2025
Al Cossar
MIFF returns to Melbourne for sheer winter illumination. Echoing in audiences’ conversations and artists’ ideas, the festival showcases a world’s worth of creativity into an array of cinematic adventures: unexpected, eclectic, celebratory. In a world of distractions, MIFF is the festival that invites you to Look Closer.
From the fiercely personal to the globally conscious, and from our place in the world to its far-flung reaches, we present films that will endear, entertain, challenge – those that deepen our understanding of the world around us or provide an escape hatch to flights of fantasy.
Music is everywhere at MIFF, including two extraordinary Special Events, both Australian exclusives: Julia Holter: The Passion of Joan of Arc and Parasite Live in Concert With Composer Jung Jae-il, both incredible experiences that bookend this year’s festival.
We also mark the 75th anniversary of Chantal Akerman’s birth with the largest Director in Focus retrospective in MIFF’s history – presenting a 27-film cinephile sprawl spanning the legendary director’s career.
MIFF’s Bright Horizons Competition remains the prestige apex of our program, a space to recognise auteurs on the ascent competing for one of the world’s richest film prizes. Bright Horizons also opens MIFF 2025 with the Australian premiere of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, a stunning, darkly comic ode to maternal stress that won Rose Byrne the Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance at the Berlinale.
Meanwhile, MIFF continues to meet audiences where they are: in weekend expansions to regional Victorian communities, or at your place anywhere in Australia through MIFF Online via ACMI Cinema 3.
Thank you, as ever, for your love of film – for this wonderful occasion that brings us together as an audience and a community. Time to light up Melbourne once again.