TILDE Film Festival

Event Information

TILDE Film Festival: Three days, seven sessions, twenty-four films, two exhibitions, four filmmakers in conversation panels, two massive community events featuring world, international and Victorian premieres.  

We acknowledge that we are on the traditional lands of the Boon Wurrung and Wurundjeri peoples of the Kulin Nation. We offer our respect to the Elders of these traditional lands and, through them, to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Elders’ past and present. Sovereignty was never ceded.  

We at TILDE understand the weight of responsibility post referendum and the role we play as a cultural festival to ensure we are intentionally collaborating with First Nations storytellers. This act of service is a privilege for the festival to enable.  

Our story began in 2014 with a core group of dedicated volunteers who held the festival through to 2021. Covid put a big strain on these volunteers, so the festival hit pause. During that time, a review was done in deep partnership with Footscray Community arts. This was a period of reflection, consideration and focus on the intentions of Tilde moving forward.  

2024 sees us return to mark the last decade of TILDE, we are leading this festival with humility and vulnerability fostering an environment of curiosity for the many varied lived experiences of our community. We have curated a program alongside our team of brilliant programmers that hopes to have captured the richness of these many lived lives through the lens of trans and gender diverse storytellers.  

Our theme for this year’s festival, “Trans Collectivism” celebrates the strength in collaboration and the importance of not being the singular trans voice at a table. This is reflected throughout our festival, where we will not only be presenting screen works that explore that but facilitating conversation through panel discussions and holding space for the community to connect with each other. 

We as TILDE aim to serve our trans and gender diverse community and their loved ones. Our focus is on the margins: those who live, work, and create on the periphery of dominant cultures. Our Vision is to lead in trans and gender diverse screen experience and practice. We want to build the practice and reputation of TILDE so that it is cherished by our community, respected, and sought after by TGD filmmakers, and recognised as a leader in Australia’s creative industries. 

We look forward to celebrating 10 years of TILDE with you.

Explore the program:

Friday 3 May

Opening Night — First Nations curated by Merryn Trescott & Jamie Connor
6:30—10pm
Opening night of TILDE will bring First Nations trans folk, brotherboys and sistergirls together in celebration of our creativity, diversity of experience, and storytelling.

Saturday 4 May

Our Future — Screening & filmmaker in-conversation
2—4pm
There is a wave of trans and gender expansive culture building strength. Featuring the world premiere of the delicately beautiful Black Trans Miracle by Tinaye Nyathi, with screenings and in-conversations with filmmakers Luka Gracie (More Than This), AP Pobjoy (Unerased), Jasper Caverly (HEDGEHOG).

Our Elders — Screening
6—7:40pm
Celebrating our icons. Celebrating elders who ensured future spaces like TILDE. Through rarely seen experimental and archival hidden gems, we open up an opportunity for our elders to look at us, as much as we look at them.

GAY24 Presents TRANS DOMESTICITY — Screenings Guest Curated by Jini Maxwell & Samantha Eckhardt
9—10:40pm
GAY24 are hosting the international premiere of Henry Hanson’s DOG MOVIE; a film about a tenderqueer couple whose eternal couch surfer who seems immune to their passive-aggressive insinuations that it might be time for her to find a new place.

Sunday 5 May

Premiere Shorts — Screening
1—2:45pm
From the sublimely absurd Australian premiere of In their dreams all jellyfish are wet to the visionary mind of director Karimah Zakia Issa in Scaring Women At Night, when we disrupt the norms of filmmaking the results are exquisite!

AFTRS Presents Women on Set — Conversational Panel
3:30—5pm
Consent educator, intimacy coordinator and performer Bayley Turner (Neighbours, Krystal Klairvoyant) sits down with leading actresses for a frank in-conversation about how we as a community can play a critical part in supporting trans women to thrive in the film industry.

Our Desires Lines: Community Night — Screening & Panel Discussion
6—8:30pm
A cinematic pairing that provides refreshingly honest perspectives on sex and relationships through a trans masculine lens. It is a rare occurrence to feel seen and understood, hopeful and motivated, deeply grateful for and connected to community, whilst also entertained and aroused, all at once.