From 7–24 August, Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) proudly returns to Naarm and surrounds with some of the most talked about films arriving hot from Cannes, Berlin, Sundance and across the globe. 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 will screen 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 complete Bright Horizons Competition lineup will be unveiled Thursday 10th July, with category nominees and juries for the MIFF Awards to be announced in late July.
Some of the highlights this year include One More Shot, an ingenious debut feature from Melbourne director Nicholas Clifford. Starring a standout lineup of Australian talent – Emily Browning, Sean Keenan, Ashley Zukerman, Aisha Dee and Elias Anton, this Y2K inspired outing about an end-of-millennium house party that becomes an endless, tequila-fuelled time loop 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 Okey Bakassi 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, 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, 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.
Some of the international and Australian titles playing this year include one of Sundance’s buzziest debuts, Sorry, Baby, an A24-backed dramedy set to announce writer/director/star Eva Victor as a formidable new talent. Produced by Barry Jenkins, Adele Romanski and Mark Ceryak – the same team behind Aftersun– and featuring key supporting turns from Naomi Ackie, Lucas Hedges and Kelly McCormack, 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 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 engaging chamber drama.
Led by a magnetic Caleb Landry Jones, Harvest by Greek auteur Athina Rachel Tsangari 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 Price Williams and assembly edited by Australian filmmaker Alena Lodkina, 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 slippery second 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 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.
Marlon Williams: Two Worlds – Ngā Ao E Rua chronicles the artistic process across four years of one of Aotearoa’s most beloved artists, Marlon Williams, as he sets out on his most ambitious musical project yet: creating an album sung entirely in te reo Māori. Director Ursula Grace Williams follows the troubadour from the tranquillity of the South Island to his adopted home of Melbourne – and onwards to tours around the world and back, where he duets with Lorde, Aldous Harding and Florence Welch (of Florence and the Machine). Balancing moments of behind-the-scenes levity with remarkable musical sequences built around Williams’ new waiata, this engrossing documentary playfully captures one musician’s poignant personal journey.
Debuting at Berlinale, Fwends by Accelerator Lab alum Sophie Somerville makes its Victorian Premiere this MIFF, as is right and proper for any film so indebted to the city’s bluestone-cobbled laneways. Estranged mates get lost in Melbourne in this full-of-feels feature debut – a paean to young-adult friendship that’s a must-watch for anyone who loves the city, or might have lived here just a little too long.
Following his passing, legendary Yolngu actor David Gulpilil is brought back to his home country in a continent-traversing commemoration worthy of his transcendent talent in Journey Home, David Gulpilil. Narrated by Hugh Jackman and Yolngu hip-hop artist Baker Boy, co-directors Trisha Morton-Thomas and Maggie Miles portray the man through the eyes of his community, intimately chronicling the epic trip through to its culmination in a Yolngu funeral ceremony and serving as a fitting tribute to a legend of Australian cinema.
Cloud is an unnerving, vicious psychological thriller from iconic director Kiyoshi Kurosawa that satirically skewers our complacent belief in the anonymity of the internet. As one of Japan’s great genre filmmakers, Kurosawa cut his teeth working on no-budget straight-to- video action and pinku movies in the 1980s before breaking out on the global stage with 2001’s J-horror classic Pulse, a fable of early-internet doom that has proven prescient. In Cloud, he turns his attention to the shady world of modern e-commerce, crafting ever-escalating tension from an online dystopia in which everyone’s out to make a quick buck and nobody wants to be left holding the bag.
Michel Gondry returns to his roots with Maya, Give Me a Title, a wildly creative animated omnibus, assembling surreal two-dimensional adventures to entertain his young daughter. Living on a different continent to his four-year- old daughter, Maya, the iconic French filmmaker comes up with a way to connect with her: she gives him a title for a story, and he turns it into a handmade animated adventure. Often peeling back to reveal his methods an offer a how-to primer for animation, the Berlinale Children’s Jury award winner is a universal valentine to storytelling and its seminal place in the parent–child bond. The film is included in the 2025 MIFF Schools line up.
Dreams marks the second collaboration between Cannes-awarded filmmaker Michel Franco and Oscar winner Jessica Chastain after Memory in a scathing yet enthralling drama about immigration, manipulation and a romance built on inequality. With taut plotting and crisp cinematography, this Berlinale-premiering film exposes the toxic flip side of progressivism and how kindness can, when pushed, devolve into cruelty.
From darkness into light, Come See Me in the Good Light is a poetic documentary that brings audiences to the brink of what it means to love. Celebrated non-binary American poets Andrea Gibson and Megan Falley are partners and fellow artists. When Gibson is diagnosed with stage 4 ovarian cancer and only given two years to live, they embark on a journey through trips to the oncology clinic, chemotherapy and the all-too-immediate realities of life and death. Directed by RyanWhite and co-produced by queer comedian and cancer survivor Tig Notaro, the Sundance Festival Favourite Award winner uses archival footage and Gibson’s own words as a poet laureate to bring this poignant story of queer love, catharsis, and sexual and gender acceptance to life.
Following six young female journalists over the course of four months, My Undesirable Friends: Part 1 – Last Air in Moscow is an engrossing observational documentary set against the backdrop of a steady erosion of civil liberties. A gripping portrait of Russian journalists living and working under the crosshairs of a hostile regime, director Julia Loktev brings a distinct feeling of intimacy to this long-form episodic work, mostly shooting on her iPhone and maintaining a close rapport with her subjects. Capturing big-picture history in small moments, this real- life epic invites us into the lives of journalists striving to fight for the truth an maintain their humanity as the walls close in around them.
And in their latest feature Reflections in a Dead Diamond, the Belgian-based French filmmaking couple Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani behind Let the Corpses Tan bring a touch of Dario Argento’s brutally surreal aesthetic to this homage to 60s-Bond-style sexy spy thrillers. Debuting in competition at Berlinale, the film fuses eurotrash flesh onto giallo bones to breathe life into a deliriously entertaining, drop-dead-gorgeous pastiche.
For this year’s MIFF, audiences are encouraged to plan ahead, with MIFF Multipasses and MIFF Memberships – which offer exclusive pre-sale access including allocated seating (in select venues) – available for purchase now via miff.com.au/tickets. Tickets for Julia Holter: The Passion of Joan Arc, presented by MUBI, are currently on sale and available via the Melbourne Recital Centre website. All other tickets will go on sale to MIFF Members for an exclusive pre-sale from 8pm AEST, Thursday 10 July and will be on sale to the general public from 10am AEST, Tuesday 15 July following the full program launch on July 10th.
