Queer Screen Film Fest is coming in hot this winter with nearly 40 titles taken straight from major international festivals.

This summer’s 30th Mardi Gras Film Festival, in the midst of Sydney WorldPride, was always going to be a hard act to follow but Queer Screen has locked in a high quality program for its 10th anniversary, featuring ten narrative features, three feature documentaries, four retrospective encores, two episodics, and 19 shorts from eleven different countries around the world.

Opening the festival is Georgia Oakley’s Blue Jean, which follows a lesbian PE teacher who is forced to live a double life in Thatcher-era England, where the Section 28 legislation forbidding the promotion of homosexuality in schools cast a dark shadow. When a student spots her at a lesbian bar, it all begins to crumble.

Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman’s tongue-in-cheek mockumentary Theatre Camp, about the eccentric staff and students of a scrappy summer theatre camp band who together to stage a show-stopping original musical, will close the festival.

Tickets are on sale now for Wednesday, August 23 to Sunday 27 August in Sydney, and for a special on-demand program, available nationally for an extra week, until Sunday, September 3.