On the very special occasion of its twentieth anniversary, The Sydney Underground Film Festival has revealed one of its most exciting and dynamic programs yet, kicking off with the opening night screening of Tura! (above), the story of cult goddess Tura Satana.
“It’s hard to believe we’ve made it to festival number twenty,” says Festival Co-Director Katherine Berger. “We’ve always backed bold, strange and independent voices, and this year feels like the perfect chance to celebrate everything SUFF has become. We’re taking over The Factory Theatre with an incredible line-up of films, wild Q&As, our first SUFF Market, live music, performances and a few surprises along the way. We hope people come for a film and end up staying all day.”
Since its debut twenty years ago, The Sydney Underground Film Festival has been one of the weirdest, wildest and most wonderful events on the Australian film calendar, showcasing the most transgressive and gleefully perverse films from around the world, with a strong dose of local flavour too. The 2026 instalment will be no different. Drawn from the highest ever entries, with over 780 films submitted for consideration, this year’s diverse program features films, documentaries, shorts and more that stretch the status quo, exploring the margins of cinematic expression and proving no end of creativity is undeserving of its time in the spotlight.
In one of its most perfect opening nights ever, SUFF will kick off with the documentary Tura!, a striking portrait of burlesque goddess and cult queen Tura Satana, whose pneumatic form is likely permanently seared into the minds of anyone who has seen Russ Myer’s 1965 sex-and-death go-go classic Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! The poster girl for lurid cult cinema, the story of Tura Satana will get SUFF attendees hopped up and gagging for more…and they won’t be disappointing.
A major centrepiece of the fest this year is the 1980s double of Gillian Armstrong’s punk-inflected musical Starstruck and Pandemonium, the post-apocalyptic black comedy from director Haydn Keenan, whose cult classic Going Down has just enjoyed a successful cinematic re-release. More local barbed delights come in the surreal horror flick Meat Daddy, and Andrew Leovold’s genre-bending The Taller They Come.
There’s also the heartland noir of Chili Finger (starring Judy Greer, Bryan Cranston, John Goodman and Sean Astin); a double from the notoriously outspoken and iconoclastic Tony Kaye (The Trainer and Humpty Dumpty X); a big slab of body horror (Species); dinosaurs (The Velocipastor 2); sharks (Hotspring Sharkattack); and some south-of-the-border madness (Barrio Triste).
The 2026 festival also features incredible short films, including deliriously odd bites in “LSD Factory”, expressions of sexuality in all its forms in “Love/Sick”, genre-crossing shorts from the vanguard renegades of Australian independent cinema in “Homebaked Shorts”, short docos in “Stranger Than Fiction”, and the return of the eight-years-in Take48 Film Challenge, which features the results of filmmakers taking on the challenge of writing, shooting and editing a short film in only 48 hours.
Proceedings will then come to a glorious head with the closing night film The Furious, a martial arts miasma in which a father fights fiercely against ruthless kidnappers to save his abducted daughter.
Strap in for another in-your-face dose of against-the-grain cinema with The Sydney Underground Film Festival…
The Sydney Underground Film Festival is on at The Factory Theatre in Marrickville from Thursday 10th through to Sunday 13th September. For all programming, venue and ticketing details, head to the official website.
