Mardi Gras Film Festival returns with Wachowskis, Quentin Crisp and sold-out sapphic cinema

Six days, thirty years of Bound, and Joan Chen discovering herself later in life.

Told by Paige Turner · 3 September 2026

The Mardi Gras Film Festival's back, 3–8 September, and Queer Screen's gone big on anniversaries, queer icons, and exactly one film brave enough to put Glenn Close and Penélope Cruz in the same frame.

Bound — the Wachowskis' 1996 neo-noir sapphic heist — screens Friday 4 September for its thirtieth anniversary, still selling fast, still a masterpiece. Thirty years ago it was a revelation: a lesbian thriller that treated desire, competence and danger as the same currency, made by two directors who would later come out as trans women and reshape blockbuster cinema entirely. In the three decades since, sapphic cinema's had exactly two modes: miserably literary or Netflix forgettable, which makes Bound's return feel less like nostalgia and more like a rebuke.

The festival opens Thursday 3 September with Body Blow, described as a neon-soaked homage to 1980s erotic thrillers packed with kink and danger, and closes across six days with a programme that toggles between queer history and contemporary work. The Naked Civil Servant, John Hurt as Quentin Crisp in 1930s and '40s England, screens for its fiftieth anniversary — the landmark film that made the decision to be openly gay in a violently conservative decade look like both an act of defiance and an exercise in sheer bloody-mindedness.

Joan Chen — Saving Face, Twin Peaks, Didi — takes the lead in Montreal, My Beautiful, a romantic drama about discovering queer identity later in life. That session's sold out, as is La Bola Negra, the Cannes Best Director winner starring Penélope Cruz and Glenn Close, billed as boldly romantic and politically urgent. Lukas Dhont, who made Close and Girl, returns with Coward, a historical romance between two soldiers during the First World War; that one's sold out too.

Queer Screen's scheduled industry programming alongside the festival: Queer Screen Studio runs Sunday 6 September as a day of masterclasses, panels and networking, and the Queer Screen Pitch Off on Saturday 5 September puts Australian filmmakers in front of a panel competing for a share of $10,000. There are shorts packages — Sydney-based work, trans and gender diverse stories, comedy chaos — and on-demand access for regional audiences who can't make it to a cinema in the first week of September.

The programme includes Miss Peppermint's documentary, Hunky Jesus about the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a Goran Stolevski shorts retrospective, and Sweet Milk Lake, a tender Australian drama with Harvey Zielinski from Deadloch. Nina Oyama moderates a live filmmaker Q&A for Lesbian Space Princess on the Sunday.

Six days, fifty films, four sold-out sessions before the festival's even opened, and Bound still selling fast three decades after it taught everyone how to do it properly. If you're wondering whether there's appetite for queer cinema that trusts its audience, the box office answered that one already.