new farm queer film festival

new farm queer film festival

Sunday 2 August 2.25pm

NFQFF: THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER

129 mins | Rated CTC

Kristen Stewart’s splashy Cannes-premiering directorial debut poetically adapts writer Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir.

Lidia (an astonishing Imogen Poots, Green Room) only feels whole when she’s in the water. Kicking through lap after lap, she can temporarily float free of the cold, rageful father who sexually abused her and her older sister Claudia (Thora Birch, American Beauty) while their apathetic mother turned away. Out of the pool, Lidia flounders, ruining her college swimming scholarship with booze, drugs and reckless sex and lashing out contemptuously at anyone who shows her kindness. But when she joins a collaborative creative writing class led by One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest author and countercultural hero Ken Kesey (Jim Belushi), Lidia finds the same fluid escape in writing. She’s back in her lane – focused, flourishing.

As an actor, Kristen Stewart (Personal Shopper) has been one of cinema’s most subtle, fascinating interpreters of interiority. Stewart invites comparisons to Terrence Malick as she tells Lidia’s story in intense, elliptical vignettes that ebb and flow on currents of memory, while Poots is as tender and fierce onscreen as she is dreamlike and sardonic in voiceover.

Sunday 2 August 9.50pm

NFQFF: BLUE FILM

82 mins | Rated Unrated18+

AUSTRALIAN PREMIERE.

When fetish camboy Aaron Eagle (Kieron Moore) visits a client in exchange for $50,000, he discovers a masked man (Reed Birney) with a camera and a series of increasingly probing questions. But when the man reveals a disturbing connection to Aaron’s past, the two drop their personas and gradually reveal their true desires in a seductive thriller being called “one of the most daring American films of recent vintage.”

Sunday 2 August 6.35pm

NFQFF: DEPARTURES

Departures draws immediate comparisons to great 90’s British features Trainspotting and Human Traffic, from Danny Boyle and his compatriots.

It’s instant chemistry when Benji encounters Jake at an airport departures gate. Benji and Jake’s relationship unfolds through Amsterdam trips and intimacy, revealing complex power dynamics. A must-see British comedy-drama that dissects a toxic relationship with humour and raw emotion.

Sunday 2 August 8.15pm

NFQFF: ANATOMY OF HELL

After attempting suicide, a young woman (Amira Casar) makes a startling proposition to the gay man (Rocco Siffredi) who rescued her: she will pay him to watch her naked body over the course of four nights as long as he provides “impartial” commentary about what he sees.

Thus ensues Anatomy of Hell, one of the most controversial films of Catherine Breillat’s career—a singularly daring meditation on the pleasures and horrors of the flesh. Buoyed by the two leads’ fearless performances, Anatomy of Hell is as much a philosophical treatise on the hidden traumas of sexuality as it is an increasingly unsettling battle of the sexes, with Breillat using a hushed chamber-play setup to show the spectator no quarter throughout the transgressive proceedings. The result is like nothing else, even within the director’s audacious oeuvre: her deepest expression of anguish over the unspeakable ecstasies and degradations of the body erotic.

Content Warning: ANATOMY OF HELLfeatures depictions and discussions of subject matters that may distress some viewers. Viewer discretion is advised.

77 mins | Rated R18+

82 mins | Rated CTC

Content Warning: BLUE FILM features depictions and discussions of subject matters that may distress some viewers. Viewer discretion is advised.

Sunday 2 August 12.45pm

NFQFF: SHE’S THE HE

81 mins | Rated CTC

QLD PREMIERE.

Before graduation, Ethan and Alex pose as trans women in a last ditch effort to quell gay rumours. It’s all a joke until Ethan realises: she really is trans. The two must reckon with their changing friendship, coming out, and coming-of-age.