Jambika Docs heads to Sunny Side with international sales across five continents

• Guided by Horses looks at the relationship between young people and wild horses in the Outback

  Barcelona-based documentary distributor Jambika Docs is heading to Sunny Side of the Doc in La Rochelle next week on the back of a slew of international sales spanning Europe, North America, Latin America, Asia-Pacific and the Middle East, and two new titles joining its catalogue.

  Recent deal-making has seen Diary of an Elephant Orphan (SkyDrum Films) acquired by SRF in Switzerland, TV2 in Norway, GZT TV in Turkey, Mediawan in France, US factual streamer Gaia and Terry Steiner Inflight, while Engineers at Ground Zero (Vacationland Films) has been sold to Foxtel in Australia, Movistar in Spain and US digital distributor Ammo Content.

  Daniel Everitt-Lock’s Our Planet, The People, My Blood, meanwhile, has secured agreements with GZT TV, Foxtel and Collective Eye Educational in North America. Further sales include Loot to Society+ in France; Open Wounds to TV Unam in Mexico; Omega Wants to Dance to Spain’s Betevé, Filmin and Beholders; and Selling Superman to American Airlines, among others.

  The company said it has also expanded its digital distribution strategy through partnerships with YouTube channel operators Little Dot Studios and Nikita Ventures and grown its presence on platforms including Tubi and Amazon Prime.

  Two new titles will be spotlighted by Jambika in La Rochelle. Guided by Horses, from filmmaker Sean O’Reilly, explores healing, mental wellbeing and self-discovery through the relationship between young people and wild horses in the Australian Outback, while Pauline Clague’s The Colleano Heart tells the story of high-wire performer Con Colleano and his family.

  “Following a strong first half of 2026, we’ve secured a number of international sales, expanded our catalogue with six new acquisitions, and will be showcasing two new documentaries at Sunny Side,” said Juan Solera, Jambika’s head of acquisitions and sales.

You know that feeling when your phone pings with something you didn’t know you needed? That’s exactly what happened earlier this cold winter morning: the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) 2026 just dropped its first 25 titles, and let me tell you, it’s shaping up to be a wild, wonderful ride.

From live 4K commentary on a cult rock musical to adrenaline-pumping urban thrillers and the world’s quietest yet most mesmerising documentaries, this year’s festival is promising to be nothing short of electric.

It's running 6–23 August 2026 across Naarm (Melbourne) and regional Victoria, with online screenings extending until 30 August. Here's everything you need to know.

Film still from 'Queen at Sea', courtesy MIFF

The full list of first-glance titles

• The Airport Chaplain

• The Best Summer

• Dead Man’s Wire

• Death of a Shaman

• Digby & Camille

• Extra Geography

• Guided By Horses

• Hard as Puck

• Hear My Eyes: Memento

• The History of Concrete

• I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning

• Jebediah: Are We OK?

• John Cameron Mitchell Presents: Hedwig and the Angry Inch

• Mad Rush

• Minotaur, Mum

• I’m Alien Pregnant

• The Only Living Pickpocket in New York

• Phenomena

• Queen at Sea

• Rose

• The Samurai and the Prisoner

• The Story of Documentary

• The Sun Never Sets

• Sweet Milk Lake

• We Are Aliens

Film still from 'The Airport Chaplain', courtesy MIFF.

Where and when to get tickets

MIFF Members get exclusive pre-sale access from 9–14 July, with general tickets going on sale from 14 July.

Tickets are available exclusively via the MIFF website. You can opt to purchase a six or 12 film Multi-pass, or you can opt to buy single tickets to individual screenings.

Our pick of must-see films

Films that have us buzzing include:

• Minotaur – Cannes' Grand Prix winner, shows Andrey Zvyagintsev channel fury into marital and political collapse in Putin-era Russia.

• Rose – with Sandra Hüller, explores 17th-century gender and identity in a quietly devastating folktale.

• Queen at Sea – starring Juliette Binoche and Tom Courtenay, unpacking family tensions and dementia in a humanist masterpiece.

• The Sun Never Sets – Joe Swanberg’s return in a mumblecore-infused Alaskan love triangle shot in radiant 35mm.

• Dead Man’s Wire – featuring Bill Skarsgård and Al Pacino, where a 70s kidnapping becomes a darkly comic exploration of media spectacle.

• John Cameron Mitchell Presents: Hedwig and the Angry Inch – John Cameron Mitchell (yes, the genius behind 2001's Hedwig and the Angry Inch) will be in town for a one-night-only live 4K commentary screening. You'll get to sit in a packed cinema while Mitchell guides you through 25 years of genderfluid rock brilliance – it's a rare chance to witness a cult classic celebrated exactly as it deserves to be.

• Hear My Eyes: Memento – Don’t sleep on Hear My Eyes' performance of Memento, pairing a restored 4K screening of Christopher Nolan’s debut thriller with a brand-new score performed live.

• Digby & Camille – part of the MIFF Premiere Fund championing Aussie talent – offers a tender look at a couple living with Down syndrome.

• Mad Rush, Maddelin McKenna’s debut is another we can't wait for, transforming Melbourne’s CBD into a dizzying thriller.

Film still from 'Dead Man's Wire', courtesy MIFF.

Screenings outside of Melbourne

MIFF isn’t just Melbourne-centric. Regional screenings hit:

• Bendigo

• Ballarat

• Castlemaine

• Geelong

• Healesville

• Rosebud

• Sale

• Warrnambool

Screenings in these cities will take place over two weekends: 14–16 and 21–23 August.

MIFF Schools will also bring diverse films in multiple languages to students, and MIFF Online will once again allow out-of-towners nationwide stream a curated selection from 14–30 August.

First Australian films announced for Melbourne International Film Festival

Cinema Australia / 22 hours ago

Today, Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) offers its first look at the 2026 program, announcing 25 films and special events, among them six MIFF Premiere Fund titles, a selection of 17 international and local highlights and special live events, many of which will make their Australian premiere at this year’s 74th edition.

Running 6–23 August across Naarm, regional Victoria, with MIFF Online screening nationally until 30 August, this year’s festival arrives with 18+ days of thought-provoking, eye-opening cinema, featuring some of the most hotly anticipated films of the year, fresh from Cannes, Berlin, Sundance and beyond.

ADVERTISEMENT Click for details

Previewing what’s ahead for this year’s blockbuster 2026 program, MIFF Artistic Director Al Cossar, said: “We’re thrilled to share these First Glance titles as an early taste of what to expect when MIFF returns to Melbourne screens this winter. From the year’s most anticipated films to bold new voices and discoveries, this selection offers a glimpse of the festival to come: a world on screen, alongside the very best in new Australian storytelling. These incredible films are just the beginning of a program that will showcase more than 300 titles. We’re proud to unveil them today – and even more excited about everything still to announce at the 74th Melbourne International Film Festival when the program goes live on 9 July!”

The much-loved MIFF Regional showcase returns with the support of VicScreen – reaching audiences where they are – travelling to Bendigo, Ballarat, Castlemaine, Geelong, Healesville, Rosebud, Sale and Warrnambool across two festival weekends of screenings and filmmaker talks (14–16 and 21–23 August).

MIFF Schools continues its dedicated offering for teachers and students, while MIFF Online ensures audiences can make the most of the festival or take part from anywhere. Streaming on Cinema 3, ACMI’s on-demand platform, MIFF Online extends the festival for an additional week beyond closing night, offering 17 days of viewing from 14–30 August.

Rounding out the festival on Saturday 22 August, the MIFF Awards celebrates cinematic excellence through one of the world’s most significant filmmaking prize pools, headlined by the $140,000 Bright Horizons Award, supported by the Victorian Government through VicScreen.

ADVERTISEMENT Click for details

The full MIFF 2026 program, including the Bright Horizons Competition lineup, will be revealed Thursday 9 July. Award category nominees and this year’s esteemed festival Jury will also be announced in late July.

Nearly two decades on, the MIFF Premiere Fund remains one of Australia’s most significant supporters of local screen talent. Having invested in more than 100 Australian feature films to date, the Fund co-finances original features making their world premiere at MIFF, backing the bold ideas and distinctive voices shaping the future of Australian cinema.

Digby & Camille

Archibald Prize-selected painter Digby Webster and trainee chef Camille Collins have been inseparable since meeting in a Sydney pub eight years ago – and in Digby & Camille, award-winning filmmaker Trevor Graham (Make Hummus Not War, MIFF 2012) simply pulls up a chair and joins them. Webster, who co-directs the film, weaves several years of fly-on-the-wall footage with animated sequences drawn from his own art, building a portrait of a couple in their thirties who are living with Down syndrome and dreaming, with considerable passion and occasional frustration, of marriage, children and a home of their own. Tender, intimate and quietly humorous, it’s a love story told entirely on its own terms.

Mad Rush

Melbourne’s laneways and street corners become a gauntlet of dread in Mad Rush, presented by Rydges Melbourne, a debut from Accelerator Lab alum Maddelin McKenna (Patterns of the Afternoon, MIFF 2022). When a phone call about fraudulent bank activity sends a rootless Gen Z spiralling through the city over the course of a single frantic day, McKenna transforms the familiar CBD into something altogether more sinister – a gritty, disorienting urban wonderland. Senuri Chandrani (Of an Age, MIFF 2022) anchors the film with a performance that makes Madisha’s prickly vulnerability impossible to look away from. A micro-budget gem that turns financial panic into existential reckoning, Mad Rush confirms McKenna as a sharp new voice in Australian cinema.

Jebediah: Are We OK?

In the late-90s Australian indie scene, Jebediah were the ones who were supposed to make it, and for a while, they did. Arlo Dean Cook’s documentary Jebediah: Are We OK? traces the Perth alt-rock quartet’s thirty-year arc from high school beginnings to Triple J darlings to the darker terrain of what sustained success actually costs – and whether lifelong friends can find a way to keep the music alive. Drawing on three decades of archival and home-movie footage and firsthand perspectives from local music icons Tim Rogers, Phil Jamieson and Janet English, the film is as much a candid cautionary tale as a rollicking celebration of one of Australian rock’s most enduring friendships.

Death of a Shaman

Death of a Shaman plunges audiences into the Ecuadorian Amazon, where Indigenous shaman Rafael Santi is running out of time to pass sacred knowledge onto his teenage grandson and to protect his community from the mining and oil corporations closing in with government backing. Australian filmmaker Dan Jackson spent over a decade building trust with the communities of Amazanga to earn the access that makes this documentary possible, weaving intimate family footage with protest recordings, archival imagery and vivid ayahuasca sequences into a film of rare textural richness. Depicting a struggle that resonates as urgently here in Australia as anywhere – this is raw filmmaking that earns every one of its ambitions.

Hard as Puck

The Garden Island Pirates are the best para ice hockey team in Western Australia – and also, for now, the only one. Isaac Elliott’s debut documentary feature Hard as Puck, embeds itself in this scrappy Perth-based club following a mixed-gender cast of amateurs as they wrangle sponsorships, navigate bureaucratic politics and strap into sledges under the stoically deadpan watch of founder Dan Perrett. Part underdog sports doc, part behind-the-scenes institutional comedy, the film brings together the spirit of Cool Runnings, the committee-room intrigue of Rats in the Ranks (MIFF 1996) and the irrepressible community warmth of The Golden Spurtle (MIFF 2025). A laugh-out-loud edge-of-your-sled ride about people who show up anyway, against Norway, against the United States, and against a booking system that won’t give them the rink.

Sweet Milk Lake

Raw, funny and achingly felt, Sweet Milk Lake marks Harvey Zielinski as a debut filmmaker with something deeply personal to say. In the remote country town of Sweet Milk, a young trans man discovers that the easiest place to finally belong is the one built on a lie, and that the most complicated relationship to repair might be with himself. Zielinski draws on his own experiences and pulls double duty in the lead dual roles of Jake and his cisgender twin, crafting a fish-out-of-water dramedy of quiet emotional precision. A budding romance with Hunter Page-Lochard (Kid Snow, MIFF 2024) gives the film a tender, charged counterweight to the web of deception quietly tightening around its protagonist.

Guided by Horses

The Kimberley region of Western Australia is among the most breathtaking landscapes on earth – and home to one of the world’s highest youth suicide rates. In Guided by Horses, filmmaker Sean O’Reilly documents the work of pioneering Aboriginal researcher Professor Juli Coffin, whose own life was once saved by a horse and who now runs a groundbreaking program pairing First Nations teenagers with horses as a culturally safe path to healing, reconnection and adulthood. Combining observational footage with first-person testimony against a stunningly cinematic Kimberley backdrop, and executive-produced by Hunter Page-Lochard, Mark Coles Smith and Stephen Page among others, the film is full of charm, joy and gentle humour with an epic quality that belies its quiet, human heart.

Phenomena

The natural wonders most likely to stop you in your tracks turn out to be the ones invisible to the naked eye and Melbourne-based debut filmmaker Josef Gatti has spent a decade finding a way to show them to us. Training a high-powered camera on Petri dish chemistry experiments across 10 thematically structured chapters, and scoring the results to music by Nils Frahm and Rival Consoles, Phenomena transforms intangible scientific concepts into kaleidoscopic, psychedelic spectacle – built entirely without AI. Gatti’s articulate voiceover narration, crafted with his father, a physics teacher, grounds the visual pyrotechnics in genuine scientific illumination, producing a documentary that has toured film festivals around the world on its way to this mesmerising full-length debut.

The full MIFF 2026 program will launch on Thursday 9 July. Full details here: https://miff.com.au

MIFF 2026 COMES INTO VIEW: FIRST 25 FILMS ANNOUNCED FEATURING WAVE OF INTERNATIONAL HIGHLIGHTS, PREMIERE FUND SLATE, EXCLUSIVE SPECIAL EVENTS AND MORE

1 day ago

Read time: 11 mins

by FilmInk Staff

Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) offers its first look at the 2026 program, announcing 25 films and special events, among them six MIFF Premiere Fund titles, a selection of 17 international and local highlights and special live events, many of which will make their Australian premiere at this year’s 74th edition.

Running 6–23 August across Naarm, regional Victoria, with MIFF Online screening nationally until 30 August, this year’s festival arrives with 18+ days of thought-provoking, eye-opening cinema, featuring some of the most hotly anticipated films of the year, fresh from Cannes, Berlin, Sundance and beyond.

John Cameron Mitchell – director, playwright and two-time Tony Award-winning star – will attend MIFF 2026 to share John Cameron Mitchell Presents: Hedwig and the Angry Inch, offering live commentary on his genderfluid rock masterpiece in stunningly restored 4K. Twenty-five years on, this defiant and uncategorisable cult classic, where drag and trans, nonbinary and androgynous bleed into one glorious whole, deserves only one kind of celebration: loud, live and in the best possible company, for one night only at The Astor.

Elsewhere in the program, MIFF is excited to host the World Premiere of The Airport Chaplain, a prestige drama series set in the controlled chaos of bustling Melbourne airport, starring Hugo Weaving and Shabana Azeez and inspired by a real encounter with Tullamarine’s own chaplain. Then, returning once again this festival season, Hear My Eyes: Memento, presented with Arts Centre Melbourne, sees a yet-to-be-announced local artist reimagine Christopher Nolan’s defining debut thriller – screening in stunningly restored 4K – with a blistering live score.

Previewing what’s ahead for this year’s blockbuster 2026 program, MIFF Artistic Director Al Cossar, said: “We’re thrilled to share these First Glance titles as an early taste of what to expect when MIFF returns to Melbourne screens this winter. From the year’s most anticipated films to bold new voices and discoveries, this selection offers a glimpse of the festival to come: a world on screen, alongside the very best in new Australian storytelling. These incredible films are just the beginning of a program that will showcase more than 300 titles. We’re proud to unveil them today – and even more excited about everything still to announce at the 74th Melbourne International Film Festival when the program goes live on 9 July!”

The much-loved MIFF Regional showcase returns with the support of VicScreen – reaching audiences where they are – travelling to Bendigo, Ballarat, Castlemaine, Geelong, Healesville, Rosebud, Sale and Warrnambool across two festival weekends of screenings and filmmaker talks (14–16 and 21–23 August).

MIFF Schools continues its dedicated offering for teachers and students, while MIFF Online ensures audiences can make the most of the festival or take part from anywhere. Streaming on Cinema 3, ACMI’s on-demand platform, MIFF Online extends the festival for an additional week beyond closing night, offering 17 days of viewing from 14–30 August.

Rounding out the festival on Saturday 22 August, the MIFF Awards celebrates cinematic excellence through one of the world’s most significant filmmaking prize pools, headlined by the $140,000 Bright Horizons Award, supported by the Victorian Government through VicScreen.

The full MIFF 2026 program, including the Bright Horizons Competition lineup, will be revealed Thursday 9 July. Award category nominees and this year’s esteemed festival Jury will also be announced in late July.

MIFF PREMIERE FUND 2026

Nearly two decades on, the MIFF Premiere Fund remains one of Australia’s most significant supporters of local screen talent. Having invested in more than 100 Australian feature films to date, the Fund co-finances original features making their world premiere at MIFF, backing the bold ideas and distinctive voices shaping the future of Australian cinema.
Archibald Prize-selected painter Digby Webster and trainee chef Camille Collins have been inseparable since meeting in a Sydney pub eight years ago – and in Digby & Camille, award-winning filmmaker Trevor Graham (Make Hummus Not War, MIFF 2012) simply pulls up a chair and joins them. Webster, who co-directs the film, weaves several years of fly-on-the-wall footage with animated sequences drawn from his own art, building a portrait of a couple in their thirties who are living with Down syndrome and dreaming, with considerable passion and occasional frustration, of marriage, children and a home of their own. Tender, intimate and quietly humorous, it’s a love story told entirely on its own terms.

Melbourne’s laneways and street corners become a gauntlet of dread in Mad Rush, presented by Rydges Melbourne, a debut from Accelerator Lab alum Maddelin McKenna (Patterns of the Afternoon, MIFF 2022). When a phone call about fraudulent bank activity sends a rootless Gen Z spiralling through the city over the course of a single frantic day, McKenna transforms the familiar CBD into something altogether more sinister – a gritty, disorienting urban wonderland. Senuri Chandrani (Of an Age, MIFF 2022) anchors the film with a performance that makes Madisha’s prickly vulnerability impossible to look away from. A micro-budget gem that turns financial panic into existential reckoning, Mad Rush confirms McKenna as a sharp new voice in Australian cinema.

In the late-’90s Australian indie scene, Jebediah were the ones who were supposed to make it, and for a while, they did. Arlo Dean Cook’s documentary Jebediah: Are We OK? traces the Perth alt-rock quartet’s thirty-year arc from high school beginnings to Triple J darlings to the darker terrain of what sustained success actually costs – and whether lifelong friends can find a way to keep the music alive. Drawing on three decades of archival and home-movie footage and firsthand perspectives from local music icons Tim Rogers, Phil Jamieson and Janet English, the film is as much a candid cautionary tale as a rollicking celebration of one of Australian rock’s most enduring friendships.

Death of a Shaman plunges audiences into the Ecuadorian Amazon, where Indigenous shaman Rafael Santi is running out of time to pass sacred knowledge onto his teenage grandson and to protect his community from the mining and oil corporations closing in with government backing. Australian filmmaker Dan Jackson spent over a decade building trust with the communities of Amazanga to earn the access that makes this documentary possible, weaving intimate family footage with protest recordings, archival imagery and vivid ayahuasca sequences into a film of rare textural richness. Depicting a struggle that resonates as urgently here in Australia as anywhere – this is raw filmmaking that earns every one of its ambitions.

The Garden Island Pirates are the best para ice hockey team in Western Australia – and also, for now, the only one. Isaac Elliott’s debut documentary feature Hard as Puck, embeds itself in this scrappy Perth-based club following a mixed-gender cast of amateurs as they wrangle sponsorships, navigate bureaucratic politics and strap into sledges under the stoically deadpan watch of founder Dan Perrett. Part underdog sports doc, part behind-the-scenes institutional comedy, the film brings together the spirit of Cool Runnings, the committee-room intrigue of Rats in the Ranks (MIFF 1996) and the irrepressible community warmth of The Golden Spurtle (MIFF 2025). A laugh-out-loud edge-of-your-sled ride about people who show up anyway, against Norway, against the United States, and against a booking system that won’t give them the rink.

Raw, funny and achingly felt, Sweet Milk Lake marks Harvey Zielinski as a debut filmmaker with something deeply personal to say. In the remote country town of Sweet Milk, a young trans man discovers that the easiest place to finally belong is the one built on a lie, and that the most complicated relationship to repair might be with himself. Zielinski draws on his own experiences and pulls double duty in the lead dual roles of Jake and his cisgender twin, crafting a fish-out-of-water dramedy of quiet emotional precision. A budding romance with Hunter Page-Lochard (Kid Snow, MIFF 2024) gives the film a tender, charged counterweight to the web of deception quietly tightening around its protagonist.

INTERNATIONAL AND AUSTRALIAN TITLES

Two best friends, one oblivious geography teacher and a self-assigned mission to become more “worldly” before Oxbridge: BAFTA-winning TV director Molly Manners announces herself as a feature filmmaker with Extra Geography, set for its Australian premiere this MIFF. A funny, bittersweet ode to teenage girl friendship in the lineage of Ghost World, Clueless and Booksmart, the story follows Minna and Flic as their extracurricular project – to fall in love with the first person they see – quietly detonates the cosy co-dependency at the heart of their friendship. Adapted by Miriam Battye from a short story, with newcomers Galaxie Clear and Marni Duggan delivering remarkably convincing performances.

After nearly a decade away from features, mumblecore luminary Joe Swanberg (Drinking Buddies, MIFF 2013) returns with canny and heartfelt love-triangle dramedy, The Sun Never Sets, featuring a radiant Dakota Fanning, handsome 35mm photography, and the wide-open Alaskan skies as his canvas. The same candour and improvised wit that helped Swanberg forge the mumblecore lexicon, and launch the career of Greta Gerwig, are all accounted for in this Australian Premiere, elevated by a warm confidence that marks a filmmaker hitting a new stride.

Among this year’s early Headliners is Rose, in which Sandra Hüller, Academy Award-nominated star of Anatomy of a Fall (MIFF 2023), took home the Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance at this year’s Berlinale for a tour-de-force turn that may be the finest of her career. Austrian filmmaker Markus Schleinzer (Angelo, MIFF 2019) draws on hundreds of historical accounts of gender transgression to craft a precise and unsettling 17th-century folktale of identity and deception. Not to be missed, Schleinzer’s third feature is a fascinating and quietly devastating fictional character study.

Juliette Binoche and Tom Courtenay star in Queen at Sea, an unflinchingly knotty drama about a woman and her stepfather at odds over her dementia-stricken mother – the first feature in 18 years from writer/director Lance Hammer, whose debut Ballast (MIFF 2008) collected a slew of accolades across the global festival circuit. Delicately complex and staunchly humanist, the film is thematically adjacent to, and equally as shattering as The Father and Amour (MIFF 2012). For their exceptional performances as Martin and Leslie, Courtenay and Anna Calder-Marshall shared the Berlinale’s Silver Bear for Best Supporting Performance.

Gus Van Sant (Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot, MIFF 2018) slides into a paranoid ’70s groove with MIFF Headliner, Dead Man’s Wire, a blackly comedic retelling of the Indianapolis kidnapping that put a shotgun-wired hostage on national television and made the captor a folk hero. Bill Skarsgård plays Tony Kiritsis, a bullish businessman convinced he’s been duped by his mortgage brokers and determined to extract debt forgiveness, an apology and $5 million at gunpoint, with Al Pacino and Dacre Montgomery (Went up the Hill, MIFF 2025) as the father-son duo on the wrong end of his grievance, and Colman Domingo (Sing Sing, MIFF 2024) as the local soul DJ narrating the unfolding media spectacle.

Minotaur, winner of this year’s Cannes Grand Prix award, is what fury looks like when channeled with exquisite precision. Andrey Zvyagintsev (Loveless, MIFF 2017) having spent years in exile, recovering from a near-fatal coma and watching his country consume itself. Reinterpreting Claude Chabrol’s 1969 classic The Unfaithful Wife as a mercilessly contemporary thriller, Zvyagintsev sets a wealthy CEO’s marital and professional unraveling against the machinery of Putin’s war. Shot in Latvia with a cunning eye for detail and a savage streak of dark humour, the feature marks the dissident director’s long-awaited return to form after a decade away.

Winner of the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight Audience Award, I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning arrives as one of the year’s most compassionate portraits of a generation promised more than it received. Writer/director Clio Barnard (The Selfish Giant, MIFF 2013) and co-scenarist Enda Walsh (Hunger, MIFF 2008) adapt Keiran Goddard’s acclaimed novel to trace five Birmingham friends across the fault lines of late-stage capitalism – from gig-economy humiliation to lonely wealth – as economic reality quietly dismantles what growing up together once made unbreakable. Daryl McCormack, Joe Cole, Jay Lycurgo and Say Nothing breakouts Lola Petticrew (Tuesday, MIFF 2024) and Anthony Boyle deliver performances so lived-in they ache, grounding the film’s social-realist rigour in something far more personal.

Also bowing at Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, Kohei Kadowaki’s debut We Are Aliens is a bittersweet, beautiful reckoning with lost innocence. Rendered in a dynamic, at times dreamlike blend of rotoscoped and hand-drawn 2D animation, the film recalls Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Monster (MIFF 2023) in its preoccupation with the lasting impacts of childhood cruelty, and Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon in a bisected structure that fills gaps of memory and offers alternative views on what has passed between them.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa – the eclectic genre master behind Cloud (MIFF 2025) – adds the samurai film to his formidable repertoire with this adaptation of Honobu Yonezawa’s award-winning 2021 novel. Set inside a 16th-century fortress under siege, The Samurai and the Prisoner pairs a career-best Masahiro Motoki (Departures) against Masaki Suda’s razor-witted envoy, two men on opposite sides of a locked door forced together by an inexplicable murder within the castle walls. Drawing on the contemplative classical simplicity of mid-20th-century Japanese cinema, it’s an epic crowdpleaser that proves no locked room can contain Kurosawa for long.

John Turturro plays a veteran fingersmith with a heart of pilfered gold in The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, actor-turned-director Noah Segan’s compelling, light-fingered Sundance debut that steals its vibe from the pockets of 1970s and ’80s New York cinema. When Harry picks the wrong mark, his collegial world comprising Steve Buscemi as his fixer and Giancarlo Esposito as a NYPD detective, is suddenly and violently under threat. Evoking Cassavetes and Spike Lee, Altman and Elaine May, Segan’s feature is neither a lament for the analogue past nor a sneer at digital natives, but a celebration of the evergreen value of human connection and well-honed skill.

An accidental alien pregnancy is already inconvenient – being an underachieving millennial still living with your oversharing single mother makes it considerably worse. In Mum, I’m Alien Pregnant, directing duo Sean Wallace and Jordan Mark Windsor, aka THUNDERLIPS, expand their 2024 short into a gleefully gloopy body-horror comedy positively dripping in extraterrestrial bodily fluids, visceral practical effects and tentacled prosthetics. Hannah Lynch (Petrol, MIFF 2022) shines as the unapologetically pissed-off Mary, navigating dismissive doctors, a useless parenting partner and a host of discombobulating physical side effects as she fights to reclaim autonomy over her body and her life.

Back on home turf, Melbourne Airport becomes a purgatory of missed connections and heavy personal baggage, and Hugo Weaving (The Rooster, MIFF 2023) is the scruffy, rule-bending chaplain in a hi-vis vest holding it all together. Commissioned by SBS and set to have its World Premiere this MIFF, multi-award-winning showrunner Elise McCredie (Stateless) and co-creator Jude Troy built The Airport Chaplain from a seed as simple as a lost handbag, expanding it into something morally complex and entirely its own. With Melbourne director Bonnie Moir (Not Dark Yet, MIFF 2022) warmly illuminating a fully booked flight of Aussie talent including screen legend Claudia Karvan (The Big Steal, MIFF 2017) to rising stars Shabana Azeez (The Pitt; Lesbian Space Princess, MIFF 2025), Thomas Weatherall (Heartbreak High) and more.

In December 1995, Tamra Davis (Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child, MIFF 2010) brought a Sony Hi8 camcorder to Australia on tour with her new husband, Mike D of the Beastie Boys, then accidentally made one of the great rock documentaries. Thirty years later, discovered in a shoebox while evacuating her home during the Los Angeles Palisades wildfire, that footage captures Beastie Boys, Pavement, Sonic Youth, Foo Fighters, The Amps and Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna at Summersault, an upstart Australian festival with ambitions to outshine the Big Day Out. Raw, intimate and buzzing with the scrappy underground camaraderie of a scene on the cusp of arena superstardom, The Best Summer is a wistful last hurrah for a particular moment in alternative music.

John Wilson, the cult filmmaker behind HBO’s beloved How To With John Wilson, has made a Sundance-premiering debut feature all about concrete, that is, predictably, about much more than that. Born from the 2023 Writers Guild strike and a workshop on Hallmark Christmas rom-coms, The History of Concrete takes Wilson’s characteristically curious perambulation from Los Angeles to Rome and beyond, testing an aspirational, escapist formula on the world’s most ubiquitous building material and finding something unexpectedly profound in the rubble.

The Story of Documentary Film marks Mark Cousins’ (Women Make Film, MIFF 2020) most ambitious excavation yet as cinema’s definitive, celluloid historian turns his lens on the flipside to fiction’s glamorous past. From 1895’s Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory through Leni Riefenstahl, Agnès Varda, Frederick Wiseman and Abbas Kiarostami, the film traverses observational docs, personal essays, archive-based works, music films and experimental non-fiction. The follow-up to his Peabody Award-winning, 900-minute opus The Story of Film: An Odyssey, this towering achievement spotlights Cousins as the one scholar capable of making film history feel like genuine discovery. MIFF presents the first nine episodes across three sessions; a cinematic smorgasbord that rewards the adventurous and surprises even the most seasoned cinephile.

SPECIAL EVENTS

Hedwig and the Angry Inch remains one of cinema’s most uncategorisable works: part punk musical, part love story, part act of identity-troubling provocation that reunites audiences with something they didn’t know they’d lost. Mitchell’s genderfluid rock masterpiece began as an off-Broadway stage show and became a cult classic precisely because it refuses to resolve: drag and trans, nonbinarity and androgyny all bleed into one another, gloriously. In John Cameron Mitchell Presents: Hedwig and the Angry Inch, the award-winning director, playwright and star joins us as a MIFF special guest for a live restored 4K commentary screening – the only way to celebrate 25 years of Hedwig. Presented by Arts Centre Melbourne and MIFF, Hear My Eyes: Memento will bring a blistering new live score to Christopher Nolan’s stunningly restored 4K debut – the film that introduced him to the world. Twenty-six years on, part screening, part live concert, it’s the latest chapter from Hear My Eyes, whose decade-plus of immersive cinema collaborations has built a devoted following. The live score artist will be announced soon.

MIFF SCHOOLS

As announced last month, MIFF Schools returns in 2026 to present high-quality, diverse films in languages including French, Mandarin, Spanish, Japanese, German, English and Greek, and aligns with several Victorian Curriculum learning areas and capabilities. Screenings will be held during the festival period and will be complemented with free Professional Learning webinars delivered by MIFF’s film-analysis expert, Dr Josh Nelson. The natural wonders most likely to stop you in your tracks turn out to be the ones invisible to the naked eye and Melbourne-based debut filmmaker Josef Gatti has spent a decade finding a way to show them to us. Training a high-powered camera on Petri dish chemistry experiments across 10 thematically structured chapters, and scoring the results to music by Nils Frahm and Rival Consoles, Phenomena transforms intangible scientific concepts into kaleidoscopic, psychedelic spectacle – built entirely without AI. Gatti’s articulate voiceover narration, crafted with his father, a physics teacher, grounds the visual pyrotechnics in genuine scientific illumination, producing a documentary that has toured film festivals around the world on its way to this mesmerising full-length debut. The Kimberley region of Western Australia is among the most breathtaking landscapes on earth – and home to one of the world’s highest youth suicide rates. In Guided by Horses, filmmaker Sean O’Reilly documents the work of pioneering Aboriginal researcher Professor Juli Coffin, whose own life was once saved by a horse and who now runs a groundbreaking program pairing First Nations teenagers with horses as a culturally safe path to healing, reconnection and adulthood. Combining observational footage with first-person testimony against a stunningly cinematic Kimberley backdrop, and executive-produced by Hunter Page-Lochard, Mark Coles Smith and Stephen Page among others, the film is full of charm, joy and gentle humour with an epic quality that belies its quiet, human heart. The full MIFF 2026 program will launch on Thursday 9 July.

TICKETING

Audiences are encouraged to plan ahead – MIFF Memberships are on sale now at miff.com.au/tickets, which enable exclusive 4-day pre-sale access. MIFF Multipasses are also available now for those looking to see more for less.

Pre-sale for Hear My Eyes: Memento opens 10am AEST Monday 15 June, with general on-sale from 10am AEST Wednesday 17 June via Arts Centre Melbourne.
Tickets for John Cameron Mitchell Presents: Hedwig and the Angry Inch go on sale from 10am AEST Wednesday 17 June.

All other tickets go to MIFF Members in an exclusive pre-sale from 8pm AEST Thursday 9 July, with general on-sale from 10am AEST Tuesday 14 July.

MIFF, Melbourne's biggest film festival is back with a first look at what's coming this winter.

The Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) 2026 has dropped its First Glance program, revealing 25 films and special events ahead of the full program launch on 9 July.

The 74th edition runs 6–23 August across Naarm and regional Victoria, with MIFF Online streaming nationally until 30 August via Cinema 3, ACMI’s on-demand platform.

Six MIFF Premiere Fund titles lead the local charge, let’s dive in!

MIFF 2026

• Dates: 6–23 August 2026

• Location: Naarm (Melbourne) and regional Victoria

• MIFF Online: 14–30 August via Cinema 3 (ACMI’s on-demand platform), streaming nationally

• Regional screenings: Bendigo, Ballarat, Castlemaine, Geelong, Healesville, Rosebud, Sale and Warrnambool, 14–16 and 21–23 August

• Full program launch: 9 July 2026

• MIFF Awards: 22 August 2026, headlined by the $140,000 Bright Horizons Award supported by the Victorian Government

Stay up to date with what’s happening in and around Melbourne here. 

MIFF Premiere Fund

Hard as Puck embeds itself in Perth’s Garden Island Pirates, the best para ice hockey team in Western Australia and also, for now, the only one — part underdog sports doc, part behind-the-scenes institutional comedy about people who show up anyway, against Norway, against the United States, and against a booking system that won’t give them the rink.

Mad Rush transforms Melbourne’s CBD into something altogether more sinister across a single frantic day, with Senuri Chandrani delivering the kind of prickly, can’t-look-away performance that micro-budget films live or die on.

Sweet Milk Lake sees debut filmmaker Harvey Zielinski pull double duty in lead dual roles, crafting a trans-led fish-out-of-water dramedy with a budding romance opposite Hunter Page-Lochard at its heart.

Digby & Camille is exactly what it sounds like and exactly what you need: a fly-on-the-wall portrait of two people with Down syndrome dreaming of marriage, kids and a home, co-directed by subject Digby Webster himself.

Death of a Shaman is the result of Australian filmmaker Dan Jackson spending over a decade building trust with communities in the Ecuadorian Amazon to capture an Indigenous shaman racing against time to pass on sacred knowledge while corporations and government close in.

And Jebediah: Are We Ok? asks the question the Perth alt-rock faithful have probably been sitting with for years, tracing the band’s 30-year arc from Triple J darlings to the harder terrain of what sustained success actually costs, with Tim Rogers, Phil Jamieson and Janet English along for the ride.

International highlights

The international program is equally stacked.

Minotaur arrives as probably the most anticipated film of the lot: Andrey Zvyagintsev, the dissident Russian director behind Loveless, spent years in exile recovering from a near-fatal coma before emerging with this Cannes Grand Prix winner, a merciless contemporary thriller set against the machinery of Putin’s war.

Sandra Hüller, who you’ll remember from Anatomy of a Fall, picked up the Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance for Rose, a precise and unsettling 17th-century folktale of identity and deception that Austrian filmmaker Markus Schleinzer built from hundreds of historical accounts of gender transgression.

Gus Van Sant is back in a paranoid 70s groove with Dead Man’s Wire, a blackly comedic retelling of a real Indianapolis kidnapping that put a shotgun-wired hostage on national television, with Bill Skarsgård, Al Pacino and Dacre Montgomery.

Queen at Sea reunites Juliette Binoche and Tom Courtenay for a knotty family drama about dementia and estrangement, with Courtenay and Anna Calder-Marshall sharing the Silver Bear for Best Supporting Performance.

Clio Barnard’s I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning, which took the Directors’ Fortnight Audience Award, follows five Birmingham friends across the fault lines of late-stage capitalism in a social-realist gut-punch. And Joe Swanberg, the mumblecore director who helped launch Greta Gerwig’s career, returns to features after nearly a decade away with the sun-drenched Alaskan love triangle The Sun Never Sets, starring Dakota Fanning.

Rounding out the international titles, there’s plenty more worth getting excited about. Kohei Kadowaki’s We Are Aliens is a rotoscoped animated debut reckoning with childhood cruelty and lost innocence.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa, the genre chameleon behind Cloud, turns his hand to the samurai film with The Samurai and the Prisoner, set inside a 16th-century fortress. John Turturro plays a veteran pickpocket navigating a very bad situation in Noah Segan’s 70s and 80s New York-flavoured Sundance debut The Only Living Pickpocket in New York.

Directing duo THUNDERLIPS go full body-horror comedy with Mum, I’m Alien Pregnant, expanding their 2024 short into something gleefully, viscerally chaotic. John Wilson, the cult filmmaker behind How To With John Wilson, somehow made a Sundance feature about concrete that is, predictably, about much more than concrete, born out of the 2023 Writers Guild strike.

And Mark Cousins follows up his Peabody Award-winning 900-minute opus The Story of Film with The Story of Documentary Film, presented across three sessions and nine episodes spanning from 1895 to the present.

Australian titles

On the local side at MIFF, The Airport Chaplain gets its world premiere at MIFF — an SBS-commissioned prestige drama series from Stateless showrunner Elise McCredie, set in the controlled chaos of Melbourne Airport and starring Hugo Weaving, Shabana Azeez, Claudia Karvan and Thomas Weatherall.

And The Best Summer might be the feel-good discovery of the festival: filmmaker Tamara Davis brought a Sony Hi8 camcorder to Australia in 1995 on tour with her husband Mike D of the Beastie Boys, accidentally capturing Beastie Boys, Pavement, Sonic Youth, Foo Fighters and Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna at an upstart festival called Summersault.

The footage sat in a shoebox for 30 years before being unearthed during the LA Palisades wildfire evacuation. Sometimes the best rock docs aren’t planned at all.

Special events are shaping up as unmissable. John Cameron Mitchell, director, playwright and star, is coming to Melbourne in person for a live 4K commentary screening of Hedwig and the Angry Inch at The Astor for one night only, 25 years on from the cult classic’s release. It’s the kind of thing you’ll be annoyed you missed if you don’t go.

Hear My Eyes also returns, presented with Arts Centre Melbourne, bringing a new live score to Christopher Nolan’s Memento in restored 4K. The live score artist is yet to be announced, but the series has built a devoted following over more than a decade of immersive cinema collaborations, so expectations are understandably high.

MIFF Schools returns with multilingual programming across French, Mandarin, Spanish, Japanese, German, English and Greek, aligned with Victorian Curriculum learning areas, and complemented by free Professional Learning webinars from film-analysis expert Dr Josh Nelson.

Two films have been announced for that strand: Phenomena, a science documentary transforming Petri dish chemistry into kaleidoscopic visual spectacle scored by Nils Frahm and Rival Consoles, narrated by Melbourne-based debut filmmaker Josef Gatti and his physicist father; and Guided by Horses, documenting the work of Aboriginal researcher Professor Juli Coffin, whose program pairs First Nations teenagers with horses as a path to healing and reconnection in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, executive produced by Hunter Page-Lochard, Mark Coles Smith and Stephen Page.

MIFF Regional also returns with support from VicScreen, heading to eight regional Victorian locations across two festival weekends, with screenings and filmmaker talks.

With the full program of more than 300 titles still to be announced, this first wave is just a taste of what’s ahead.

‘Hard as Puck’, ‘Jebediah: Are We OK?’, ‘Mad Rush’ included in MIFF first look line-up

Sean Slatter·

FestivalsFilmNews

·June 11, 2026

'Hard as Puck'

The sights, sounds, and sport of the west are among the early highlights in this year’s Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF), which has announced a first-look program of 25 titles.

Among the six MIFF Premiere Fund titles announced today, Isaac Elliott’s debut documentary Hard as Puck embeds itself with the Garden Island Pirates, Western Australia’s only para ice hockey team, as they wrangle sponsorships, navigate the bureaucratic politics, and strap into sledges under the stoically deadpan watch of founder Dan Perrett.

Also premiering through the fund is Arlo Dean Cook’s Jebediah: Are We OK?, tracing the Perth alt-rock band’s thirty-year arc from Triple J darlings to the darker terrain of sustained success, and featuring firsthand perspectives from local music icons Tim Rogers, Phil Jamieson, and Janet English.

Elsewhere, Sean O’Reilly’s Guided by Horses, which documents Aboriginal researcher Professor Juli Coffin’s equine healing program for First Nations teenagers in the Kimberley, also screens in the program.

A still from Jebediah: Are We OK?

The trials of youth are also explored in Maddelin McKenna’s debut Mad Rush, which transforms Melbourne’s CBD into a landscape of financial panic and existential dread after a phone call about fraudulent bank activity sends a rootless Gen Z spiralling through the city; and Harvey Zielinski’s Sweet Milk Lake, a coming-of-age dramedy in which a softly spoken trans man is mistaken for his alpha, cis twin brother by his estranged and dying dad, and takes the opportunity to be “one of the boys.”

They will premiere as part of the fund alongside Trevor Graham’s Digby & Camille, a portrait of two Sydneysiders living with Down syndrome and dreaming of marriage and children; and Dan Jackson’s Death of a Shaman, a documentary that plunges audiences into the Ecuadorian Amazon, where Indigenous shaman Rafael Santi is running out of time to pass sacred knowledge onto his teenage grandson and to protect his community from the mining and oil corporations closing in with government backing.

Other local highlights include the world premiere of SBS drama series The Airport Chaplain, created by Elise McCredie and Jude Troy and starring Hugo Weaving; Josef Gatti’s decade-in-the-making Phenomena, which transforms Petri dish chemistry into psychedelic visual spectacle, built entirely without AI; and Tamra Davis’ The Best Summer, a co-production between the US, Australia, Thailand and Indonesia that captures performances at Summersault, an upstart Australian festival with ambitions to outshine the Big Day Out.

The international contingent features Sandra Hüller’s Silver Bear-winning performance in Markus Schleinzer’s Rose and Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Cannes Grand Prix winner Minotaur — the dissident director’s first feature in a decade — alongside Clio Barnard and Enda Walsh’s I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning, winner of the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight Audience Award, and Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s samurai thriller The Samurai and the Prisoner.

‘Phenomena’

Of the events announced, John Cameron Mitchell will attend to present a live commentary screening of Hedwig and the Angry Inch in restored 4K at The Astor, while Memento returns in a new edition of Hear My Eyes with a live score from a yet-to-be-announced local artist.

MIFF artistic director Al Cossar said the selections offered a glimpse of a festival that would feature a world on screen, alongside the very best in new Australian storytelling.

“These incredible films are just the beginning of a program that will showcase more than 300 titles. We’re proud to unveil them today – and even more excited about everything still to announce at the 74th Melbourne International Film Festival when the program goes live on July 9.”

The full program, including the Bright Horizons Competition lineup, will be revealed on 9 July. The 74th Melbourne International Film Festival will run from August 6–23 across Naarm, regional Victoria, with MIFF Online screening nationally until August 30.

“Also honing in on young people, the feature-length project “Liyan: Guided by Horses” is about Aboriginal researcher Professor Juli Coffin’s equine-assisted program, with Hunter Page-Lochard, Huna Amweero, Daniel Gordon, Mark Coles Smith and Stephen Page among the film’s executive producers.”

Liyan: Guided by Horses (working title): Set against the breathtaking backdrop of the Kimberley, this feature documentary from director Sean O’Reilly is a heartwarming and timely story of reconnection. At the heart of it is a group of young people, nurtured within a one-of-a-kind sanctuary using horses as powerful guides, pioneered by Aboriginal researcher Professor Juli Coffin. This documentary is produced by O’Reilly with Professor Juli Coffin and Sophy Crane. It is executive produced by Hunter Page-Lochard, Huna Amweero, Daniel Gordon, Mark Coles Smith and Stephen Page. 

This includes Liyan: Guided by Horses, from director and producer Sean O’Reilly, which explore a Kimberley-based sanctuary that uses horses as therapy, pioneered by Aboriginal researcher Professor Juli Coffin. Among the executive producers are Mark Coles Smith, Stephen Page and Hunter-Page Lochard.