by FilmInk Staff
The Adelaide Film Festival (AFF) has today launched its full program for the 2026 Festival, to be held from October 14 – October 25 at cinemas across Adelaide.
Twenty-seven Australian Premieres and 10 World Premieres are among the 122 films from an astounding 52 countries to be presented at AFF 2026.
Highly anticipated films with both international festival and Oscar® buzz include the Opening Night Gala film – direct from Venice – Wild Horse Nine, from Martin McDonagh, the Academy Award-winning writer and director behind In Bruges (2008), Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017) and The Banshees of Inisherin (2022); along with the Saturday Night Party gala event screening of the outrageously sexy Jim Queen nominated for the Queer Palm and the Camera d’Or for best first feature at Cannes; the Cannes Best Actor Award winning Coward (Director Lukas Dhont); the Cannes Best Director award winning Fatherland (Director Paweł Aleksander Pawlikowski); the Sundance Best Director award winning Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty! (Director Josef Kubota Wladyka); the Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner Josephine (Director Beth De Araújo); the Sydney Film Prize winner Minotaur by the great Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev; and Berlin’s Silver Bear Award winner for Best Leading Performance, Rose, starring the incomparable Sandra Hüller, who also stars in Fatherland alongside Hans Zischler. Rose is directed by Marcus Schleinzer.
International cinema is represented by, amongst others, the winner of Best Actor and Best Director awards at the Shanghai Film Festival, 9 Temples to Heaven, by Thai director Sompot Chidgasornpongse; the Greek/German/Romanian/Franch/Spanish production, Titanic Ocean set in Japan in a fantasy world of pop-infused teenage mermaid culture (Director Konstantina Kotzamani); and the Philippines-set Filipiñana, selected for Sundance, Berlin, Sydney, Melbourne, Karlovy Vary and San Francisco film festivals (Director Rafael Manuel).
AFF’s Special Presentations include:
Paper Tiger: The stellar cast of Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson and Miles Teller star in this this thrilling storm from director James Gray about the complicated aspirations of a suburban family to hit pay dirt.
Pressure: Acclaimed Adelaide director Anthony Maras returns with his highly anticipated follow-up to Hotel Mumbai (AFF 2018), a gripping account of the 72 hours preceding D-Day. Based on David Haig’s acclaimed stage play, starring Andrew Scott, Brendan Fraser, Kerry Condon, Andrew Messina and Damian Lewis.
Wicker: Australian filmmaker Eleanor Wilson and her partner in life and cinema, Alex Huston Fischer, craft an endlessly inventive fable, casting Oscar-winner Olivia Colman as an unnamed smelly fisherwoman. Wicker opened the recent Melbourne International Film Festival.
Shine: Simon Tedeschi AM will perform a piano recital at the new 4K restoration premiere celebrating the 30th anniversary of Scott Hicks’ Academy Award-winning Shine. AFF also hosts the launch of Scott Hick’s book Shine: Persistence of Version about the 10-year journey to make the film.
The Fox: The Fox had its world premiere at AFF 2025 and AFF is delighted to present this encore screening in the lead up to its cinema release. A darkly comic folktale of an ordinary bloke and the fox who offers to solve all his problems, directed by Dario Russo, and featuring an all-star cast is headed by Jai Courtney and Emily Browning, with the voices of Olivia Colman and Sam Neill.
The AFF Competition, established in 2007, was the first in Australia with prize winners determined by a prestigious Jury. This year’s Jury is Cameron Bailey, Tilda Cobham-Hervey, Xavier Samuel, Sandeep Ray and Anna Vincent. As the first prized competition in Australia, the AFF Fiction Competition celebrates visionary filmmakers with bold stories about the longings of the human heart in difficult worlds with contested realities. These films in 2026 traverse a princess who chases love across time, but can she outrun patriarchy? A young boy who shakes away the summery haze of his cossetted family life only to find the ugliness of apartheid. And the desire for fulfillment which ekes out its own paths across the bulwark of class, caste, homophobia and emotional devastation.
This year’s Feature Fiction Competition titles are Chile’s Donkey Princess, directed by Joaquín Cociña and Cristóbal León, where a princess escapes her storybook world, only to find love and obligation following her across realities; Fruit Gathering thoughtful if provocative debut feature from writer-director Aung Phyoe about a forbidden love that blossoms on the unforgiving production line of a Myanmar textile factory won the Grand Prix Crystal Globe at Karlovy Vary; set in chaotic Mumbai, Lovers in the Blue Night follows people who dare to desire in a world that punishes feelings (Director Anuparna Roy); The Smell of Apples, directed by John Trengrove, takes us to an idyllic childhood in apartheid-era South Africa which fractures as an 11-year-old boy awakens to its violence and inequality; and Tiber, by Australian director Dominic Allen. Who are we when our world falls apart? That’s the question faced by handsome art historian Marco (Australian-born, Italian-speaking star Marcus J. Cotterell). Spiralling out of a job, Marco leaves Rome to reconnect with his daughter on an unforgettable journey through Tuscany.
Five films have been selected for the Feature Documentary Competition. They are:
The Balkan Cowboy by Dublin-based visual artist, academic and filmmaker Dragana Jurišić. Dragana is an exile from an Atlantis-like country that no longer exists. Her family fled the war crimes following the catastrophic collapse of Yugoslavia. Troubled by rising anti-immigrant sentiment in Ireland, she returns ‘home’ to rediscover the creative soul, Hari Džekson, who inspired her love of Westerns.
Jean-Michel Basquiat: Burn bright enough and you’ll be remembered forever, no matter how tragically short your life is cut. Such was the fate of game-changing artist Jean-Michel Basquiat – friend of Madonna, Grace Jones, Debbie Harry, Keith Haring and Andy Warhol – who blazed an indelible trail before joining the infamous 27 Club. But when legend envelops your legacy, with Basquiat’s brilliantly bold works going for as much as US$110 million, the truth can get lost. Viridiana Lieberman and Quinn Whitney Wilson’s iridescent documentary sets the record straight.
Tehran, Under the Skin: With many of Tehran’s women rejecting the hijab, an oppressive regime and the shackles of foreign interference, their boldness leads to freer ways of embracing what it means to be seen. But therein lies a trap, as the all-pervasive body beautiful myth ensnares them, driving near world record levels of Tehranian women to go under the knife for nose jobs, tummy tuck and face lifts. Some men long to lose their double chins. This double-edged scalpel is explored in award-winning filmmaker Afsaneh Salari’s deep cut on Iranian history, architecture and upheaval.
The Way You See Me: What does transition look like from the inside? Filmed across a decade, The Way You See Me is a self-portrait of transition from the inside out, tracing a radical transformation from hyperfemininity towards a defiant masculinity. What begins as a personal experiment with gender becomes something far more consuming as body, identity and the gaze of others shift in unexpected ways. Set against the codes of beauty, class and behaviour within Mexico’s conservative upper-middle-class society, this candid documentary turns an intensely personal experience outwards, revealing how privilege and patriarchy shape not only the identities we inhabit, but the ways we police one another (Director M Untitled).
Wolf: British musician Patrick Wolf opens his archive in a reflection on art and survival, framed by a searching conversation with longtime friend Tilda Swinton. (Director Christian Cargill).
Established in 2020, the $5,000 AFF Change Award is for positive or environmental impact and cinema expressing new directions for humanity. This year’s films express the urgency for change – and the need to preserve our best legacies. The Change Award Jury for 2026 is Professor Ariella Helfgott, Professor of Foresight at Adelaide University and Co-Director of SA Futures Agency; Dr Jared Thomas, a curator, archivist, researcher, filmmaker and award-winning writer of children’s and young adult fiction; and Emma Webb OAM, an organiser, curator and activist.
The selected films are:
All Rivers Spill Their Stories to the Sea, directed by Jeanie Finlay. When thousands of poisoned crabs wash ashore on England’s north-east coast, veteran fisherman Stan Rennie sets out to uncover what happened. As his search for answers draws fishermen, scientists, campaigners and politicians into a bitter struggle over accountability.
Humboldt USA, directed by G. Anthony Svatek. How do bighorn sheep reintroduced to a Nevada desert reserve connect to a tech couple 3D scanning California’s endangered Redwoods State Park, and the local residents campaigning against a supposedly green roof for a Buffalo freeway? For one thing, these places all share the name of 19th century German environmentalist, Alexander von Humboldt whose vision of nature’s interconnectedness was later supplanted by Darwin’s adversarial alternative ‘natural selection’. So why does nobody know Humboldt or his radical musings on our interconnected world? G. Anthony Svatek’s astonishingly beautiful essay film will get you up to speed.
Time and Water, directed by Sara Dosa. You’ll come to mourn the loss of a glacier every bit as much as a family member in Sara Dosa’s astonishing new film. Dosa folds his fascinating family history into a meditation on a local and global catastrophe in hauntingly beautiful fashion.
Steal This Story, Please! directed by Carl Dean and Tia Lessin. For three decades, Democracy Now! newshound Amy Goodman and her equally fearless colleagues have covered the stories the mainstream media prefers to ignore. From Indonesia’s bloody massacre of East Timorese protestors to Chevron assisting the Ugandan military in crushing resistance to the oil industry. She’s held presidents from Clinton to Bush to Trump accountable, stood shoulder-to-shoulder with First Nations folks battling the Dakota Pipeline and exposed the toxic aftermath of 9/11. Discover what makes her tick in this award-winning doco from Trouble the Water (2008) filmmakers Tia Lessin and Carl Deal.
The Way We Move, directed by Vanessa Joo Dumont and Nicolas Davanel. What lies between notes and lyrics? For ASL (American Sign Language) performer and trainer extraordinaire Amber Galloway, the answer lies in inviting deaf audiences to go way deeper. As she wrestles with her own family drama while building up hopeful translators – including young Puerto Rican dad Julian Ortiz and queer Laotian American AV – the heaving crowds at Austin City Limits music festival await. We bear witness to remarkable possibility as they create visual poetry that physically conveys the soul of performers in this soaring SXSW.
Since 2003, AFFIF has backed over 150 South Australian film projects, working alongside the teams who help get a film made. Pitch to premiere is the shape that support takes – involvement from a filmmaker’s first idea, through development and production, to the night a film finally screens. The AFFIF is designed to set South Australian films up to earn international accolades and success.
This year’s Closing Night Gala presentation is the AFFIF film Hell Has No Fire Escape from directors Georgina Savage and Matthew Bate. This remarkable film is the story of Pastor Ina Dry, a 63-year-old widow who, after inheriting her late husband’s evangelical rehabilitation centre, begins to flourish, finally free from their stifling marriage. While attempting to heal people struggling with addiction, Ina yearns for a new life and the possibility of love. But as she drifts away from God and towards TikTok, fantasy television and an online romance with a man posing as Jason Momoa, can Ina save the failing rehab while pursuing her own desires? And does filmmaker Georgina Savage’s presence ultimately help her, or cause more harm than good?
Other AFFIF films premiering at AFF 2026 are the previously announced Agata The Writer, starring Mia Wasikowska, which recently premiered at Venice (Director Kuba Dorabialski); Kumarangk: Sacred Women’s Business (Director Tracey Rigney); The Forbidden Aunt, directed by and featuring internationally regarded Australian actress Bojana Novakovic; Aftermath (Directors: Jared Nicholson, Ben Lawrence) which, in era where conspiracy theories threaten the scaffolds of society like never before, is a fearless psychological portrait of two lives intertwined by trauma and obsession, in the years following the Port Arthur massacre; and, announced today, Lucrum, directed by Johanis Lyons-Reid, about a celebrated pianist whose secluded estate conceals a terrifying covenant. Lucrum, which stars Sophie Lowe, Tahlia Sturzaker and Adelaide local Nathan Page, is a meticulously composed work of folk horror that exposes the insatiable forces that can lurk beneath refinement, privilege and legacy. Following Monolith (AFF2022) and Lesbian Space Princess (AFF2024), Lucrum is the third Film Lab New Voices production, an initiative of AFF, South Australian Film Corporation and Screen Australia.
AFF has also announced that the Australian premiere of Tilda Cobham-Hervey’s feature directorial debut, It’s All Going Very Well…,will be an AFF special co-presentation with the Adelaide Festival March 2027. The film was supported by AFFIF.
The final AFFIF titles screening at this year’s Festival are the two short films: Delia, from director Madeleine Parry, starring Essie Randles, about an emotionally suppressed office worker caught in a supermarket hold-up who finds an unexpected way to intervene, featuring Missy Higgins singing Troye Silvan’s One of Your Girls; and the first AFFIF and Pride Foundation Australia co-commission, The Night Moses Died, directed by Lilah Bennett, where, on a night of escape and amid the sequins and stories of retired showgirl Carmel, nineteen-year-old Moses finally sees themselves.
AFF 2026 also see a number of Australian independent films in the program including director Genevieve Clay-Smith’s audience pleaser Boss Cat, about 20-something Sonja, a person with Down syndrome, who expresses her independence through Krump dancing; River, the sophomore directorial feature of Sunflower (2023) producer Zane Borg, is an achingly beautiful coming-of-age story about a 16-year-old girl cast adrift by the shock death of her mother, who finds solace in a lonely, equally troubled boy; the documentary The Piano Tuner from veteran Australian filmmakers Julia Overton and Tom Zubrycki; the CinefestOz prize winner Sweet Milk Lake, directed by Harvey Zielinski, about Jake, a trans man, who is mistaken for his twin brother by their estranged dad; and Wilderness, starring Mirrah Foulkes and Yael Stone, directed by Martin McKenna, about an offbeat road trip into Victoria’s High Country which reunites two old friends who have forgotten how to listen to each other.
Additional must-see films in the World Cinema collection feature stellar filmmakers and actors including director Pedro Almodóvar’s new, Cannes-selected film Bitter Christmas, Rami Malek, Tom Sturridge, Luther Ford and Rebecca Hall in Ira Sach’s The Man I Love, and Winner of the Un Certain Regard Prize at Cannes, Sandra Wollner’s Everytime which transforms a drama of family grief into a work of sublime imaginative scope; alongside Sundance Special Jury Award winner Bedford Park (Director Stephanie Ahn); the Cannes Best Screenplay winner, A Man of his Time (Director Emmanuel Marre; and the new film from Drive My Car director Ryūsuke Hamaguchi All of A Sudden. Other stand outs include, from the UK, the Cannes Director’s Fortnight audience and Palm d’Or winner, I See Buildings Fall Like Lightening (Director. Clio Barnard), Cannes Queer Palm Revelation winner Flesh and Fuel (Director. Pierre Le Gall) about a trucker’s unlikely love on the road; and direct from its world premiere at Toronto International Film Festival, an epic Anatolian family drama, Djinn Wedding (Director Ferit Karahan).
The World Documentary section presents a fiery and colourful mix of documentaries – stories of unforgettable love for lovers, friends and for family members both close and afar in exile. Some hold a mountain to preserve a community and its traditions against an encroaching militarised state while others overwhelm seaside hillside villages with their cameras and their hunt for a perfect shot to signal their connectedness to mass sensation. Some feed dictators, some feed their emasculation while others feed our longing for cosmic awe found in the everyday.
Bring your tissues for The Cycle of Love (Director Orlanda von Einsiedel), where love surpasses all odds in this astonishing true tale about an ‘untouchable’ who crosses continents for his sweetheart. Manhood (Director Daniel Lombroso) introduces the entrepreneur who wants to make penis enlargement as ordinary as Botox, and the men buying in; How To Feed A Dictator (Director Andrew Neel) introduces the chefs who served feasts to Saddam Hussein, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Augusto Pinochet and Kim Jong-il while thousands starved; Into the Jaws of the Ogre, where Iranian documentarian Mahsa Karampour, exiled in France, films her journey to New York to reconnect with her also exiled punk-rocker brother and reckons with herself; in the previously announced title Phenomena, physics teacher and debut filmmaker Josef Gatti – inspired by his father – a turns the microscope towards the hidden forces that shape our world; The Siege of Paradise (Director Gar O’Rourke) about the postcard-perfect villages of Italy’s Cinque Terre, where the 400 residents are invaded each year by some 4.5 million tourists; Tin Castle (Director Alexander Murphy), an intimate and lyrical observational documentary spanning six years and the changing seasons, which chronicles the lives of an Irish Traveller family; To Hold a Mountain (Directors Biljana Tutorov, Petar Glomazić), winner of the World Cinema Documentary Grand Jury Prize, Sundance, about a mother and daughter in Montenegro who confront militarisation, displacement and the return of a violent past; Yumburra (Director Grace McKenzie) follows Dark Emu author Bruce Pascoe who practices what he preaches on Yumburra Farm, the idyllic home of Indigenous-run Black Duck Foods; and the previously announced Yo (Love is a Rebellious Bird), by directors Anna Fitch and Banker White, about Yo, who was many things to many people: a great-grandmother, career weed dealer, intellectual, psychic, hostess, tyrant, a captivating storyteller.
AFF’s hugely popular Music on Film series returns with The Best Summer, directed by Tamra Davis, which drops us straight into 1995, backstage at Australia’s Summersault tour with Beastie Boys, Sonic Youth, Bikini Kill, Pavement, Beck and a fledgling Foo Fighters. Billy Madison (1995) director Tamra Davis was travelling with then-husband Mike D of Beastie Boys when she turned her camcorder on friends, performances and backstage life. Rediscovered three decades later, her footage has the loose intimacy of a home movie and the thrill of being somewhere you shouldn’t, immersing us in an alternative music culture before smartphones, social media and everyone knowing where the camera is. Also screening is Everybody Digs Bill Evans (Director Grant Gee), winner of the Silver Bear for Best Director at Berlin. The film is an absorbing riff on legendary jazz musician Bill Evans’s disappearance after his collaborator’s death – emotionally devastated, he drifts between grief and memory. Rio’s bass-heavy funk scene drives Funk (Director Aly Muritiba), A vivacious rise-to-stardom drama, led by magnetic newcomer Duda Santos as MC Sabrina. From favela parties to the unapologetically sexually charged explicit world of kinky funk (putaria), the camera moves with the music’s swagger and momentum, plunging us among dancers and twerking bodies. We Are The Shaggs (Director Ken Kwapis) is the story behind one of the most unusual bands of all time. Misunderstood by most who heard them, beloved by some prominent champions (including Kurt Cobain, Patti Smith and Frank Zappa), now the three Wiggins sisters tell their unlikely story in their own words.
The Late Night series also returns to AFF in 2026 with four films: Future Tense (Director Jenna Cato Bass) about a couple in a near-future Cape Town who back to 1647 on a holiday to pre-colonised South Africa; Mum, I’m Alien Pregnant (Director Thunderlips – Sean Wallace, Jordan Mark Windsor), a riotous body horror-comedy from New Zealand; South Australian film Ruby, Ruby (Director Ursula Dabrowsky) about two friends who awaken a deadly legend and find themselves hunted by the living and the dead; and Gothic menace gets a wacky makeover in Victorian Psycho, a schlocky horror from Sanctuary filmmaker Zachary Wigon.
Cineastes will not want to miss Memory of Princess Mumbi and Robert Richardson, The White Devil. Director Damien Hauser’s wholly original Memory of Princess Mumbi unfolds in a retro-futuristic coastal Africa of 2093, where a filmmaker documenting despair after the Great War meets Mumbi, a spirited actress who captures his heart. In Robert Richardson, The White Devil, Czech filmmaker Jana Hojdová gets more than she bargained for when profiling the mercurial and driven Oscar-winning cinematographer. Richardson will be in conversation with director Scott Hicks as part of this year’s Screen Conversations.
A particularly special event this year will be – in collaboration with Yitpi Yartapuultiku- the World Premiere of Bukul Bukal, directed by the late, great Rhoda Roberts AO with Pauline Clague. Join Pauline Clague and the subject of the film, Yindji woman and activist Henrietta Fourmile Marrie AM, on the banks of the Port River for a very special gathering and an unforgettable evening of campfire yarns. Henrietta Fourmile Marrie’s work has transformed Indigenous rights and reshaped the way governments, corporations and international institutions engage with Indigenous people land and culture. There will be food trucks and male/female fires. Picnic rugs encouraged! This event is part of AFF’s (Port) Adelaide Film Festival program which also features a stellar line-up of films at the Odeon Star Cinemas.
AFF’s partnership with Moviejuice, an Adelaide-based film collective dedicated to the screening, distribution, and celebration of alternative and experimental cinema, in 2026 will see an evening of historical conspiracy and paranoia amongst the abyssal depths of the archive. Kevin Walker and Jack Auen’s Rotterdam favourite Chronovisor and local hero Gabriel Bath’s Scum ‘87 burrow through hidden records and esoteric media in a series of late-night research binges that gradually take over the psyche. Falling down a rabbit hole of mysterious literary and audiovisual ephemera, both films form a DIY diptych on the pleasures and horrors of the deep dive, and the manifold ways that one can find themselves trapped in the past.
AFF will present a comprehensive short film programs World Shorts, Australian Shorts, Animation Shorts, Queer Shorts, and Made in SA, with a selection also screening before some of the main program’s features.
AFF is honoured to administer the Bettison & James Award on behalf of the Jim Bettison and Helen James Foundation. The Award provides $50,000 in recognition of an exemplary and inspiring lifelong contribution by an individual working in any field. This year’s recipient is Karina Lester is a Yankunytjatjara Anangu woman from the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands (APY Lands) in the far northwest of South Australia. She was taught to speak her language with her father’s people and today she is passionate to maintain her language for future generations. Karina is Aboriginal Co-Manager and Senior Aboriginal Language Expert for the Mobile Language Team (MLT) at Adelaide University, supporting the Aboriginal languages of South Australia in revival and living languages programs. Karina is also an active anti-nuclear activist, sharing not only her late father, Yami Lester’s story but her grandmother’s story of the first mainland nuclear bomb tests at Emu Field in 1953, where Yami and his people felt the “ground shake and the black mist roll”.
Karina Lester will be in conversation with Gem Romuld preceded by a screening of Britain’s Nuclear Bomb Scandal: Our Story (2024).
Mat Kesting, AFF CEO & Creative Director, said: “This year Adelaide Film Festival brings together highly anticipated international cinema alongside a stellar array of Australian films, in a program that celebrates master filmmakers and bold new voices. Support our courageous filmmakers who take our stories to the world, come party at a gala, see the filmmakers on the pink carpet or just come be part of one of our many free events – AFF is All For Film and invite everyone to join in.”
Deputy Premier and Minister for Arts, Kyam Maher, said: “Since its inception in 2003, the Adelaide Film Festival has become one of Australia’s most respected screen events, with an international reach. In 2022, the Labor Government made the Adelaide Film Festival an annual event, allowing our screen sector the opportunity to shine on the international stage. I’m looking forward to another successful Adelaide Film Festival in October and I congratulate the Adelaide Film Festival team on their incredible work.”
