MIFF 2023

Welcome to 2023. What times we live in – but what a difference film can make.

This year, the Melbourne International Film Festival was more than a mere celebration of movie-making. With the film industry burning, wallets hurting and algorithms churning, the 71st edition of MIFF continued to fly the flag for the survival, for the thriving, for the necessity of cinema that matters – and for the profundity of welcoming people, again, to the movies.

At over 275 films, over 50 MIFF Play titles, over 40 films straight from Cannes and over 70 countries represented across the program, MIFF this year was an immensity of film. After opening with the MIFF Premiere Fund– supported Shayda, the celebrated debut of Victorian filmmaker Noora Niasari, we also launched the Music on Film Gala of Paul Goldman’s Ego: The Michael Gudinski Story in world premiere, a loving portrait of the titular music industry impresario and, through him, the very story of Australian music itself. We then drew the curtain with our Closing Night, Australian-premiere presentation of Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman’s Theater Camp, a hilarious mockumentary set among the aspirational world of low-level community theatre – a movie that celebrates the strange tics of the creative spaces we inhabit.

Elsewhere, we welcomed year two of the Bright Horizons competition, a jaw-dropping line-up of emerging international and Australian filmmaking. Ramata-Toulaye Sy’s beautifully affecting Banel & Adama was awarded the $140,000 Bright Horizons Award – one of the richest film prizes in the world – by an esteemed international Jury. Our MIFF Awards also continued to expand in their recognition of exceptional screen practitioners with the establishment of our First Nations Film Creative Award, presented in collaboration with Kearney Group (awarded to Adrian Russell Wills and Gillian Moody for Kindred) and the continuation of our major Blackmagic Design Australian Innovation Award (awarded to Soda Jerk for Hello Dankness).

We celebrated the 10th anniversary of our Critics Campus program, which offers incredible professional development opportunities for emerging film and arts critics within the festival. Our special Critical Condition retrospective saw a range of internationally and locally attending critics guest-curate a stunning selection of films, all wrapped in conversation and debate. Alongside this special program, the festival presented dedicated retrospectives on Safi Faye, the pioneering Senegalese director, as well as an expansive program of resplendently blood-soaked new restorations from horror master Dario Argento.

MIFF continued to expand and enhance the way we welcome audiences in 2023, presenting festival seasons outside of Melbourne in seven different country-Victorian locations as well as an at-home festival-highlights program screening Australia-wide via our MIFF Play streaming platform. In 2023, the festival also offered an array of sensory-friendly screenings and a significant d/Deaf-led event alongside the presentation of a range of captioned and audio- described sessions.

Across 25 days of film, MIFF is its own world. It is one built around the world of cinema, built by the ideas and the imaginations of artists and audiences everywhere, and from the collisions – of creativity, of conversation, of the love of cinema – that bring Melbourne alive every August.

What a thrill and a privilege to once again share the stories and successes of MIFF in 2023. Our gratitude to staff and volunteers; for the ongoing support of our festival partners and contributing filmmakers; and for all of those people, especially, who continue to find wonder on the screen, in the company of each other, here at MIFF.