Melbourne Documentary Film Festival 2026: Out Laws | Interview with James Lewis

Born out of a profound sense of urgency, Out Laws is a powerful and deeply human documentary that refuses the familiar trauma-driven lens to instead celebrate the resilience, resourcefulness, and unwavering courage of queer people fighting for justice. Co-directed by James Lewis and Lexi Powner, the film follows three remarkable activists risking everything to challenge colonial-era laws that continue to criminalise same-sex intimacy in their countries, offering a stirring tribute to those society has long sought to silence and marginalise. Looking reality squarely in the eye while holding onto the belief that a fairer, more inclusive future is possible, Out Laws is currently screening at the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival in Australia. We were delighted to speak with co-director and producer James Lewis for this exclusive interview about the film’s urgent message, its hopeful vision, and the extraordinary protagonists at its heart.

We wanted to show a pattern of oppression, rather than a single story.

Mehdi Balamissa: Friedel Dausab, Rosanna Flamer-Caldera and Raven Gill come from very different countries and experiences, yet the film brings them together in a way that feels remarkable. What drew you to tell these three stories side by side, and how did you find the balance?

James Lewis: Three is the magic number!  We knew we needed more than one protagonist/litigant, so that we could show a pattern of oppression, rather than a single story. We wanted to show how criminalisation affects people across the globe (we have representation from the Caribbean, South Asia and Africa) and across identities (here, a gay man, a lesbian and a trans woman). If we’d followed one activist, we felt an audience might file it away as one country’s tragedy, rather than understand this is a global systemic issue. When you put Namibia, Sri Lanka and Barbados side by side – three continents and three very different cultures – you find the same law underneath, reflecting the same outdated British Victorian values.

Friedel, Rosanna and Raven each hold a different part of the story: Friedel in the heat of a live court case, Rosanna as a seasoned pioneer, Raven carrying a hard-won recent victory. The balance came from letting them converge – physically, in London – around a shared purpose, so the film has a spine rather than three parallel stories. What really creates balance is how, as an audience, we warm equally to all three of them – to their humour and their courage.

Out Laws flips a vital narrative that opponents rely on.

Mehdi Balamissa: Why was it important to frame the story as decriminalisation being an act of decolonisation?

James Lewis: Out Laws flips a vital narrative that opponents rely on. The most effective lie told about LGBT+ people in criminalising countries is that queerness is a “Western import” – a decadent foreign idea being forced on a traditional society. Our film shows, with historical evidence, that the opposite is true: it’s the criminalisation that was imported. The laws are colonial relics – a Tudor-era clause exported across the Empire, forced onto cultures that often held far more expansive ideas about gender and love before the colonisers arrived. 

As this is revealed through the film, audiences see that decriminalisation is about reclaiming pre-colonial values by evicting foreign laws. This is essential to understand, since activists are so often accused of being Western stooges. Decriminalisation, framed this way, isn’t Westernisation. It’s decolonisation – a country finishing the job of becoming itself.

Trolls online seem to get very upset about highlighting the role of British imperialism and often insist we simply “move on”. Unfortunately we are not going to be able to move on while this lie is so entrenched, whilst so many people are unaware of the history. Mindsets need to shift, and that means understanding the past to have a clear view of the present.

Mehdi Balamissa: The documentary shows how Britain’s anti-LGBTQIA+ laws were exported across the Empire, including to countries like Australia. You touch on the idea of the “imperial boomerang” (that systems of repression developed in the colonies eventually shape the societies that created them): what do you hope audiences in former colonial powers take away?

James Lewis: The imperial boomerang is the idea that techniques of control tested in the colonies eventually curve back and land at home. Time and again we seem imperialism being used as an opportunity to test methods of subjugation outside of the restrictions of domestic law, so they can tested and then enforced again, including at home.  Britain didn’t just export these laws; the machinery of moral panic it perfected abroad is the same machinery now being aimed at trans people, at protest, at bodily autonomy, in Britain itself. 

For audiences in the countries that once ran empires I hope the takeaway is responsibility rather than pity or shame. Recognition that “over there” and “over here” are the same story at different stages. If your country wrote the code, you have skin in the game of dismantling it – and you need to notice when the same tactics come home. 

For people that inherited those legal systems as colonies themselves – I hope they will question the narratives that people in power use to distract through scapegoating, and by lying about our community in order to manipulate and deceive for money and power. That LGBT+ people have always been here and are a beautiful, essential and significant minority in our societies. Everyone deserves to be included, to be safe and to live happy, loving lives.

We are serious about the stakes but we insist the audience meet these three as human beings first.

Mehdi Balamissa: Many documentaries about persecution focus heavily on suffering, but Out Laws deliberately makes space for solidarity, friendship, light and hope. You have spoken about refusing “trauma porn.” Why was that such an important creative principle, and how did it shape the way you filmed Friedel, Rosanna and Raven?

James Lewis: If you reduce people to their suffering, you re-perform the very erasure the film is meant to challenge – you make them victims on screen exactly as the law tries to make them victims in life. By spending quality time with each of the charismatic protagonists, we know them as fully rounded people – we understand their resilience but we also experience their joy, wit and friendship. That is the human experience, and unfortunately many people do yet see LGBT+ people as human. Refusing to be defined by pain is itself an act of resistance.

This shaped our approach practically and visually.  The look is deliberately bold – a patchwork, scrapbook aesthetic rather than a desaturated misery palette! When filming, we made room for laughter, and for the genuinely brilliant, sharp humour Friedel, Rosanna and Raven have. Humour is often a response to hardship, but there is a specific quality to this for queer people that we wanted to celebrate. That’s not to say we downplay the danger – we are serious about the stakes but we insist the audience meet these three as human beings first.

Mehdi Balamissa: The film is ultimately about the power of ordinary people challenging systems that have existed for centuries. Has following these journeys changed your own understanding of what meaningful activism looks like?

James Lewis: Absolutely. The scale of what people like Friedel, Rosanna and Raven are up against is genuinely staggering, and the litigants are incredibly inspiring in their resoluteness – even when sacrificing so much energy, so many years, and their personal safety. Meaningful activism does bring purpose to one’s life, but it is also very sad to think what else activists could have done with their lives if they didn’t have to fight for our freedoms day in and day out. The energy required is indescribable, because meaningful activism means daily persistence, mutual care and a willingness to keep having difficult conversations with people who deny your rights. It’s exhausting work.

Watching three people hold enormous hope and enormous exhaustion at the same time, and still find things to laugh about, reset my sense of what courage actually looks like.

This article is part of a collaboration with the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival, presented online from July 1–31, 2026, and in cinemas from July 7–19, 2026.