Across 18 days of bold programming,this year’s festival slate is brimming with original storytelling that will ask audiences to Look Closer as the much-loved festival lights up Melbourne this winter for its 73rd edition. Announcing 26 of its first films and unmissable events, MIFF offers a First Glance at its 2025 program which includes seven MIFF Premiere Fund titles, 17 international and local highlights and two special events – many of which willscreen for the first time in Australia. Presented by MUBI, the Australian Premiere of Julia Holter: The Passion of Joan of Arc will take to the stage with an exclusive live-score cinematic event set to transform the Melbourne Recital Centre for two nights only. Meanwhile, in partnership with Now or Never, When the World Came Flooding In – an immersive installation and VR documentary centered on the intimate stories of life during a natural disaster – will have its World Premiere during MIFF. Then, offering cinephiles the chance to experience this year’s Palme d’Or winner, It Was Just An Accident by Iranian master director Jafar Panahi makes its highly anticipated arrival to Melbourne this August. The Cannes-awarded revenge thriller is both a broadside and real-world triumph against authoritarian oppression, with MIFF audiences some of the first in the world to see it on the big screen.

Sharing a glimpse at the festival’s 2025 program,MIFF Artistic Director Al Cossar, said: “It all starts here – the full MIFF 2025 program is soon to arrive; set to be a world-ranging, celebratory and all-out extraordinary collection of films. I’m excited to share some of our first announcement of titles, and incredible highlights, of this year’s MIFF: beloved auteurs, festival blockbusters, the best of new Australian filmmaking, alongside the incredibly special and absolutely unmissable live-score cinema event, Julia Holter: The Passion of Joan of Arc. You’ll want to look closer at MIFF’s First Glance – there is so much to see, and so much more to come!”

Outside of metro Melbourne, the MIFF Regional showcase expands its tour across festival weekends 15–17 and 22–24 August with venues in Bendigo, Ballarat, Castlemaine, Morwell, Geelong, Rosebud, Sale and Shepparton, ready to screen some of the festival’s biggest and much-loved titles, supported by VicScreen. MIFF’s digital offering also returns from 15–31 August for 18 days and continues one week after the festival wraps up – ensuring that cinema-lovers across Australia can catch films beyond the in-cinema season. MIFF Online features a limited suite of festival films and free short films available on demand via ACMI’s dedicated online streaming platform, Cinema 3. The annual MIFF Awards will also return on Saturday 23 August, celebrating cinematic excellence and talent with one of the world’s most significant filmmaking prize pools – including the prestigious $140,000 Bright Horizons Award, supported by the Victorian Government through VicScreen. The full MIFF 2025 program including the completeBright Horizons Competition lineup will be unveiled Thursday 10 July with category nominees and juries for the MIFF Awards to be announced in late July.

MIFF PREMIERE FUND

The 2025 MIFF Premiere Fund lineup champions outstanding Australian filmmaking, groundbreaking ideas, and spotlights unique Australian creatives within our local filmmaking industry. Providing co-funding for all-new Australian feature films which later debut at the festival, the commissioning fund aims to reinforce MIFF’s relationship with Australian filmmakers in a bid to foster a variety of exciting new voices for festival audiences. Entering its second decade, the MIFF Premiere Fundproudly continues to back diverse local perspectives. Throwing it back to Y2K, an end-of-millennium house party becomes an endless, tequila-fuelled time loop in One More Shot, an ingenious debut feature by Melbourne director Nicholas Clifford. Starring a standout lineup of Australian talent – EmilyBrowning (God Help the Girl, MIFF 2014), Sean Keenan (Nitram, MIFF 2021), Ashley Zukerman (In Vitro, MIFF 2024), Aisha Dee (Sissy, MIFF 2022) and Elias Anton (Of an Age, MIFF 2022) – the film is packed with non-stop turn of the century hits and shows audiences that some nights out are better left in the rear-view mirror.                                                                                                Shot in a verdant mountainous landscape in northern Luzon, First Light is the feature debut by celebrated Filipino-Australian photographer James J. Robinson starring veteran Filipina actor Ruby Ruiz and industry legend Maricel Soriano. Evoking Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light and Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s Black Narcissus through its masterfully composed images and thought-provoking interrogation of faith, First Light is a slow-burn crime drama and sensory meditation on the structures of power and corruption. Suspenseful and heartwarming, Spreadsheet Champions captures the challenges of performing at an elite level while also navigating the volatile, identity-forming time of adolescence. Previously announced as part of MIFF Schools, Australian filmmaker Kristina Kraskov crafts an observational feature documentary charting six young people from around the globe as they channel their dreams into a competition with a difference: a test of their elite mastery of Microsoft Excel.              Starring beloved Nigerian stand-up comedian OkeyBakassi and impressive young actor Tyson Palmer as father and son, Pasa Faho by Australian director Kalu Oji presents a quintessentially Melbourne tale of life in a migrant community. A down-to-earth, moving and gently funny portrait of suburban African-Australian life, the debut feature is a vibrant tribute to life in the suburbs, a cinematically underrepresented local community, and to how, no matter where we’re from, we all ultimately constitute parts of a whole. Iron Winter is the latest mesmerising documentary from Kasimir Burgess (Franklin, MIFF 2022) capturing a fading tradition at the intersection of rural life and modern technology. Beautifully shot for the big screen, the film brings to the screen the real-life story of camaraderie and survival, opening an intimate window into the icy Mongolian steppes – one of the world’s most breathtaking and forbidding environments – as well as the immediate threats posed by catastrophic climate change.

Intimately produced by his daughter Lorin Clarke, Not Only Fred Dagg But Also John Clarke is a deeply personal documentary portrait of a legend of the antipodean screen, John Clarke. In a tribute to the disruptive power of creativity, the film comprises a remarkable series of recorded conversations between John and Lorin, woven together with personal anecdotes, a rich television archive, tales from international comedy greats and riches from more than 200 boxes of Clarke’s work and letters. Directed by award-winning filmmaker Sue Thomson (The Coming Back Out Ball Movie, MIFF 2018 Closing Night Gala; Under Cover, MIFF 2022), Careless is a funny, moving and energetic exploration that follows elderly people’s fight to grow old their way. Through observational footage, archival materials, home movies and interviews, the documentary issues a timely and powerful response to a hidden crisis.

SPECIALEVENTS, XR ANDMIFF SCHOOLS

Acclaimed LA singer, songwriter and composer Julia Holter arrives exclusively to MIFF to present a special live-score to one of cinema’s all time visionary works in Julia Holter: The Passion of Joan of Arc, presented by MUBI. Combining Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 silent film masterpiece – widely considered as one of the greatest movies ever made – with a spellbinding score composed by Holter, expect an immense sonic tapestry performed live at the Melbourne Recital Centre for two nights only. Alongside Holter will be her band, singers of leading vocal ensemble, The Consort of Melbourne, and conducted by internationally renowned HughBrunt(co-Artistic Director/co-Principal Conductor, London Contemporary Orchestra).

Commissioned by Opera North Projects.

Presented with Now or Never,When the World Came Flooding In is a powerful collective narrative co-directed by Van Sowerwine and Isobel Knowles and shaped by the deeply personal experiences of three flood- affected individuals who while thousands of kilometres apart, are united in their experience of living through climate disaster. Through virtual reality, projections, miniatures, photographs and sound, the immersive installation and creative VR documentary brings an evocative and wondrous tour through memory spaces, exploring personal memory, grief and loss, and the sharedexperience of an extreme climate event.

FIRST GLANCE INTERNATIONAL AND AUSTRALIAN TITLES

Previously subjected to lengthy filmmaking and international travel bans and forced to film in secret even after his release, director Jafar Panahi(No Bears, MIFF 2023) claimed cinema’s most coveted prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for It Was Just An Accident. The incendiary thriller combines pitch-black gallows humour and devastating plot twists with elements of real stories Panahi heard from fellow prison inmates – a rage-filled rallying cry against state-sanctioned censorship and violent oppression that courageously interrogates the morality of retribution.

One of Sundance’s buzziest debuts, Sorry, Baby is the A24-backed dramedy set to announce writer/director/star Eva Victor as a formidable new talent. Produced by Barry Jenkins, Adele Romanski andMark Ceryak – the same team behind Aftersun (MIFF 2022) – and featuring key supporting turns from Naomi Ackie, Lucas Hedges and KellyMcCormack, Sorry, Baby is a funny, gentle and nuanced look at what it means to survive. Ethan Hawke brings legendary Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart to life in revered US filmmaker Richard Linklater’s A-list ensemble portrait of fallen stardom – featuring Margaret Qualley,Bobby Canavale and Andrew Scott – in Blue Moon. It’s 31 March 1943: the opening night of Oklahoma!, the first musical collaboration between Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II and Hart laments his failing career and the changing nature of musical theatre. Linklater (Boyhood, MIFF 2014) synthesises the backstage showbiz lore approach of his 2008 period drama Me and Orson Welles with the conversational, philosophical mode of his beloved Before trilogy to craft an mengaging chamber drama.

Led by a magnetic Caleb Landry Jones (Nitram, MIFF Premiere Fund 2021), Harvest by Greek auteur Athina Rachel Tsangari(Attenberg, MIFF 2011) is based on Jim Crace’s Booker Prize–shortlisted novel of the same name. Walter watches on as his remote English village is rocked by a series of arrivals: a cartographer, who seeks to literally put the town on the map; and a despotic new estate lord, who upends the locals’ arcadian social order. Shot in evocative 16mm by Sean PriceWilliams (The Sweet East, MIFF 2023) and assembly edited by Australian filmmaker Alena Lodkina (Petrol, MIFF 2022), this adaptation is a sagacious, at times humorous portrait of small-town small-mindedness and humanity’s complicated bond with the land.

After winning the hearts of audiences at SXSW and taking home the Narrative Spotlight Audience Award, The Baltimorons is the directorial debut of Jay Duplass – one half of a renowned indie filmmaking duo alongside his brother, Mark – that brings its dreamy, postcard-perfect images of wintry Baltimore and a joyous soundtrack of jazzified holiday classics to the festival screen. Co-written with lead actor Michael Strassner, who based the film’s setup on his own experiences, the feature is an uplifting crowd pleaser offering audiences the very gifts its central twosome bestow on one another: a reminder to laugh, and a hopefulness that fills the heart.

Dylan O’Brien gives an award-winning dual performance in Twinless, a darkly comic, intriguingly queer study of grief loaded with twisty absurdity. Receiving a Special Jury Award for Acting at this year’s Sundance Festival, where the film also claimed an Audience Award, O’Brien delivers a star- making double turn as Roman and Rocky. After his impressive 2019 debut, Straight Up, director James Sweeney levels up with this slick and slipperysecond feature, marking himself as a filmmaker to watch.

A cunning wannabe enters the orbit of an ascendant celebrity in Lurker, a thrillingly tense debut by TV producer and screenwriter Alex Russell (The Bear; Beef) about the hunger for – and hollowness of – stardom. Screening at Sundance and Berlin, the engrossing directorial debut collides the celebrity jealousies of All About Eve and Ingrid Goes West (MIFF 2017) with the obsessive fixation of Saltburn (also starring Lurker’s Archie Madekwe), resulting in a striking, shrewd critique of exploitation and superficiality in the entertainment world that shows there are no winners in the battle for fame.

In a wise and subtle meditation on the limits of music’s emotional power, The Ballad of Wallis Island, brings together UK comedy veterans Tim Key and Tom Basden, who – alongside director James Griffiths – return to the premise of a 2007 short film they wrote and starred in. This time joined by three-time Oscar nominee Carey Mulligan and featuring Basden’s original songs and Key’s dryly funny wordplay, the film resists romantic clichés and bursts with comic charm.