The 74th Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) unveiled its full 2026 program – more than 300 screen works spanning features, shorts and XR experiences, special events – including the Australian Premiere of Wicker as this year’s Opening Night Gala. Across 18+ days of cinema, MIFF 2026 runs 6–23 August across Melbourne and regional Victoria, with MIFF Online running nationally 14–30 August. Wicker, the Sundance-premiering fable from Australian-born writer/director Eleanor Wilson and her filmmaking and real-life partner Alex Huston Fischer, opens MIFF 2026 on Thursday 6 August – and also screens in the prestigious Bright Horizons Competition. As audacious and irresistible as its premise, the film stars Olivia Colman in a role that recalls her fiery turn in The Favourite, alongside a magnetic Alexander Skarsgård (Lee, MIFF 2024) and a dazzling ensemble including Peter Dinklage (The Toxic Avenger, MIFF 2025), Richard E. Grant and Melbourne’s own Elizabeth Debicki (The Tale, MIFF 2018). Adapting Ursula Wills-Jones’s 2008 short story, counting MIFF Accelerator alum David Michôd among its producers, and shot by The BrutalistOscar winner Lol Crawley, Wicker is beneath its whimsical surface a sharp critique of small-mindedness, superstition and overzealous conservatism – a fable that asks whether we truly know our heart’s desire. Wilson and Fischer will be in attendance to celebrate the film’s Australian premiere at Hoyts Melbourne Central. On screen and beyond, MIFF 2026 bursts to life with an unmissable slate of special events – including John Cameron Mitchell Presents: Hedwig and the Angry Inch 25th Anniversary, the World Premiere of Tina Arena: Unravel Me, the return of Footy Shorts alongside the AFL and VicScreen, and the inaugural Sovereign Shorts Gala, in partnership with NITV and VicScreen.
“We’re again thrilled to reveal the full film overload of MIFF’s epic 2026 program! From highly anticipated festival blockbusters to bold new voices, experimentations to a family day at the flicks, MIFF is the maximalist way to enjoy all of what cinema can offer in the midst of a Melbourne Winter. We look forward to welcoming audiences back to the big screen this August,” said Artistic Director Al Cossar, of the Program Launch, presented by Mac Forbes.
Across the MIFF Shorts Awards, presented by Armani Beauty and the MIFF Awards the festival celebrates cinematic excellence with a prize pool of over $300,000 – one of the world’s most significant prize pools. The flagship Bright Horizons Award, supported by the Victorian Government through VicScreen, recognises first and second-time filmmakers with $140,000, making it one of the richest feature film prizes in the world. Award nominees will be announced later this month.
“MIFF is Australia’s largest film festival, bringing together the people who love film with the people who make it. It champions new voices, transports us to other worlds and lives, and offers fresh perspectives on our own. By showcasing Australian films alongside the best international cinema, MIFF connects our stories to the world. VicScreen is proud to support the festival and the Bright Horizons Award—a career-defining prize for emerging filmmakers that strengthens MIFF’s standing among the world’s leading film festivals.” VicScreen CEO Caroline Pitcher commented.
The Intrepid Audience Award also returns, inviting festival-goers to champion the film that moved them most. Audiences who rate their favourite MIFF 2026 will go in the running to win two spots on an iconic Intrepid trip – with a choice of experiences including Sacred Land of the Incas, Morocco Uncovered, Classic Japan, Best of Sri Lanka, East Africa Highlights and the Amalfi Coast. The Premiere With Purpose Gala returns on Tuesday 11 August with a special screening of Silenced, Selina Miles’ (Martha: A Picture Story, MIFF 2019) incendiary documentary in which lawyers, activists and survivors – including Jennifer Robinson, Amber Heard, Brittany Higgins and Colombian journalist Catalina Ruiz-Navarro – reckon with the weaponisation of defamation law to silence women who speak out. Furious, urgent and impossible to look away from, Silenced indicts a misogynist status quo with forensic precision. The Victorian premiere will be celebrated with a special gala event at The Capitol. This year, MIFF is proud to announce Armani Beauty as a major new festival partner, presenting the Armani Beauty Cinema Club – a curated strand of specially selected films reflecting a shared commitment to artistic excellence and cinematic craft. On Thursday 13 August the Armani Beauty Cinema Club Opening Night arrives with Graham Parkes’s SXSW Grand Jury Award-winning rom-com Wishful Thinking, starring Lewis Pullman and Maya Hawke. Further Cinema Club films include Mark Jenkin’s haunting 16mm ghost story Rose of Nevada, with George MacKay and Callum Turner; Alexandre O. Philippe’s candid documentary portrait Kim Novak’s Vertigo; Pauline Loquès’s César-winning debut Nino; Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo’s Cannes Best Director Prize-sharing queer epic La Bola Negra; and Chandler Levack’s bittersweet Montreal romance Mile End Kicks, starring Barbie Ferreira. Armani Beauty also presents the festival’s Shorts strand and the MIFF Shorts Awards, including the inaugural Armani Beauty Talent of Tomorrow Award, recognising an outstanding emerging filmmaker from the MIFF Accelerator Lab.
“We are absolutely thrilled to return to the Melbourne International Film Festival as the Presenting Beauty Partner for 2026. Film and beauty share a profound connection as powerful vehicles for storytelling, self-expression, and emotion,” Bethany Cartan, Brand Director, Armani Beauty,ANZ commented “This year, our presence is a celebration of Mr. Armani’s lifelong fascination with film; the icons that shaped his earliest inspirations, the actors he dressed, and the screens that carried his vision to the world. Cinema has always been the ultimate canvas for Mr. Armani’s elegance, and we look forward to sharing the same timeless style, artistry, and storytelling with Australia’s most passionate film community.”
MIFF CEO Damien Hodgkinson adds, “MIFF and Armani Beauty share a belief in the power of creativity, craftsmanship and artistic expression to inspire, connect and move. Our partnership reflects a shared commitment to championing exceptional storytelling, celebrating artistic excellence and supporting the creative voices shaping culture today. From emerging filmmakers recognised through the MIFF Shorts Awards to acclaimed international works showcased in the Armani Beauty Cinema Club, together we are creating new opportunities for audiences to connect through outstanding cinema from around the world.”
Elsewhere in the program, the festival’s beloved Family Gala returns on Saturday 15 August at Hoyts Melbourne Central with the Australian premiere of DreamWorks Animation’s Forgotten Island, the new original film written and directed by Oscar-nominee Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado and produced by Mark Swift, the filmmaking trio behind Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. The film stars Grammy and Academy Award winner H.E.R. and Liza Soberano as best friends who find themselves transported to a magical island that they grew up hearing stories about from their Filipino families. They soon discover, however, that their memories of each other will be the cost of getting home. The all-star supporting cast includes Dave Franco, Broadway icon Lea Salonga, Manny Jacinto, Dolly de Leon(Triangle of Sadness, MIFF 2022), Jenny Slate, Ronny Chieng and comedian Joy Koy. The MIFF Regional showcase traverses 14-16 and 21-23 August, with screenings in Bendigo, Ballarat, Castlemaine, Geelong, Healesville, Rosebud, Sale and Warrnambool, supported by VicScreen and Screen Australia. For cinema-lovers across the country, MIFF Online returns 14-30 August – extending MIFF’s footprint by one week after the festival wraps with a curated suite of festival films and free short films available nationally on demand via ACMI’s streaming platform, Cinema 3. Alongside MIFF’s Opening Night Gala directors and many of the Bright Horizons filmmakers, this year’s edition welcomes a stellar lineup of visiting film talent and creatives from around the world. Guests confirmed to attend include Tamra Davis, Tina Arena, Hugo Weaving, Claudia Karvan and Lisandro Alonso – with more names to be shared closer to opening.
- MIFF PREMIERE FUND
This year’s MIFF Premiere Fund presents six new Australian features, beginning with three intimate portraits of people finding their place: award-winning filmmaker Trevor Graham’s (Make Hummus Not War, MIFF 2012) Digby & Camille, co-directed by its subject Archibald Prize-selected painter Digby Webster, weaving fly-on-the-wall footage with animated sequences from his own art into a tender, quietly humorous portrait of a couple living with Down syndrome; Maddelin McKenna’s (Patterns of the Afternoon, MIFF 2022) debut Mad Rush, presented by Rydges Melbourne, in which a phone call about fraudulent bank activity sends a rootless Gen Z spiralling through Melbourne’s CBD; and Harvey Zielinski’s Sweet Milk Lake, a fish-out-of-water dramedy in which a young trans man discovers the easiest place to finally belong is built on a lie, selected for this year’s Bright Horizons Competition. The remaining three venture further afield: Arlo Dean Cook’s Jebediah: Are We Ok? draws on three decades of archival footage to trace the Perth alt-rock quartet’s arc from Triple J darlings to a candid reckoning with what sustained success actually costs; Dan Jackson’s decade-in-the-making Death of a Shaman plunges into the Ecuadorian Amazon, where Indigenous shaman Rafael Santi races to pass sacred knowledge to his grandson while mining and oil corporations close in; and Isaac Elliott’s debut Hard as Puck follows Western Australia’s only para ice hockey team as they wrangle sponsorships, navigate bureaucratic politics and show up anyway – against Norway, against the United States, and against a booking system that won’t give them the rink.
- BRIGHT HORIZONS
MIFF’s boundary-pushing Bright Horizons Competition slate returns, featuring ten Australian-premiering new works from twelve extraordinary directors on the ascent, including previously mentioned titles in Wicker by Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer and Harvey Zielinski’s Sweet Milk Lake. Executive-produced by Jane Campion and led by Ani Palmer in a remarkable debut performance, Big Girls Don’t Cry is an unflinchingly honest portrait of queer adolescence in a sleepy New Zealand beach town, circa 2006. Writer/director Paloma Schneideman (Gate Crash, MIFF 2023) – a graduate of Campion’s A Wave in the Ocean program and former MIFF Accelerator Lab participant – brings a sensitivity and assurance to the material that belies her feature debut, with Noah Taylor (Predestination, MIFF 2014) in key support. A filmmaker sifts through old home videos and bittersweet memories of a 90s Vancouver Island childhood in Blue Heron. Winner of the Swatch First Feature Award at Locarno and Best Canadian Discovery at TIFF, Sophy Romvari’s hugely impressive debut is an autobiographical companion to her celebrated short Still Processing and marks the arrival of one of the most emotionally precise filmmakers working today. Milo Machado-Graner, the astonishing young star of Anatomy of a Fall (MIFF 2023), delivers another extraordinary performance in Félix de Givry’s tender Cannes Critics’ Week closer, Goodbye Cruel World, a poetic meditation on adolescent loneliness and the redemptive power of human connection. Shot in striking 16mm by Tara-Jay Bangalter, son of Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter, and capped with fable-like narration by screen legend Françoise Lebrun (The Mother and the Whore, MIFF 2014), the film evokes François Truffaut and Robert Bresson while feeling entirely of the present moment. In Yesterday the Eye Didn’t Sleep, two Bedouin sisters are given up as a marriage offering to a rival clan, in the hopes of bringing a blood feud to a halt. Shot without a script and with a non-professional cast, this Cannes-premiering debut comes from Rakan Mayasi, a protégé of Abbas Kiarostami and Béla Tarr whose short Trumpets in the Sky screened at MIFF in 2022. Elephants in the Fog follows a Kinnar matriarch on the fringes of a Nepalese village, shadowed by wild elephants, forced to choose between forbidden love and the daughter who needs her. The feature debut of Abinash Bikram Shah (writer of Shambhala, MIFF 2024; The Black Hen, MIFF 2016), it became the first Nepali feature selected for Cannes’ Un Certain Regard, where it won the Jury Prize, and stars LGBTQIA+ activist Puspa Thing Lama in a role drawn from lived experience. A riveting crime saga that doubles as a clear-eyed reckoning with trans rights across South Asia. When an eight-year-old girl witnesses a brutal assault in Golden Gate Park, nothing is the same for her or her parents again. Directed by Beth de Araújo with a child’s-eye view of an incomprehensible world, Josephine won the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award in Sundance’s U.S. Dramatic Competition. Channing Tatum is career-best opposite Gemma Chan, but it’s newcomer Mason Reeves who carries this devastating drama.
In La Gradiva, simmering desires and buried tensions erupt among Parisian teenagers on a school trip to Pompeii in Marine Atlan’s searing first feature, winner of the Cannes Critics’ Week Grand Prize. Inspired by Wilhelm Jensen’s novella and Freud’s analysis of it, the film juxtaposes the transitory nature of youth with the timelessness of ancient ruins, anchored by a quietly commanding Antonia Buresi (Rodeo, MIFF 2022) and a breakout cast whose naturalism makes every suppressed emotion feel inevitable. Shot in secret and smuggled out of Iran to premiere at Sundance, where it won the Special Jury Award for Ensemble Cast, The Friend’s House Is Here follows two young women navigating Tehran’s underground art scene with defiance, warmth and wit. Drawing on Kiarostami, Godard and American mumblecore, co-directors Hossein Keshavarz and Maryam Ataei have made a film that is a charismatic hangout movie and courageous act of dissent in equal measure. Competing for MIFF’s highest honour, the Bright Horizons Award, the winning film will be chosen by a renowned Jury of local and international industry figures who will be deliberating and appearing at this year’s festival – to be announced in late July.
- HEADLINERS
This year’s Headliners strand brings an essential lineup of new films arriving direct from the festival circuit, alongside new works from some of the world’s most vital and celebrated international directors. Previously announced, film-loving audiences will be some of the first in Australia to see Minotaur, Andrey Zvyagintsev’s (Loveless, MIFF 2017) savage Cannes Grand Prix-winning return from exile; Rose, in which Sandra Hüller (Anatomy of a Fall, MIFF 2023) claimed the Berlinale Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance for her turn in Markus Schleinzer’s (Angelo, MIFF 2019) quietly devastating folktale; and Gus Van Sant’s (Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot, MIFF 2018) blackly comedic Dead Man’s Wire, a paranoid ’70s kidnapping thriller starring Bill Skarsgård, Al Pacino and Dacre Montgomery (Went up the Hill, MIFF 2025). Lewis Pullman and Maya Hawke (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, MIFF 2019) exude effortless chemistry as a couple deeply in love and fundamentally incompatible in Armani Beauty Cinema Club Opening Night: Wishful Thinking, first-time feature director Graham Parkes’ supernatural rom-com that gets funnier and stranger as its consequences spiral out of control. Winner of the SXSW Grand Jury Award, the film follows the pair as they discover that the ups and downs of their relationship are beginning to warp the world around them, with Randall Park, Kate Berlant and Jon Hamm in support. Much like Pain and Glory (MIFF 2019), Bitter Christmas is an ingenious piece of self-portraiture from Pedro Almodóvar that interrogates creativity and its impediments. The enthralling film-within-a-film explodes onto the screen with Almodóvar’s signature vivid colours and a piquant score from long-time collaborator Alberto Iglesias, while leads Bárbara Lennie and Leonardo Sbaraglia are stellar as mirror images of each other – and of the director himself. Filmed in luminous black-and-white, Fatherland is the third in Paweł Pawlikowski’s thematic triptych of European postwar reverberations, following Nobel laureate Thomas Mann and his resentful daughter Erika on a road trip through a devastated Germany. Sandra Hüller (Rose, MIFF 2026; Anatomy of a Fall, MIFF 2023) delivers a brilliantly understated turn alongside Hanns Zischler (Kings of the Road, MIFF 1976), capturing a breadth of emotions lurking just below the surface. Following Peter Hujar’s Day (MIFF 2025), Ira Sachs crafts another stirring time capsule of queer New York in The Man I Love, set in the charged atmosphere of the late-1980s West Village. Rami Malek brilliantly incarnates the unapologetic audacity and yearning fragility of Jimmy, an HIV-positive theatre artist determined to live on his own terms, acting alongside a formidable Tom Sturridge in a Cannes-competing film that recalls Passages (MIFF 2023) while staking out richer terrain.
Presented by Letterboxd, I Want Your Sex finds queer punk provocateur Gregg Araki (Mysterious Skin, MIFF 2005) back on the big screen for the first time since 2014 with a delirious dom-com that teases Gen Z with the fun they’re missing while satirising his own permissive cultural sphere. Cooper Hoffman is delightful as the wide-eyed Elliot, sparking irresistibly with a hilariously unhinged Olivia Wilde (Drinking Buddies, MIFF 2013), while Daveed Diggs, Margaret Cho, Johnny Knoxville, Chase Sui Wonders and Charli xcx (Erupcja, MIFF 2026) ensure the candy-coloured mayhem never lets up. On a scarcely inhabited Scottish island, a visiting bureaucrat attempts to wrangle a pair of eccentric siblings in The Incomer. Isla and Sandy have spent their lives on a remote Orkney island, training to fend off “incomers” as their late father once warned – until government official Daniel arrives to evict them. Writer/director Louis Paxton shoots the island’s mythic landscape with a keen eye, anchored by Gayle Rankin’s audacious turn as Isla alongside Grant O’Rourke, Domhnall Gleeson, John Hannah and Michelle Gomez. Following the Cannes Grand Prix-winning Close (MIFF 2022) and Queer Palm-awarded Girl (MIFF 2018), Lukas Dhont returns with Coward, a clandestine WWI romance whose two leads, Emmanuel Macchia and Valentin Campagne (Species, MIFF 2026), both took home Best Actor at Cannes. Returning cinematographer Frank van den Eeden observes the pair with an intimate eye, their chemistry fuelling an emotive drama less interested in queering history than in holding a mirror to the homosocial foundations of wartime camaraderie. Goya Award-winning director Rodrigo Sorogoyen (The Beasts; Mother, MIFF 2018) returns with The Beloved, in which Javier Bardem delivers a career-best performance as a widely laurelled enfant terrible who casts his estranged daughter in a new film after thirty years apart. Victoria Luengo (Bitter Christmas, MIFF 2026) matches him with sophisticated grace, navigating nepotism, ulterior motives and simmering resentment against the scorching backdrop of the Canary Islands. From sombre black-and-white to shaky handheld 16mm to digital, Sorogoyen marshals every film stock available to render a combustible portrait of patriarchal power and familial messiness.
- INTERNATIONAL HIGHLIGHTS
Ben’Imana is set in 2012 Kibeho, a Rwandan village where Gacaca tribunals still grapple with the legacy of the 1994 genocide. Vénéranda, committed to reconciliation, is asked to forgive her family’s killer – a request that enrages her sister Suzanne. A decade in the making, this Cannes Caméra d’Or winner is the debut feature of Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo, made with non-professional actors and drawn from victim interviews and Gacaca testimonies. The first Singaporean film to compete at the Berlinale in the festival’s 70-plus-year history, We Are All Strangers reunites Anthony Chen with Ilo Ilo (MIFF 2013) and Wet Season (MIFF 2020) stars Koh Jia Ler and Yeo Yann Yann for the culminating entry in his ‘Growing Up’ trilogy. Recalling Edward Yang’s explorations of family, this touching, quietly thought-provoking epic dissects human relationships across four intertwined lives in a Singapore where consumerism and class foment divisions. Named after the perpetual circular movement whose flow unites the world, Dao is a vibrant family saga from Alain Gomis (Félicité, MIFF 2017) bouncing between a wedding in France and a funeral in Guinea-Bissau to explore identity, belonging and cross-continental cultural heritage. Recalling MIFF 2025 highlight I Only Rest in the Storm in its Bissau-Guinean setting and philosophical sprawl, this sweeping cine-mosaic premiered in competition in Berlin as a triumphant return to narrative filmmaking after Rewind & Play (MIFF 2022). Nino, Pauline Loquès’s tender César-winning debut, is a modern riff on Cléo from 5 to 7 following a young Parisian man through a fog-tinged weekend after a cancer diagnosis, struggling to say the words aloud to the people he loves. Théodore Pellerin (Lurker, MIFF 2025) brings nuance and vulnerability to the title role, earning the Louis Roederer Foundation Rising Star Award at Cannes Critics’ Week, in a film that is warm-hearted where it could easily be bleak. Tim Blake Nelson and Vera Farmiga star as Heaven’s Gate co-founders Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Lu Nettles in The Leader. After a 1972 overdose lands Applewhite in the care of nurse Nettles, the pair forge a cosmic bond that fuses biblical prophecy with UFO utopianism, drawing broken souls toward a doctrine of ascension that ends in tragedy. Writer/director Michael Gallagher, who grew up near the Heaven’s Gate compound, channels over a decade of research into this gripping true-crime drama, rounded out by Jim Parsons and Simon Rex (Magic Farm, MIFF 2025) as loyal believers.
Co-presented with Birrarangga Film Festival, Taratoa Stappard’s striking debut, Mārama, takes the tropes of Victorian Gothic horror and redeploys them through a uniquely Māori lens – a chilling tale set in a windswept North Yorkshire manor reckoning unflinchingly with the violence of British colonialism. Ariāna Osborne runs the gamut from grief to righteous fury in a ferocious central performance, while lavish costume and production design elevate the film to the pantheon of great ghost stories. Shot entirely on an old Sony Ericsson camera phone, Dry Leaf is Alexandre Koberidze’s sublimely digressive follow-up to What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (MIFF 2021). A young woman’s disappearance sends her father – played by the filmmaker’s own father, David Koberidze – on a cross-country road trip. Strangely gorgeous and wildly lo-fi, the feature gives the Georgian countryside a pixelated beauty verging on abstraction. In his first film made outside Japan, Ryusuke Hamaguchi turns his gaze on elder care and the quiet violences of contemporary societies in All of a Sudden. Virginie Efira (Parallel Tales, MIFF 2026) and Tao Okamoto play two women whose chance all-night conversation about mortality, philosophy and capitalism becomes the unlikely crucible of a life-changing friendship. Hamaguchi builds a portrait of female solidarity, with Efira and Okamoto sharing the Best Actress award at Cannes for performances that move fluidly from French and Japanese, and between grief, wit and hard-won grace. Twin brothers Arie and Chuko Esiri follow their debut Eyimofe (This Is My Desire) (MIFF 2021) with Clarissa, transforming Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway into a potent meditation on Nigerian class and colonialism. Sophie Okonedo is sublime as an elegant Lagos society wife reckoning with the roads not taken, alongside Toheeb Jimoh, Ayo Edebiri (Theater Camp, MIFF 2023), David Oyelowo and a luminous India Amarteifio as the young Clarissa. Species arrives from the Cannes Midnight Screenings section sharing a blood type with Coralie Fargeat (The Substance, MIFF 2024) and Julia Ducournau (Titane, MIFF 2021). Mara Taquin stars as a young doctor ground down by Karin Viard’s (Polisse, MIFF 2011) merciless boss, every frame a gonzo frenzy shot through fish-eye by The Artist cinematographer, Guillaume Schiffman. Marion Le Corroller’s brash debut delivers its critique of rise-and-grind culture with an axe, not a scalpel. Maika Monroe demolishes her final-girl persona as an unhinged governess terrorising a posh 19th-century household in Victorian Psycho. Adapted by Virginia Feito from her own novel and directed by Zachary Wigon, this gory Gothic romp pitches Wuthering Heights against American Psycho, with Ruth Wilson (Dark River, MIFF 2018) and Jason Isaacs as Monroe’s loathsome employers, Thomasin McKenzie (The Justice of Bunny King, MIFF 2021) as a sympathetic nursemaid, and Jacobi Jupe and Evie Templeton as the household’s two precocious children.
- DOCUMENTARY HIGHLIGHTS
At fifteen, Adam Sieswerda received his first testosterone shot. Over the next eight years his mother, filmmaker Amy Jenkins, documented his journey with curiosity, compassion and a handheld camera. Screening at SXSW and CPH:DOX, Adam’s Apple chronicles the milestones of gender-affirming care, weaving Jenkins’s footage with Adam’s own smartphone videos to create a portrait of rare intimacy. Amid mounting threats to trans rights in their home country and beyond, the film is both a testament to familial acceptance and an act of quiet defiance. The Siege of Paradise turns its lens on Cinque Terre, the Italian Riviera’s postcard-perfect stretch of villages and beaches that draws millions of tourists annually to a region home to just 4000 people. Gar O’Rourke (Sanatorium, MIFF 2025) grounds his investigation in firsthand accounts from locals including winemaker Bartalo, restaurateur Carmelo and fisherman Guido, whose divergent attitudes reveal tourism as a double-edged sword. DOP Lukas Gut’s cinematography, awarded a Special Jury Mention at Tribeca, captures Cinque Terre’s painterly radiance in this handsomely realised account of travel’s true cost. In 1972, groundbreaking filmmaker William Greaves gathered the surviving luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance for an evening of drinks and reminiscence at the home of Duke Ellington – footage that lay unseen for more than 50 years. Once Upon a Time in Harlem finally brings it to the screen, completed by William’s son David Greaves, who blends roving party scenes with sit-down interviews to create an atmosphere that crackles with the revolutionary verve of Noble Sissle, Eubie Blake, Aaron Douglas and Louise Thompson Patterson.
Winner of the 2026 Best Documentary Award at Cannes, Rehearsals for a Revolution is Pegah Ahangarani’s (I Am Trying to Remember, MIFF 2022) singular essay film chronicling decades of Iranian history, structured in five chapters each dedicated to a friend or family member lost along the way. Born to filmmakers Manijeh Hekmat (Bandar Band, MIFF 2021) and Jamshid Ahangarani, she weaves home movies, archival imagery and front-line protest footage into a film as intimate as it is expansive. Vividly personal and politically urgent, Rehearsals for a Revolution interrogates what it means and takes to resist. In October 2009, Javier Chocobar was shot dead as members of the Diaguita community resisted eviction from their native land in northern Argentina, a crime captured on video but not brought to court for a decade. Landmarks, Lucrecia Martel’s (Zama, MIFF 2018) first feature-length documentary and winner of Best Film at the 2025 BFI London Film Festival, connects this act of violence to Argentina’s centuries-long history of colonial settlement and the silencing of Indigenous populations. As precise and devastating as Martel’s finest fiction. Director Michał Marczak withholds archival material of missing teenager Krzysztof Dymiński in favour of a present-tense approach, following his father Daniel’s grief-fuelled search for answers in Closure. Premiering at Sundance and winning the top prize at the Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival, the film transcends true-crime cliché to make for uneasy, spellbinding viewing. In Remake, veteran auto-documentarian Ross McElwee (Sherman’s March, MIFF 1986) turns to his archive in the painful aftermath of his son Adrian’s death, searching for what he and his camera might have missed. Awarded at Venice and True/False, the film offsets this emotion-laden investigation with an almost satirical subplot involving a proposed adaptation of Sherman’s March. In his most devastatingly personal work to date, McElwee turns his characteristic wry intelligence on the limits of his chosen medium. Winner of the U.S. Documentary Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, Nuisance Bear follows Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman into the self-proclaimed Polar Bear Capital of the World – Churchill, where Manitoba’s iconic predators arrive as both dangerous visitors and tourist fodder. Gorgeous landscape photography, narration by Inuit Elder Mike Tunalaaq Gibbons and a playful score from The White Lotus composer Cristóbal Tapia de Veer anchor a tragicomic portrait that opens into bigger questions about climate change, displacement and the rights of habitation. Deep in the Šumava Mountains, identical twins František and Ondřej Klišík live out their sixties in bucolic seclusion: drinking, bickering, and wandering through forests, their lives narrated in voiceover by their majestic bull, Nandy. Made over five years by Miro Remo, Better Go Mad in the Wild won three Czech Lion Awards and the top prize at Karlovy Vary. The work is neither an essay film nor observational documentary, but an enchanting portrait of eccentricity and freedom magnificently unmoored from modern society. Kim Novak’s performance in Vertigo has long been undersold, too often attributed solely to Alfred Hitchcock’s genius, and her fiercely private retirement misread as Hollywood wreckage. In Kim Novak’s Vertigo, prolific documentary filmmaker Alexandre O. Philippe (Chain Reactions, MIFF 2025; You Can Call Me Bill, MIFF 2023; 78/52, MIFF 2017) finds in the now-93-year-old a candid collaborator, illuminating a complex person rather than worshipping a star. Her refreshing musings on authenticity and mystique reframe her legacy entirely.
- AUSTRALIAN HIGHLIGHTS
The world’s largest showcase of local filmmaking returns with an exciting line-up of stories from across the nation, highlighting the voices shaping contemporary Australian cinema. The statistics on First Nations disadvantage in Australia’s legal system are as familiar as they are damning – which is exactly why Kieran Satour (Gurindji, Pertame and Worimi) and Tyson Perkins (Arrernte and Kalkadoon) set out to tell a different story. Weaving memoir, poetry, dance and activism into a hybrid anthology built entirely from Indigenous perspectives, Facing the Numbers connects to ancient traditions of oral storytelling and songlines to find the human lives behind the statistics. Set to have its World Premiere this August, Wilderness opens on a Melbourne doctor whose carefully constructed life is quietly unravelling. In the wake of a serious car accident, Allie hits the road into Victoria’s High Country, dog in tow, on a journey that grows increasingly primal. MIFF Accelerator alum Mirrah Foulkes (Animal Kingdom) delivers a bold central performance alongside Yael Stone (Blaze, MIFF 2022) in Martin McKenna’s latest work – a midlife crisis movie about women behaving badly that doubles as a paean to the environments we stop listening to. In Phillip Philadelphia, prolific filmmaker Adam C. Briggs – whose A Grand Mockery took top honours at SXSW Sydney and Best Director at Sitges – turns his lens on the garish, grubby beauty of the Gold Coast, capturing it in 16mm for his latest twisted caper. The eponymous Phillip fritters his days away in a faded motel pursuing flights of fantasy with an aspiring actor and the drug dealer next door, evoking Florida as seen through the lenses of Harmony Korine and Sean Baker. It’s Briggs’s most eloquently vulgar work yet. When a glowing green meteorite crash-lands near her small town, slacker Sheri (Sara Thompson, One of Us Is Lying) finds herself humanity’s last hope alongside her estranged astronomer dad Hank (Scott Major, Neighbours) and her Scooby Gang of mates – Poppy (Annapurna Sriram, Fucktoys), Ash (Karis Oka, The Deb) and Finn (Jess McLeod, One of Us Is Lying). Directing her seventh feature at just 21, prolific Aussie queer-horror talent Alice Maio Mackay (T Blockers) blends retro schlock with warmth for chosen family. Produced by Jane Schoenbrun (I Saw the TV Glow, MIFF 2024), Our Effed Up World features cameos from TV Glow star Jack Haven and MIFF Accelerator alum, co-writer/director Leela Varghese (Lesbian Space Princess, MIFF 2025). Made for just $28,000 and drawn from her own experiences as a fashion photographer, Hyun Lee’s (Asian Girls, MIFF 2018) debut feature French Girls, presented by Time Out, is a DIY portrait of the drudgery of labour that punches well above its weight. Shot in Sydney by cinematographer Dimitri Zaunders (The Golden Spurtle, MIFF 2025) with non-professional actors, including impressive newcomer Mia Kidis, it’s at once a comedy about fashion’s absurdities, a commentary on the construction of imagery and a work in open dialogue with the Nouvelle Vague. The Fox marks the feature debut of Danger 5 co-showrunner Dario Russo, who writes, directs, edits and composes a wickedly dark Australian folktale about small-town duplicity built around remarkable animatronic puppetry and a cast that goes fully, gloriously ham. Jai Courtney (Felony, MIFF Closing Night 2014) and Emily Browning (One More Shot, MIFF 2025) star alongside Olivia Colman as a trickster fox and Sam Neill as a gossiping magpie, with Damon Herriman (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, MIFF 2019) and Miranda Otto (Love Serenade, MIFF 1996) rounding out the ensemble.
Spurred by a conversation with ethicist Peter Singer to investigate the secretive world of animal testing, veteran ABC journalist and former Q&A host Tony Jones makes his directorial debut with Sentient. Drawing on contemporary and archival footage alongside expert commentary from frontline scientists, the film surfaces a sobering truth: animal testing harms not only its physical victims, but the humans who carry it out. When Melbourne filmmaker Vee Shi returns to the rural Chinese town he left at thirteen, he finds his father recovering from a stroke and a fractured family forced to navigate the complicated weight of duty and care. Fresh from its Documentary Australia Award at this year’s Sydney Film Festival, Time and Tide was initially conceived as a scripted film in which Shi’s family would play themselves; what emerged is an at times shockingly intimate portrait of love, duty and inherited trauma. A MIFF Accelerator alum whose short Jia (MIFF 2023) first explored familial estrangement, Shi extends that inquiry into the most contested space of all: home. Three Chinese women seek intimacy on their own terms in Replica, VCA grad Chouwa Liang’s debut feature expanding her short My AI Lover into a timely portrait of technology, fantasy and connection. Informed by her own experience of developing feelings for a chatbot, Liang uses the backdrop of modern China – gender inequality, high-pressure work environments and a burgeoning love economy – to sensitively contextualise her subjects’ unorthodox approaches to romance.
- MUSIC ON FILM PRESENTED BY RRR
Behind Tina Arena the power balladeer and pop icon is the woman her family still calls Pina, and Tina Arena: Unravel Me, a World Premiere from Adrian Russell Wills (Kindred, MIFF 2023), follows the threads of her story in candid, dryly funny conversation. Across 50 years in music, her arc takes in suburban Melbourne, Young Talent Time, a soaring run of 90s hits and repeated reinventions in the UK and France, with new and archival interviews from Céline Dion, Lionel Richie, Katy Perry, Marc Anthony, Jessica Mauboy and The Veronicas, among others. British documentarian Grant Gee (Joy Division) won the Berlinale’s Silver Bear for Best Director with Everybody Digs Bill Evans, a fiction debut that seeks its anguished subject in negative space – tracing the aftermath of a tragedy that left the US jazz piano icon unable to touch a piano. Shot in elegant black-and-white with impressionistic montages that shimmer like harmonic chords, the film finds Anders Danielsen Lie (The Worst Person in the World, MIFF 2021) magnetically quiet in the title role, while Bill Pullman and Laurie Metcalf are in career-best form as Bill’s parents. In 1965, Austin Wiggin pulled his daughters out of school, handed them instruments they couldn’t play and named them The Shaggs. From veteran comedy director Ken Kwapis (Vibes, MIFF 2019), We Are The Shaggs traces their unlikely path from “the worst band ever” to outsider music icons with a cult following that included Frank Zappa, Patti Smith and Kurt Cobain. Gentle, bemused surviving Shaggs Dot and Betty muse on the phenomenon they’ve been caught up in, while music experts champion their intuitive brilliance. Summer Tour is Mischa Richter’s deeply personal love letter to the communal roadshow of Grateful Dead tours, filmed on 16mm from deep within the community of fans who follow successor band Dead & Company across America. Produced by committed Dead devotees Chloë Sevigny (Magic Farm, MIFF 2025) and Emily Mortimer (The Party, MIFF 2017), the film adds up to a warm-hearted hymn to hippie culture and an exploration of how people find meaning, and belonging, in art. In the first summer of the new millennium, four tween girls in Santa Rosa, California recorded eight songs and called themselves X-Cetra before producing an album that was heard by virtually no one. Summer 2000: The X-Cetra Story, winner of the Grand Jury Award in SXSW’s Documentary Feature Competition, follows writer/director Ayden Mayeri and her former bandmates two decades on, as they discover their childhood experiment has developed a cult following on music forums. Funny, introspective and genuinely surprising, it’s less a Y2K nostalgia trip than a story about four women reconnecting with fearless creativity. Legendary Marianne Faithfull sits down with George MacKay (Rose of Nevada, MIFF 2026) at a fictional Ministry of Not Forgetting – overseen by Tilda Swinton – to reflect candidly on six decades that took her from 1964 chart-topper to tabloid fodder and back again. In Broken English directors Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, who previously built form-defying portraits around Nick Cave (20,000 Days on Earth, MIFF 2014) and Emiliana Torrini (The Extraordinary Miss Flower, MIFF 2025), bring a particular unanticipated pathos to the film. Faithfull died in January 2025 while still in production, making her rendition of ‘Misunderstanding’, accompanied by Cave and Warren Ellis, her final recorded performance.
- MIFF SHORTS PRESENTED BY ARMANI BEAUTY
MIFF’s short film program brings together bold, urgent and formally adventurous works from Australia and across the globe, spanning fiction, documentary, animation and experimental cinema. For the Opponents, from Cannes Short Film Palme d’Or winner Federico Luis, is a modest, humane portrait of a young Mexican boxer caught between the dream of victory and a yearning for childhood – trusting audiences to intuit its quieter violence. Renée Marie Petropoulos’s Souvenir, an SXSW Grand Jury Award winner, is a claustrophobic, 4:3-framed coming-of-age story following a closeted teen confronting the unnerving hold her girlfriend gains over her during a family holiday. Our Choir Has Always Been Travelling, directed by Judith Pungarta Inkamala, Marjorie ‘Nunga’ Williams and Nelson Armstrong, is an animated account of the international legacy and intergenerational impact of the Ntaria Choir, formerly known as the Hermannsburg Choir, from the Northern Territory. Elizabeth Hobbs’s Daughters of the Late Colonel, a Cannes Directors’ Fortnight premiere, is a merry, rude and lyrical animated adaptation of Katherine Mansfield’s 1920 short story, following two middle-aged sisters who find the courage to begin anew after the death of their controlling father. Two special one-night-only packages extend the Shorts offering: An Fylmow Berr | The Shorts of Mark Jenkin, a focused program celebrating the BAFTA-winning Cornish filmmaker’s tactile, handmade approach to celluloid and cinematic form; and Cinema of Spectacle: Experimental Visions, a special presentation of contemporary stereoscopic and experimental moving-image works that expand the screen through depth, illusion and perception.
- MIFF XR
Celebrating its tenth year in 2026, MIFF’s XR program continues to push the boundaries of storytelling through fully immersive audio-visual experiences. Showcasing cutting-edge extended reality works across virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR), the program invites audiences into bold new worlds of creative exploration. World-premiering at MIFF, Firestorm confronts a near-future Australia bracing for a probable super El Niño event in 2026/27, with wildfire conditions that may exceed the catastrophic Black Summer of 2019/20. Director Dennis Del Favero combines the latest scientific data, a custom machine-learning model and the Unreal Engine to let audiences visualise historical Australian bushfires and interactively adjust weather conditions, watching them escalate under different warming scenarios in real time. Presented at the VCA, in a world-first conversion of an LED volume into a stereoscopic cinema, it’s less a film about climate change than a firsthand encounter with what’s coming. Singing Chen’s staggering immersive work The Clouds Are Two Thousand Meters Up poignantly expands on the theme of memory the artist explored in Afterimage for Tomorrow (MIFF 2019), adapting a short story by acclaimed Taiwanese author Wu Ming-Yi into an experience that takes extended reality to new technological heights. Rather than adopting a first-person perspective, the user figures as a ghostly shadow moving freely through an eight-square-metre space, shifting between the digital realm of a dead woman’s cloud storage and the fantasy-tinged living forest where her unfinished novel is set. In The Dollhouse, nine-year-old Juniper works through her guilt over how her family treated Magnolia, a refugee who cleaned their house, by re-enacting troubled memories inside a handmade paper diorama. Directed by Charlotte Bruneau and Dominic Desjardins, this animated interactive XR work uses childlike, puppetry-inspired textures to let audiences play alongside Juniper as she finds the courage to follow her heart. Already shown at Cannes, Annecy, BFI London Film Festival and SXSW, it’s a small, hand-built world with a salient point: it’s never too late to be kind.
- RETROSPECTIVES, CRITICAL CONDITION AND MIFF TALKS
Ulrike Ottinger: Radical Travels takes audiences on a cinematic odyssey through the work of the octogenarian German auteur – a brilliantly idiosyncratic filmmaker known for wildly sensuous visuals and avant-garde tales that journey to the most unexpected of places. Highlights include Johanna d’Arc of Mongolia, Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press, Freak Orlando, Ticket of No Return, Madame X: An Absolute Ruler and more. One of Hollywood’s last golden-age stars is celebrated in Kim Novak: Hollywood Heretic, a selection spanning her most iconic performances to lesser-seen, recently reappraised works, including Vertigo, Bell, Book and Candle, The Man with the Golden Arm, Middle of the Night and The Legend of Lylah Clare.