"Queensland Film Festival is in some ways a utopian film festival," says director and co-founder John Edmond.



It's a female-first utopia, going by this year's festival, opening today: 80 per cent of the films in the program are by women or non-binary directors.



It's a stark contrast with the Cannes Film Festival, which this year was criticised for having just three female directors in an official competition field of 21 (or 14 per cent).



Locally, Sydney Film Festival achieved gender parity in its official competition berth, but its full line-up featured roughly 35 per cent female-directed films, compared to roughly 61 per cent by men (roughly 3 per cent were by male-female directing teams).

Melbourne Film Festival, opening in August, tallies at roughly 34 per cent for female-directed films, and roughly 60 per cent for male-directed films.



But Edmond says surpassing gender parity at Queensland Film Festival (QFF) has been more happy accident than deliberate design.



Running since 2015 and co-founded with Huw Walmsley-Evans, QFF's mandate is far less commercial than Australia's major film festivals. Edmond describes it as an event for "film devourers" looking "beyond popular-driven ideas of cinema."



"I'm not anti-commerce, but what I'm passionate about is movies with flavour and colour that just pop through, and that carry with them a sense of purpose about why they exist."

Director Lucrecia Martel is best known for her 2008 film The Headless Woman, nominated for Cannes Film Festival's Palme d'Or. ( Supplied: Limelight Distribution )

This year's program is a considered tour of world art cinema. The biggest names on the line-up are Scottish director Lynne Ramsay, with her nervy meditation on crime and trauma You Were Never Really Here, starring Joaquin Phoenix; and Argentinian director Lucrecia Martel, with her woozy, shimmering anti-colonial nightmare Zama.

Cinephiles may be more excited by retrospectives of avant garde work by pioneering Czech filmmaker Věra Chytilová (best known for her 1966 film Daisies), French filmmaker Valerie Massadian (Milla) and Belgian filmmaking partners Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani (Let the Corpses Tan), who will attend.

Closer to home are two features from Australian women: Terror Nullius, a collaged #auspol anti-manifesto by Australia video art duo Soda_Jerk, which will open the festival, and Alena Lodkina's glittering debut feature Strange Colours, set in the lunar landscape of NSW mining ghost-town Lightning Ridge.

Director Valerie Massadian's Milla is a sincere depiction of motherhood. ( Supplied: Queensland Film Festival )

These films fall under the festival's broad theme "Aesthetics of Care", which Edmond describes as "about looking at how filmmakers are exploring domesticity and caring".

The theme, he says, was generated in part by rewatching Laura Mulvey's experimental feminist film Riddles of the Sphinx, about a woman negotiating motherhood and domestic life: "I'd seen it as a terrible VHS as an undergrad, and then I rewatched it and I was just charmed. It's a very 1970s, English culture, utopian thing."

A combination of the theme, and the festival's approach to curation, formed a perfect storm for work by women to shine.

Edmond explains what he's looking for when he's programming for the festival: "You watch so many things, but this [has to be] something new. Not just new as a variation of form, but something you've never seen before. And that just really grabs me."

The avant garde end of the spectrum is where you find the female filmmakers, Edmond says, because there are fewer gatekeepers and barriers to their practice.

Terror Nullius was developed over a decade and is a radical retelling of Australian history. ( Supplied: ACMI )

"It's much easier to strike [gender] parity in experimental moving image works. The bigger your budget, the further you move away from parity in the production line. The moment you move towards big-budget populist cinema, you are sadly moving away from parity.



"These [smaller] films can be self-funded, they can be from arts backgrounds, which has a higher rate of [gender] parity, and these choke-points are ameliorated."



The same logic extends to short films, which precede many of the feature film screenings at the festival. Of the 28 short and medium-length films in the line-up, only four are directed solely by men.



Edmond realises that not all film festivals can fix their female troubles by looking toward the new, the experimental and the innovative, stressing that festivals are restricted by the limitations of the rest of the film industry.

Vera Chytilova's Daisies (1966), which follows the antics of two bored young women, was banned in Czechoslovakia soon after its release. ( Supplied: Queensland Film Festival )

"Parity is hard because the production line is terrible. That isn't to say that festivals shouldn't be aware of it, or should pass it off by saying 'This isn't our problem.'"



But he says festivals have a unique opportunity to redress gender imbalance:



"You can shape things, because you have control over how you're spotlighting work or bringing guests or commissioning essays on the work."



"If you have two equally good movies, by a male director and a female director, and you're screening both, you can err on the side of inviting the woman director to present their work.



"If you're thinking about how you're designing or commissioning work, you can err on [women filmmakers]."



A different kind of festival

Edmond's background programming short films in the art gallery context (including UQ Art Museum, Brisbane's Institute of Modern Art and Monash University Museum of Art) has a profound effect on the way he approaches Queensland Film Festival.

La Casa Lobo takes inspiration from religious sect Colonia Dignidad in Chile. ( Supplied: Queensland Film Festival )

"We try to integrate museum spaces, installations, moving image work, and put them on the same tier as cinema," he says.



He credits this background with the decision to "treat QFF not just as a film festival but something that's contributing to the broader [art and film] ecology, a film festival that people can go to and love, while also sketching out other possibilities of what an Australian film festival could look like."



Strongly supported by the Australian Cinematheque at QAGOMA (Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art), the program incorporates fearless, quality films collected mainly from last year's Toronto and Locarno film festivals — the kinds that multiplexes can't and won't accommodate.



Take for instance the Australian premiere of the new work by Canadian Blake Williams, who Edmonds describes as "an experimental filmmaker who's been exploring the possibilities of 3D beyond realism".



In Williams' film Prototype, viewers will see the Galveston Hurricane disaster, one of the deadliest in US history, through polarised red and blue 3D glasses.



The Wolf House (or La Casa Lobo), by Chilean directors Cristobal Leon and Joaquin Cocina, is another audacious artistic work, coming to Edmond's attention via the Berlinale, where it screened in February.



"It's a striking stop-animation movie that they worked on for years. Rather than use a puppet-theatre reduced-scale set, they worked in a series of installation rooms, using not just papier mache and marionettes, but also painting on the walls with two-dimensional and three-dimensional animation at a life-sized scale. It's a really astounding achievement that I simply have never seen before."



Queensland Film Festival opens today and runs until July 29.

