'It’s a beautiful day on the unceded lands of the Kulin nations. The Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) is in full swing and the climate crisis has delivered some sunshine on the land down under this winter. Issue 106 leads with Pride on the Margins, a dossier guest edited by Stuart Richards and Antoine Damiens that explores queer films that gain value through their circulation on the queer film festival circuit. Their lead essay provides an overview of queer film festival scholarship and argues that queer cinema travels along a number of circuits. Some Indiewood films crossover and reach broader audiences at larger film festivals, while others, such as the work of Xavier Dolan, Desiree Akhavan or Robin Campillo circulate across many at once. Some films do not ‘cross over’ at all and remain in a market often defined as ‘niche.’ Richards and Damiens argue that these films aren’t any less successful or meaningful to their audiences. Pride on the Margins presents an eclectic mix of queer films that, while traversing many film festival circuits, produce queer resonances in the space of the queer film festival.' (Publication summary)
'Cate Blanchett, the celebrated Australian actor, has recently received several prestigious awards including the Golden Globe for Best Actress, for playing Lydia Tár, the American genius, lesbian conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, in Todd Field’s Tár (2022). However, it failed to win any Oscars in 2023, along with Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis (2022). At first glance though there appears to be no basis for comparing the two films on structural aesthetic grounds, I will demonstrate how one might think the two films together in terms of analysing the crafting of a character type or persona in the script and the related choice of styles of acting to embody it. Critically, Tár was largely a success. But Luhrmann’s Elvis was either loved or vehemently loathed by critics in Australia and internationally too.' (Introduction)
