Out Takes

18 Feb 2025

Invisible Boys, Queer and AIDC 2025

TV & Film

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For this Out Takes it was a mixed bag of reviews and interviews to celebrate the arrival of a new Aussie series based on a much loved queer coming of age novel, the latest release from Italian auteur Luca Guadagnino and the return of the Australian International Documentary Conference. First up we reviewed ‘Invisible Boys’, the new LGBTQ coming-of-age Australian series set in the unforgiving Western Australian coastal city of Geraldton, with the 2017 plebiscite on same-sex marriage as the backdrop, It follows a quartet of gay young men trying to figure out how to navigate family, friends and the expectations put on them and is adapted by director Nicholas Verso from Holden Sheppard’s award-winning 2019 novel of the same name. We always love shining a light on new local queer productions and it’s fair to say this latest offering is a promising start to the year ahead for local LGBTQ content on our small screens. Next up we turned we’re turned our attention to ‘Queer’, which is directed by Out Takes favourite Luca Guadagnino and based on the 1985 novella by William S. Burroughs. Set in 1950s Mexico City, the film follows an outcast American expatriate played by Daniel Craig who becomes infatuated with a much younger man played by Drew Starkey and it features Jason Schwartzman and Lesley Manville in supporting roles. Director John Waters ranked Queer second on a list of his favourite movies of 2024, writing that Craig “may be queerbait for taking on the gay beatnik role of William Burroughs’s alter ego, but I’m all for it’ – we couldn’t agree more! Finally, we welcomed back the return of the Australian International Documentary Conference aka AIDC which is back on in Melbourne in early March. The 2025 AIDC program includes over 40 sessions, more than 115 speakers and 90 industry decision makers and is inspired by the theme “Future Telling: New Horizons in Documentary & Factual Storytelling”. One of the key elements of delivering a successful conference is the program and we were delighted to be joined by AIDC Programmer Alice McShane to get the full scoop on how they’ve pulled together this phenomenal line up for 2025 and some of the many highlights on offer at this year’s conference.

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