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.
