The measures of success for modern moviegoing have become a strewn space in recent times. I remember the days when I used to be able to go to a local cinema without someone stopwatch-timing my applause at the end of the latest Mission Impossible sequel, or declaring the durations of my standing ovations “tepid” in the trades – when the playground banter of my kids didn’t extend to fierce invocations of David Zaslav’s latest tax write-off.

The business of movies is suddenly everyone’s business, because it’s an industry and an art publicly pushing against the path of a slippery slope – at least, according to a just-released industry survey suggesting more than half of US cinema owners believe the moviegoing experience cannot survive another 20 years. 

Is this a death knell, or the turning of a corner? Are we headed for some kind of pop-cultural singularity where cinema is finally to be finished off by our toxic economy of distraction? Are we now rushing out of the movies and instead into the waiting arms of online micro-celebrities? Are our leisure dollars about to be subsumed by the unstoppable evolution of the dreaded-but-magnetic Labubu doll? 

Our conversations about the movies are now laced with wild cynicism and optimism and commentary and all too many podcast episodes, announcing the next big thing that will save and reanimate moviedom into the cultural stratosphere. But Tom Cruise can only do so much. 

If you’re a cinephile, or are somewhat cinephile-adjacent in your life – or simply have ears to listen to the swarming, pop-cultural manifestoising of the cycles of push and pull and buzz and hype that surrounds the movies like the hazy aura of a sham-fortune teller these days – it can be somewhat straightforward to forget the films at the centre of the whole equation, the cores of creativity that sustain themselves under the avalanche of the conjecture and convolution and commodification of modern times.

Above (both images): MIFF Artistic Director Al Cossar (right) on stage with Auslan interpreter Ilana Charnelle at the MIFF 2025 Program Launch.

MIFF’s job as a festival remains ever this: to make movie matters more. We focus your eyes, direct your attention back where it belongs: on the screen, and away from the noise of the periphery. Our festival program in 2025 is a path charted through pure cinema – 300 films deep – that looks back, forward and side to side in googly-eyed, swooning disorientation. It is yours to follow, to lose yourself in.

Now, because I like them, I’m going to steal the recent words of one of this year’s attending directors, Andrew Patterson: “A good movie will make you feel one thing. A great movie will make you feel multiple things.” Festivals, then, as hives of great movies, are experiences built to contain multitudes, depths, meanings onscreen and in the moments inbetween. They are places to be lost, and found, and overwhelmed by the beauty of a screen and the depths of imagination inside it.

At MIFF, you can get closer to the world. You can escape from it. You can remind yourself of the joys of someone’s art, someone’s story, shared with those around you. At MIFF, cinema is alive, and it will stay alive. 

For 18 days in-cinema, and another week online, the festival is here to meet you where you are. In Melbourne, we welcome you to our metropolitan season; outside of the city, across eight country Victorian centres in MIFF Regional; or wherever you are in Australia, MIFF is yours via a highlights selection of festival features and shorts playing on MIFF Online – streaming via ACMI Cinema 3.

Think of the MIFF program as your annual cinema-wellness retreat, your movie-meditation state: designed to clear the pop-cultural noise, the speaking louder of the world; to resist the hot-takery that comes with a viewing culture that can lean into the disposable, and instead to look closer.

Browse the MIFF 2025 program.