The Mardi Gras Film Festival enters its 32nd year in Sydney from February 13 to 27. The festival holds a mix of in cinema screenings, on-demand streaming around the nation from 28 February to 10 March.
As we come together to celebrate our collective love of queer cinema, we will also be farewelling Lisa, who is moving on from Queer Screen. The festivals longest-serving Festival Director, Lisa has been at the helm for eight years. Prior to accepting the role, she was a volunteer Board Director (and Co-chair of the Board) for five years. Alaisdair Leith sat down with Lisa to talk about this years festival and a look back on her run as festival director.
Alaisdair : Congratulations on your last year. Are you sad or excited or mixed?
Lisa Rose : A bit of a, a bit of a mixed bag to be honest, it’s going to be strange. It’s been 13 years of my life, it’s going to be weird to not be a part of it at all. It’s a bit bittersweet. I’m excited about the future and I’m excited about the last festival.
Alaisdair : Yeah, you should be. It’s a really, really good lineup. I guess we’ll probably go back to the beginning if that’s okay. When did you first get started in the film industry?
Lisa Rose : Yeah, well, this actually was my first sort of job in the film industry, because unless you want to count my nine and a half years working in the Blockbuster video, which I kind of do, that’s how Quentin Tarantino got his start. So I made my claim. Film is my favourite medium of art. I just have always connected with screen stories more so than any other. Particularly growing up in Tasmania in the nineties, you really kind of were grabbing any sort of representation of queer on screen that you possibly could. I always gravitated towards that and I used to come to the festival as a punter and an audience member and then I started volunteering in 2012. It kind of became a bit of a hobby and then it sort of turned into a vocation and then eight years ago it turned into my career.
Alaisdair : What was that journey like going from volunteer to festival director?
Lisa Rose : It was interesting. It was great to be able to have a little bit of a better work-life balance because I had a full-time job and I was volunteering anywhere between like five to 20 hours a week as a volunteer. So being able to then, get paid for the thing that I was passionate about was exciting, but it was a lot. I remember my first festival, I did, it was with our old festival operations manager, Vicky Gutierrez. We did it for five festivals together and we didn’t know what we were doing. We just made it up. And a lot of it is common sense. I came from a background of management and sales and service and marketing. So I kind of put all of those things into it. And then I’d learned a lot from the previous festival director Paul Struthers and the previous festival producer, James Woolley. They really took me under their wing and they taught me everything they knew. And so, it was a steep learning curve. I learned stuff every week, I’m learning new things, even now.
Alaisdair: I’m sure you get asked a lot about advice. So I’ve got two advice questions. The first one is what advice would you give anyone wanting to get into the industry? And more particularly involved with this film festival.
Lisa Rose : So I started as a volunteer the program and assistant industry coordinator started as a volunteer. The person who’s doing our marketing this year started as a volunteer. These organizations really do live and breathe on the fact that we have volunteers helping us do what we do. So that’s my number one piece of advice if people want to get into working in the film festival industry, is to volunteer for film festivals. Show your passion and interest in it. Like no one is full-time. We’re all part-time at different points of the year. So. When opportunities come up, the first kind of thing is if you know that someone is already invested in your organization, it kind of puts you foot first.
And so that would be my number one tip. And the other one is go to festivals, watch films, just make sure that if it is programming and stuff that you’re interested in, you just need to make sure that you’re watching and seeking out films and going to festivals and see how festivals do things.
Alaisdair : Amazing. Second advice question, if you could go back and give your younger self advice when you first entered queer screen, what would that advice be, knowing what you know now?
Lisa Rose : I used to work at a retail company that sold clothes and there was this woman that I worked with and she always had this piece of advice when people would get really stressed and agitated, perhaps even a little bit upset or angry in a meeting or like frustrated. She would just say, “look, calm down. We’re not saving lives. We’re just selling dresses” and I feel like I can’t use that obviously, because I’m not selling dresses. I mean, can we use that phrase and I do feel like the impact that we have can change lives and can really make people feel connected to the community and see themselves reflected and all those sort of things.
So we are having that more impact, but I think it is because you can’t please everyone. So I think it is just going back and telling myself, reminding myself that, that even though I can program a really diverse program, not everyone is going to like every single thing that I do and choose to do with the festival and not to sweat the little stuff and just have faith in yourself.
Alaisdair : Amazing. Great advice. Jumping into the festival, I guess, tell us a little bit about this year’s incredible lineup.
Lisa Rose : Yes. So this festival has nearly 150 LGBTIQ plus films across the features, documentaries and short films. We’ve got 72 sessions of screenings happening across a variety of venues. And also we’ve got a selection of 25 programs that will be on demand Australia-wide as well. We have films that are premiering in Australia and in Sydney. Films that played Cannes, Sundance, Tribeca and and Berlin. It’s really exciting, the calibre of films It’s really impressive.
It’s a really diverse program as well. There are films from all over the world and lots of different genres and identities are represented. We’ve got a lot of films about music as well. It’s kind of a bit of a throughline throughout the festival. There seems to be a plethora of films about queer people this year, many of which are either musicals or focused on musicians. A recurring theme of the festival is celebrating our love for queer cinema and coming together to experience it. There’s nothing quite like the moment when the lights go down, you’re shoving popcorn in your mouth, and you’re watching a queer film on the big screen in a cinema full of queer people and allies—it’s a completely different experience. Love is a central theme because, especially in today’s world, we all need a little more of it. The opening and closing night films reflect this idea, exploring self-love, love from family, and romantic love in all its forms
Alaisdair : Amazing. I think we’re all very excited for Liza, just saying.
Lisa Rose :It is, I can tell you, it is our fastest seller. Liza is, officially the documentary and it’s great that we’re going to be able to play Cabaret on the big screen as well for lots of people. Whenever we do retrospectives, I always ask in the intros how many people are here watching it for the first time, it’s always great. It’s always at least half the audience are getting to see an old classic on the big screen. It’s that kind of movie where you’re like, “Oh, you haven’t seen it” and it’s always a good group.
Alaisdair : Looking back on the last few years I really feel like queer films have exploded. I think they were always there, but probably not in the volume that we get now. So I can only imagine, has that changed a lot for you, when you’re looking at choosing films for the festival Compared to when you started to where it is now?
Lisa Rose : Yeah, yeah. you’re definitely able to choose from a lot more.
Alaisdair :Because I know, traditionally, the, you know, coming out young gay man story was pretty much all we had. For a very very long time.
Lisa Rose : Yeah. It’s interesting and obviously, the opening night film is a coming-of-age coming-out film, but even though it is, it’s, like everyone, all of us who watched it, we’re all like, it’s still so unique. It’s like a warm hug, So it has changed a lot, particularly the volume of films that is getting made, but it’s also the overall quality of the films that are getting made. There’s been a lot of films, particularly centring on gay men over the years and there’s getting that diversity of different people from the community. Stories about women and stories about the trans and non-binary community, there’s a greater variety of those. Honestly, there was a period of time where, if you made a trans film, or a film focused on a lesbian or a bisexual woman, it was pretty much getting programmed, like it had no competition, but now there are so many films that are actually missing out because we can’t fit it in the program. The other thing is as well, it’s also a competitive environment that we’re in. So not only with streaming, like a lot of films, you know, back in the day, had a sort of run on the festival circuit, like they would be on the festival circuit for like a year to 18 month, then they would go to video and DVD and all those sort of things and then on TV, if they got distribution, they’re not doing that now.
A lot of films will go to streaming after playing one festival. Or they don’t play festivals at all and just go straight to streaming , it’s good to see a lot more films are getting distribution in Australia, which is great. There’s also the competition that we have. with the other festivals. This is our 32nd year, going back 32 years ago, we were pretty much the only festival, particularly in Sydney, that was playing queer content. Over the last few years, like a lot of other festivals are starting to recognise the importance of this and that there’s an audience for it.
This is one of the most challenging years I had, like in locking my program because I had the highest number of feature films that I’ve ever invited say no once I’d invited them. So it does make it a challenge for queer festivals who’ve been really the ones kind of pushing the importance of this, there’s so much more competition now that, you know, sales agents, distributors, filmmakers, sometimes, don’t want, even though the film is a quick film, they don’t want it playing at a quick festival. Like it’s because we are the audience that want it more than anything else. And so that is probably one of the, along with like just. you know, cost of living and the, and the funding and all those sort of things. That’s probably one of the biggest challenges that will happen beyond my tenure is that competition.
Alaisdair : How does streaming play a part and did that change your approach to choosing films for the festival at all? Because you would have seen that come in really quickly, accelerated by COVID. Did that affect the films you selected? Were you able to go, oh yeah, this will be good for cinemas, this will be good for our streaming platform?
Lisa Rose : I mean it was a bit of a steep learning curve. So obviously there is a silver lining to the pandemic that you know, we had an environment that at least was conducive to being streamed. As an industry, we didn’t suffer potentially as much as some other arts industries, we kind of sat back, we were really lucky. Our festival happened, our main festival, it was our most successful, the biggest festival that we had in terms of finances that we had done in over a decade in 2020. Then the pandemic hit Australia about 10 days after our festival finished. So we were incredibly lucky but we were able to sit back and kind of see what the industry did, so being able to then move forward with a hybrid offering, like a lot of festivals aren’t doing it anymore and a lot of filmmakers and sales agents, distributors won’t allow their films to be part of a hybrid festival anymore.
Because they want to go back to the pre-pandemic kind of way of, cause it’s all, it’s so much of it’s about protecting their asset and, and the, and getting their financial return. So they want to be able to sell to a distributor. They want to be able to sell to a streamer. If it has been, you know, available at a festival in a, in a territory, it might be like less than their ability to be able to do that.
We do quite well online, but it is at this stage. I’m beholden to who says yes about being part of the online program and who says no, which a lot of them, unfortunately, are saying no now.
Alaisdair: Look, what are some of your, I don’t want to say favourite films because I know people hate being asked that question, but over your tenure, what are some really memorable moments during the festival where you found a film, picked it and seeing the audience reaction and response to it.
Lisa Rose :Yeah, that is a really good question. Over my whole tenure. I got to open the festival twice with Australian films and the first time I did it was for the 2020 festival with Ellie and Abby (and Ellie’s dead aunt) that was the first time in our history that we’ve been able to open the festival with an Australian feature. I think In my tenure is the biggest-selling lesbian film that we’ve ever had in the 13 years that we’ve been together., The cool thing about it was, an opening night is always a really diverse audience,it also has the most amount of straight people and allies as well. Because of the volume of films that we’re doing, a lot of people don’t necessarily go outside their lane from their identity of the LGBTIQ plus community. So it’s not like a lot of gay men are going to usually watch lesbian films. But there was a lot of gay men there that night, and the amount of them that came up to me afterwards. Being like, “I nearly wasn’t going to come and I just thought, Oh, I will, and it was so good. Like, it was so funny and that was like the best”. It won our audience award, which is, you know, not the normal for an opening night film to do that either, So that was definitely a highlight. There are a couple of other things that kind of happened throughout the journey. I remember when I was still on the board before I was the first director. We screened Moonlight about four days after it had won the Oscar to a room of 800 mostly queer people, and that was a pretty phenomenal experience. I also had a couple of guests come to the festival from Canada who were from a web series called Camilla, which was really popular with a lot of young queer women and non binary people.They did meet and greets while they were here, people flew in from all over the country to meet them. I was telling our board about the fact that this is who I was bringing. None of them knew who they were. And I was like, trust me, this would be good, it was just the most amazing experience to be there. People became friends in the queue and that experience of making people have the greatest day of their life at that point.
Alaisdair : Thank you so much for chatting with us. And congratulations on an incredible run as Festival Director. We cannot wait to see what you do next.
Lisa : Thank you so much. You’ve always been such a great supporter. I really appreciate it.
Thank you to Lisa for giving your time, and for an incredible tenure as festival director.
The Mardi Gras Film Festival is in-cinemas across Sydney 13 to 27th of February, highlights will be available to stream, on demand, around the nation from 28 February to 10 March. You can buy tickets here
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