of the Completion Fund are Cooee, directed by Toby Morris, and How Quickly Clouds Move, directed by Armin Džafić, Richard Jamze, and Natalie Rose.
Each project will receive $5,000 to support the completion of its narrative feature film.
And the winners are…
Cooee, directed by Toby Morris, is a sci-fi coming-of-age set twenty years in the future.
In small-town Australia, there’s no work, no hope, but a whole lot of hopeless teenagers out to drive fast, hunt roos, get laid and escape into a virtual wonderland.
“We’ve all grown up watching images of a futuristic America in films like Blade Runner and Interstellar; Cooee responds, ‘meanwhile, in Jindabyne’.” said director Morris.
“We cannot wait to be able to share this wild, strange and unabashedly queer vision of Australia’s future with the world,”
How Quickly Clouds Move, directed by Armin Džafić, Richard Jamze and Natalie Rose, follows two estranged childhood friends who reunite during a chance drug deal.
As the struggling dealer and an addicted realtor catch up, their night morphs into a confronting look at family, culture and sexuality.
Co-director Armin Džafić said, “We’re so thankful to Queer Screen for giving independent queer films like ours a chance. We’re also deeply honoured to join the lineup of amazing films that Queer Screen has supported over the years.”
