by FilmInk Staff
The red carpet is rolled out, the lights are dimmed and Melbourne’s biggest celebration of film begins tonight as the 74th Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) officially opens. Audiences will gather at Hoyts Melbourne Central for the International Premiere of Wicker, launching 18 days of world-class cinema, international guests, special events and more than 300 screen works across Melbourne from 6–23 August.
Wicker is the Sundance-premiering debut feature from Australian-born writer/director Eleanor Wilson and co-writer/director Alex Huston Fischer. Starring Academy Award winner Olivia Colman alongside Alexander Skarsgård, Peter Dinklage, Richard E. Grant and Melbourne’s own Elizabeth Debicki, the darkly funny modern fable offers a sharp critique of small-mindedness, superstition and overzealous conservatism. The film also screens in this year’s Bright Horizons Competition, with Wilson and Huston Fischer attending MIFF to celebrate its International Premiere.
Following tonight’s Opening Night Gala, MIFF takes over venues across Melbourne with more than 600 sessions of world and Australian premieres, filmmaker Q&As, talks, retrospectives, immersive XR experiences and one-of-a-kind special events. Beyond the city, MIFF Regional brings the festival to audiences across Victoria over the weekends of 14–16 August and 21–23 August, while MIFF Online streams a curated selection of festival highlights nationally via ACMI’s Cinema 3 from 14–30 August, extending the festival across the country.
MIFF Artistic Director Al Cossar, said: “It is a delight to welcome audiences once again to the Melbourne International Film Festival, as our city comes alive for a celebration of cinema like no other! With a packed first weekend-slate of World Premieres, international and Australian guests, special events, and some of the year’s best filmmaking set to thrill Melbourne audiences, join us as MIFF again brings the world on screen to Melbourne across the next 18 days.”
Beyond welcoming audiences back to cinemas, MIFF has assembled an acclaimed panel of Australian and international filmmakers and screen practitioners to judge this year’s major competition awards. The Bright Horizons Award, supported by VicScreen, recognising exceptional first and second features from around the world, will be judged by Jury President, award-winning Australian director Sophie Hyde, alongside independent filmmaking pioneer Joe Swanberg (The Sun Never Sets, MIFF 2026), Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winning filmmaker Desiree Akhavan (The Miseducation of Cameron Post), acclaimed filmmaker Noora Niasari, whose debut feature Shayda opened MIFF in 2023, actor Courtney Eaton (Mad Max: Fury Road, Yellowjackets), and leading Singaporean producer Tan Si En, co-producer of Cannes Competition title Nagi Notes, screening at MIFF 2026.
The Uncle Jack Charles Award, recognising outstanding First Nations film creatives, will be judged by acclaimed Nyikina actor, writer, producer and MIFF Ambassador Mark Coles Smith, Wonnarua writer, director and producer Adrian Russell Wills, whose documentary Tina Arena: Unravel Me premieres at MIFF this year, and Wiradjuri curator and RISING festival Senior Curator of Music Hayley Percy. Together, the juries will recognise outstanding filmmaking across MIFF’s awards suite.
Building on the exceptional response to this year’s Program Launch, demand has continued to build up to festival opening, with audiences snapping up tickets to many of the season’s biggest premieres, filmmaker events and special presentations ahead of Opening Night with films including Mark Jenkin‘s hypnotic time-travel mystery Rose of Nevada, Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Cannes Grand Prix winner Minotaur and John Wilson‘s genre-defying documentary The History of Concrete on standby across all sessions.
Additional sessions close to sell-out include Chandler Levack’s Montreal-set coming-of-age comedy Mile End Kicks and György Pálfi’s tragicomic fable Hen, told entirely from the perspective of a runaway chicken navigating the cruelty and tenderness of the human world. A fourth and final session of Markus Schleinzer’s Berlinale Silver Bear-winning drama, Rose, has been added to the festival’s weekend after three prior sell-outs.
Making it easier than ever to discover something unexpected, Rush Tix return for MIFF 2026, offering $12 tickets to selected sessions each day of the festival. A fresh allocation of discounted tickets will be announced at 11.30am daily before going on sale from 12pm, rewarding spontaneous festivalgoers willing to take a chance on their next cinematic discovery.
OPENING WEEKEND HIGHLIGHTS
Following Opening Night, the festival gathers pace with a packed weekend of major Australian and international premieres, offering audiences their first opportunity to experience many of the most anticipated films in this year’s program.
At ACMI, MIFF-goers can experience an extraordinary cross-section of contemporary world cinema. Sho Miyake‘s quietly affecting Two Seasons, Two Strangers explores the fleeting connections that shape our lives, while Ryūsuke Hamaguchi‘s All of a Sudden continues the acclaimed director’s fascination with chance encounters and human intimacy. Fresh from Cannes, Valeska Grisebach’s Jury Prize-winning The Dreamed Adventure sits alongside Fernando Eimbcke’s Berlinale prize winner Flies, while documentary highlights include Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner To Hold a Mountain, Christopher Nelius’ delightfully offbeat Whistle, exploring the fiercely competitive world of musical whistling, and Sukundimi Walks Before Me, following Papuan Indigenous communities fighting to protect the sacred Sepik River.
Opening weekend also marks the launch of this year’s Music on Film strand with Tamra Davis’ acclaimed documentary The Best Summer. The celebrated filmmaker and festival guest features in a special In Conversation event as a highlight of the MIFF Talks program, reflecting on a career spanning iconic music videos, Billy Madison, Basquiat and her latest documentary.
Australian cinema takes centre stage throughout the opening weekend with a remarkable lineup of world premieres and new local voices. Supported by the MIFF Premiere Fund, Harvey Zielinski’s Sweet Milk Lake – also screening in this year’s Bright Horizons Competition – follows a young trans man navigating family, identity and belonging after unexpectedly reconnecting with his estranged father in rural Australia. Other Premiere Fund titles screening in world premiere over the weekend include Trevor Graham’s intimate documentary Digby & Camille, following two people with Down syndrome pursuing marriage, children and a home of their own with remarkable honesty and humour, and Dan Jackson’s Death of a Shaman, which journeys deep into the Ecuadorian Amazon as an ageing spiritual leader prepares his grandson to inherit generations of ancestral knowledge. The world premiere of James Hunter’s psychological thriller The Latcher explores grief, obsession and the unsettling pull of the Australian bush, while W.A.M. Bleakley and Rhian Skirving’s documentary Rodeo Dreams ventures deep into one of Australia’s most dangerous sporting subcultures.
Music, fashion and extraordinary true stories also converge through Robert Gordon’s Newport & the Great Folk Dream, revisiting the Bob Dylan performance that changed music forever, Marc by Sofia, an intimate portrait of fashion visionary Marc Jacobs through the lens of Sofia Coppola, and Orlando von Einsiedel’s The Cycle of Love, chronicling the extraordinary bicycle journey that reunited an Indian artist with the Swedish woman he loved.
Elsewhere across the city, Gregg Araki’s provocative new thriller I Want Your Sex brings together Olivia Wilde, Cooper Hoffman and Charli XCX in a bold exploration of desire and power, while restored presentations of Mary Harron’s groundbreaking I Shot Andy Warhol and Horace Ové’s landmark Pressure reaffirm MIFF’s longstanding commitment to cinema history. Acclaimed international discoveries continue with Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Sheep in the Box, Asghar Farhadi’s morally complex Parallel Tales, starring Isabelle Huppert, Sandra Wollner’s Un Certain Regard Prize winner Everytime, David Pablos’ Queer Lion-winning On the Road, Tsai Ming-liang’s meditative Back Home, Ira Sachs’ The Man I Love, starring Rami Malek, and Yellow Letters – the winner of the prestigious Golden Bear at this year’s Berlinale, one of the festival world’s most significant awards.
Opening weekend also showcases MIFF’s signature live and immersive experiences. Hear My Eyes returns to Hamer Hall with Christopher Nolan’s Memento, reimagined through a specially commissioned live score by King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard drummer Michael “CAVS” Cavanagh, and the Fulldome Showcase transforms Melbourne Planetarium into a spectacular 360-degree cinema with immersive works including Vaka Moana: Ancestors of the Future.
FESTIVAL GUESTS
From acclaimed auteurs and first and second-time feature directors to actors, producers and industry leaders, MIFF 2026 welcomes an extensive roster of international guests to Melbourne, giving audiences the opportunity to experience cinema alongside the creative minds behind it. Introductions, post-screening Q&As, in-conversation events and special appearances remain at the heart of the festival, creating one-of-a-kind moments for audiences to engage directly with some of the world’s most exciting screen talent.
Leading this year’s international delegation are Opening Night filmmakers Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer, celebrating MIFF’s Opening Night Gala and the International Premiere of Wicker, alongside legendary filmmaker, performer and writer John Cameron Mitchell, who arrives in Melbourne to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Hedwig and the Angry Inch with an exclusive live director’s commentary showing at the fittingly iconic Astor Theatre. Acclaimed Argentinian auteur Lisandro Alonso also visits Melbourne in conjunction with MIFF’s major retrospective of his work, offering audiences a rare opportunity to experience one of contemporary cinema’s most distinctive voices both on screen and in person.
Across the festival, many of this year’s Bright Horizons filmmakers will introduce their Australian premieres and participate in post-screening discussions, including, Abinash Bikram Shah (Elephants in the Fog), Hossein Keshavarz and Maryam Ataei (The Friend’s House Is Here), Paloma Schneideman (Big Girls Don’t Cry), Sophy Romvari (Blue Heron), Beth de Araújo (Josephine), and Rakan Mayasi (Yesterday The Eye Didn’t Sleep), joining Australian filmmaker Harvey Zielinski (Sweet Milk Lake) throughout the Competition.
To round out MIFF’s event season, Bright Horizons filmmakers will attend this year’s MIFF Awards ceremony on Saturday 22 August at Rydges Melbourne, vying for the chance to win the festival’s top prize – the $140,000 Bright Horizons Award, supported by VicScreen.
Australian and international screen talent will also feature prominently throughout the festival, with guests including Tamra Davis, Tina Arena, Hugo Weaving, Claudia Karvan, Thomas Weatherall, Yael Stone, Selina Miles, Tony Jones, Ken Kwapis and Joe Swanberg all in attendance.
The full list of confirmed MIFF 2026 guests is available on the MIFF website.
OTHER SPECIAL EVENTS AND FESTIVAL EXPERIENCES
Australian stories continue through Adrian Russell Wills‘ world-premiering Tina Arena: Unravel Me, offering unprecedented access to one of Australia’s most celebrated performers across five decades in music; Dario Russo‘s delightfully twisted The Fox, featuring the voices of Olivia Colman and the late, great Sam Neill; and the made-in-Melbourne SBS series The Airport Chaplain, screening exclusively at MIFF ahead of its wider release, with many key cast confirmed to attend the festival. The festival will also celebrate the work of award-winning Australian filmmaker, writer and animator Sarah Watt with a special focus featuring three screenings: her acclaimed debut feature Look Both Ways, the warmly observed comedy My Year Without Sex, and Small Treasures: Animations by Sarah Watt, a collection of her rarely seen early animated works.
Fresh from the world’s leading festivals, alongside bold new Australian world premieres, MIFF audiences will once again be among the first to experience many of the year’s most anticipated screen works. The inaugural Armani Beauty Cinema Club Opening Night presents Graham Parkes’ SXSW Grand Jury Award winner Wishful Thinking, starring Maya Hawke and Lewis Pullman, an offbeat romantic comedy exploring fate, love and second chances. Meanwhile, the festival proudly presents the World Premiere of Facing the Numbers, from First Peoples creatives Kieran Satour (Gurindji, Pertame and Worimi) and Tyson Perkins (Arrernte and Kalkadoon). Blending memoir, music, poetry, dance, journalism and activism, the powerful documentary tells the stories behind familiar statistics, with both filmmakers attending the festival.
Two recently announced major international headline additions include James Gray’s Cannes competition title Paper Tiger, starring Adam Driver, Miles Teller and Scarlett Johansson, and audiences will have a special opportunity to experience Na Hong-jin’s long-awaited monster action epic Hope in a one-off IMAX Melbourne presentation. The biggest film production in South Korean history, it promises to be one of the festival’s most spectacular big-screen events.
The Sovereign Shorts Premiere, presented with NITV and VicScreen, brings together four original documentaries by First Peoples filmmakers exploring Treaty through deeply personal stories of Country, identity and self-determination. The festival’s much-loved Footy Shorts, presented in partnership with the AFL and VicScreen, returns with five original short documentaries celebrating football, community and Australian identity through fresh creative voices, and this year’s Premiere With Purpose Gala shines a spotlight on Selina Miles‘ urgent documentary Silenced, bringing filmmakers, advocates and audiences together for one of the festival’s most timely conversations.
Families once again take centre stage with MIFF’s cherished Family Gala, presenting the Australian Premiere of DreamWorks Animation’s Forgotten Island from directors Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado. One of the festival’s most beloved annual traditions, the gala welcomes audiences of all ages for a red-carpet celebration of cinema and storytelling. The Australian Premiere of Coyote vs. Acme also joins this year’s program, with acclaimed Looney Tunes voice actor Eric Bauza attending MIFF as an international guest for special festival screenings.
Celebrating 10 years of MIFF XR, this year’s expanded immersive program continues the festival’s decade-long commitment to pushing the boundaries of screen storytelling. Presented across the VCA LED Volume Studio and Swinburne Studio, the anniversary program invites audiences to step inside fully immersive audiovisual worlds through Australian and international works spanning virtual reality, interactive installation and mixed-media experiences. Highlights include the World Premiere of Dennis Del Favero’s Firestorm, a work exploring the future of wildfires and immersive cinema; the Australian premieres of The Awake from Hsiao-Ting Hsieh and Hsiao-Wei Hsieh, transporting audiences into the inner world of people living with ALS; The Dollhouse from Dominic Desjardins and Charlotte Bruneau, an interactive experience exploring empathy and family through the eyes of a child; Hsin Hsuan Yeh’s Sense of Nowhere, a meditative journey through sound and memory; and The Clouds Are Two Thousand Meters Up from Singing Chen, a reality-bending pilgrimage between digital worlds and a living forest.
Beyond the cinema, MIFF Talks returns with an ambitious program of conversations exploring the filmmakers, ideas and cultural moments shaping contemporary screen culture. Highlights also include Hollywood Heretic: The Many Faces of Kim Novak, celebrating one of Hollywood’s most enigmatic screen icons; In Conversation: Singing Chen, exploring the acclaimed filmmaker’s work across cinema and immersive storytelling; Consuming Culture, presented with The Wheeler Centre, bringing together visiting critics and filmmakers to debate the year’s defining cultural moments; and Modern Moviemaking, where emerging and established directors discuss the realities of making films today. MIFF Accelerator Lab continues to take audiences behind the scenes of Australian productions through craft-focused sessions exploring the making of Mad Rush and The Airport Chaplain, alongside DIY or Die Trying?, where The Fox writer, director, editor and composer Dario Russo joins Sweet Milk Lake writer, director, producer and lead Harvey Zielinski for a candid conversation about the rewards and realities of independent filmmaking.
Newly added events include Cinema Worldbuilding: Wicker with Wēta Workshop sees Wicker directors Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson joined by Wētā Workshop’s Joe Dunckley and Sarah Rubano to unpack the film’s world, from concept design to practical effects, and The Screen Show: Meet MIFF’s Bright Horizons Directors, presented with ABC Radio National, brings together emerging filmmakers Sophy Romvari, Paloma Schneideman and Rakan Mayasi with host Jason Di Rosso to discuss their acclaimed debut features.
Major retrospectives remain a cornerstone of the festival, with focuses on visionary German filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger, Argentinian auteur Lisandro Alonso, who will be attending multiple sessions across the festival, and Hollywood icon Kim Novak, each honoured through extensive career surveys spanning some of the most influential works in contemporary cinema, while restored classics and special presentations continue MIFF’s longstanding commitment to celebrating film history alongside its future.
FOOD AND FILM
Cinema and dining once again come together through MIFF’s popular Food & Film program, presented by MINI and Broadsheet, pairing standout screenings with specially curated menus at some of Melbourne’s leading restaurants. This year’s experiences include Saadi with The Cycle of Love, Supernormal with We Are All Strangers, Cumulus Inc. with Marc by Sofia, and Bossley Bar & Restaurant with The Fox, each inspired by the stories, settings or themes of the featured film. For festivalgoers on the move, Food & Film Express also returns throughout the festival, with curated pre- and post-film menus at Elio’s Place, Bossley Bar & Restaurant and Apollo Inn, making it easy to experience Melbourne’s renowned food scene between sessions.
BEYOND MELBOURNE: REGIONAL AND ONLINE
The festival extends well beyond Melbourne through MIFF Regional, bringing a curated selection of festival highlights to audiences across Victoria across two weekends, 14–16 August and 21–23 August. This year’s regional program visits Ballarat (Showbiz Cinemas), Bendigo (Star Cinema), Castlemaine (Theatre Royal), Geelong (Village Cinemas Geelong and Pivotonian Cinema), Healesville (The Memo), Rosebud (Peninsula Cinemas), Sale (Sale Cinema) and Warrnambool (Capitol Cinema), with Healesville joining the tour for the first time. Audiences will experience a curated selection of acclaimed Australian and international features, including Opening Night Gala film Wicker, MIFF Premiere Fund titles, films from the Bright Horizons Competition, and selected short film programs.
For audiences further away and at home, MIFF Online returns from 14–30 August, extending the festival by a full week after the Melbourne program concludes. Presented nationally via ACMI’s Cinema 3 platform, the online program features a curated selection of festival highlights alongside dedicated short film collections, ensuring audiences across Australia can experience MIFF wherever they are.
