The Mardi Gras Film Festival is inarguably one the biggest stand-alone events of Sydney’s Mardi Gras annually, and 2008 is proving to be no exception with the program launch of the fifteenth film festival put together by Queer Screen.

With its opening night on Valentine’s Day, daily sessions will see screenings of close to seventy full length films and nine My Queer Career finalists (plus a celluloid salon thrown in for good measure) through to 28 February.

Included films this year have been described by festival director Lex Lindsay as “a bouquet of celluloid flowers”, with a substantually diverse program line-up from your romantic comedies, to gay surfer films, to tales of the late 1800s, to dilemmas of supporting evil plans of a drag-demi-god. If that doesn’t sum up its diversity, we don’t know what will.

For the first time in six years, screenings will be held in Parramatta to encourage the western Sydney audience back to the festival. Over the course of three days, seven sessions will be held at the Riverside theatre in an attempt to turn the west ‘way out’.

Elements of the film festival are also going digital, with the launch of ‘Queer Eye for my Valentine’, where queers from around the world will be able to leave messages on a designated YouTube page for their same-gender valentine; the best will be shown on opening night.

“It's a guerilla style Tropfest with a queer twist where the unifying theme is the equality of all love. We’re hoping to get 1000s of filmed messages from people wanting to publicly express their love for their same-sex Valentine. While the nation’s laws may prohibit us from publicly legitimising our relationships, the internet offers us the opportunity to bypass the bigotry and shout our love out to the world,” Lindsay said.

The 15^th Mardi Gras Film Festival will have screenings at Palace Academy Twin, Dendy Newtown and Riverside Parramatta along with its opening and closing nights at the City Recital Hall and Randwick Ritz respectively. The festival runs from 14 to 28 February.