Queer Screen - Mardi Gras Film Festival

There have been lesbian and gay film festivals in Sydney since 1978. Initially these were run by the AFI. In 1986, the AFI partnered with what was then the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, to present an annual 'Sydney Gay Film Week' during the Mardi Gras festival. The film festival was taken over by commercial concerns in 1991 but still screened as a highlight of the Mardi Gras season. In 1993, a group of queer Sydney filmmakers, students and others approached Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras with a view to establishing an independent organisation whose primary focus was queer film and screen culture. This organisation, Queer Screen, had the central aim of reclaiming Sydney's LGBT film festival as owned and operated by the community. From that time, Mardi Gras was the principal funding body of Queer Screen, initially with a five-year funding agreement, followed by a three-year agreement in 1998. This agreement came to an end with the 2001 Mardi Gras Film Festival. The Mardi Gras Film Festival has grown considerably since 1993. It is now one of Australia’s largest film festivals of any kind, and one of the top five queer film festivals in the world. It is highly regarded by filmmakers all over the world and is the most important avenue for promoting gay and lesbian titles to distributors and exhibitors in this territory. For 10 years, Queer Screen's documentary festival, queerDOC, was the first and only LGBT documentary festival in the world, and the annual My Queer Career competition is Australia's richest prize for LGBTIQ short films. Since 2013, a second film festival, Queer Screen Film Fest, has become a major event that delivers the latest LGBTIQ+ movies to Sydney’s screens in the month of August. Since 2016 Queer Screen has awarded $162,000 in funding to Australian filmmakers through it’s Queer Screen Completion Fund. Since 2018 Queer Screen has awarded $60,000 in production funding for Australian LGBTIQ short films through Queer Screen PitchOff.