
Ablaze
Tiriki Onus thought he knew his grandfather Bill, until an unearthed film reel suggests he might have been the first ever Aboriginal filmmaker.

Accelerator Shorts 2
Short films by emerging filmmakers from Australia participating in the MIFF Accelerator Lab 2021. See the work of tomorrow’s hottest directors today.

Ain't No Time for Women
Hot Docs 2021’s Best Canadian Short Documentary winner turns the lens on Saïda’s, a salon where Tunisian women can talk politics while getting their hair done.

All Light, Everywhere
A visionary exploration of the inherent biases in surveillance technology from one of North America’s most fascinating and inventive documentary filmmakers.

Animation Shorts

Anonymous Club
Courtney Barnett pulls back the curtain in this intimate first-person exposition on creativity, vulnerability and artistic life on the road.

Araatika: Rise Up!
For Indigenous Australian rugby league players, a pre-game ‘unity dance’ is an important step towards celebrating their cultures and combating entrenched racism.

Babi Yar. Context
The perpetration and subsequent cover-up of one of the 20th century’s worst mass murders are examined in detail in Sergei Loznitsa’s remarkable archival collage.

Bach-Hông
A young Vietnamese-French woman is faced with the communist takeover of Saigon on 30 April 1975.

The Beloved
Commune or cult? This epic documentary illuminates the Rajneesh sannyasin movement in 1980s Fremantle, as told by those who lived through it.

The Bends
A mixed martial arts fighter discovers she’s pregnant in the lead-up to the most important fight of her career.

Best MIFF Shorts
A collection of the best short films of the festival, as chosen by the MIFF Shorts Awards Jury and the MIFF Shorts Programmer.

Black Audio Film Collective
Spurred by political unrest in Thatcher’s Britain, the Black Audio Film Collective’s experimental cinema challenges form and culture to dismantle stereotype.

Blind Ambition

Bodies in Motion

Bonanza!
Commissioned by Chunky Move, this playfully experimental work traverses ritual, body modification and algorithms.

Bridge to Sovietopia
Roam through Soviet ruins in this poetic dissection of a crumbled past and an always forward-looking future.

Bulletproof
Hot Docs award winner Todd Chandler examines disturbing evolutions in today’s USA, where schools operate in the shadow of mass shootings.

Captains of Zaatari
This ode to sport and friendship takes us to the world’s largest Syrian refugee camp, where two soccer-obsessed teens see the game as their way out.

Chef Antonio's Recipes for Revolution
This uplifting feast of a film goes behind the scenes of an Italian hotel-restaurant staffed by youngsters living with Down syndrome.

City Hall
Veteran filmmaker Frederick Wiseman offers a fascinating longform insight into the dramas, frustrations and triumphs of local government.

Come Back Anytime
Food lovers won’t be able to resist this tantalising story of a master ramen chef and his legendary Tokyo noodle shop.

Cow
Festival favourite Andrea Arnold gets up close and personal with a dairy cow to unveil a surprising and unknown world.

Devotion: A Film About Ogawa Productions
Legendary American lesbian feminist filmmaker Barbara Hammer turns her lens to the inner workings of Japanese filmmaking collective Ogawa Productions.

Documentary Shorts

Experimental Shorts

Faya Dayi
In an Ethiopian community dependent on its cash crop in more ways than one, a new generation’s furtive hopes slip through the cracks.

Flee
This award-winning, stylistically bold documentary tells the story of an Afghan refugee’s coming home – and coming out – via animation and archival footage.

Flow – Visions of Time
Come face-to-face with the mysterious force that both surrounds us yet remains beyond our reach or comprehension.

Fortune!
Enter the mind of the world’s greatest con man – and get that dough.

Freakscene – The Story of Dinosaur Jr.
This riveting firsthand account tells the story behind the legendary band that helped inspire the alternative rock sound of the 90s.

Freedom Swimmer
Olivia Martin McGuire parallels a grandfather’s journey to safety during the Cultural Revolution with his granddaughter’s fight for freedom in Hong Kong today.

The Game
Step into a referee’s boots and onto the field to soak up the ecstasy and thrilling stakes of a soccer match.

Geeta
This true story of an acid attack survivor’s fight to alter her daughter’s destiny is an inspiring and heartwarming call-to-action.

The Gig Is Up
Subtitled A Very Human Tech Doc, this timely documentary exposes the true cost of the gig economy quietly powering our everyday lives.

Girls | Museum
A guided tour through art history as seen through the female gaze – and a savvy, subversive rejoinder to centuries of representation from the eyes of the male beholder.

Handsworth Songs
Archival footage and media portrayal of violent civil disturbances in Birmingham are used to explore a broader picture of the Black experience in postwar Britain.

Happy Valley
Shot on cold-hued 16mm, this mournful, restless ode to Hong Kong sketches the city’s fragile present and indefinite future.

Hating Peter Tatchell
Presented by Sir Ian McKellen and co–executive-produced by Elton John, this unflinching portrait reveals a human rights activist at once revered and notorious.

Helmut Newton: The Bad and the Beautiful
Misogynist or champion of women? This expansive portrait of a controversial fashion icon captures both light and shade.

He's My Brother
Winning a Special Mention at CPH:DOX, this moving, poignant film is a love letter to a deaf and blind brother from his younger sister.

Hopper/Welles

The I and S of Lives
Kevin Jerome Everson’s camera dances with a rollerskater in this mesmerising exercise in fluidity and embeddedness.

I'm Wanita
Meet Australia’s self-crowned “Queen of Honky-Tonk”: renegade country singer Wanita was born ready.

The Inheritance
A collective springs to life in this radiant tribute to radical Black politics.

IOPU
Moment and memory blend as you bear witness to a Samoan rite of passage.

Is This Just a Story?
Yugantar’s most well-known film is a collaboration with the Hyderabad-based feminist activist collective Stree Shakti Sanghatana and an urgent treatise on domestic violence.

Ithaka
The campaign to free Julian Assange takes on intimate dimensions in this documentary portrait of an elderly man’s fight to save his son.

James & Isey
Ahead of her 100th birthday, Isey and her devoted son James prepare for the party of a lifetime.

JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass
Oliver Stone knows who really killed the president. Now, his new documentary sets out to convince you.

Karen Dalton: In My Own Time
An engrossing profile of a little-known 60s blues and folk icon, executive-produced by Wim Wenders.

The Kids
Award-winning filmmaker Eddie Martin revisits the cultural landscape of Larry Clark’s iconic 90s film, which paved a bumpy path for its young stars’ future success.

Lagos at Large
Weave your way through the bustling streets and idyllic beaches of Lagos.

Le temps perdu
A book group of Proust superfans elevate the art of collective reading and sharing to delightful new heights.

Listen to the Beat of Our Images
As humans shoot for the stars, what do we lose along the way?

Love in Bright Landscapes
An engrossing portrait of the rise and untimely demise of David McComb, the virtuosic frontman of Australian rock band The Triffids.

Maat Means Land
Poised at the intersection of activism and art, wunderkind Fox Maxy’s TikTok-esque tapestry documents the injustice and legacy of colonisation.

Madrid, Bad Life
Over a hundred years since the publication of the sociological text, La mala vida en Madrid, that coined the term in Spain, what does it mean to be a ‘lowlife’?

Maid Servant
Yugantar focuses on female labour rights in Maid Servant (Molkarin, 1981), which features domestic workers in Pune.

Mama
Göteborg’s 2021 Ingmar Bergman International Debut Award winner dives into personal memories that embody the persistence of life in the face of enormous tragedy.

Marcelita
An elderly woman and her nephew wax nostalgic in this charming ode to times gone by.

Maso and Miso Go Boating
Les Insoumuses tackle the French media’s sexism by taking playful aim at a misogynistic episode of a popular TV program hosted by Bernard Pivot.

MIFF Centrepiece Gala - Summer of Soul (...or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)
The “Black Woodstock” of 1969, which was filmed but never seen, finally makes it to the big screen in this Sundance US Documentary Grand Jury Prize winner.

Moments Like This Never Last
Dash Snow epitomised “live fast, die young”, ascending from New York’s fringe to the major international art scene during his brief existence.

The Monopoly of Violence
This timely, intelligent and emotional examination of state-sanctioned violence reveals a disturbingly universal story.

The Most Beautiful Boy in the World
An unsettling, melancholic portrait of what fame did to the talented young star of Death in Venice.

Mr Bachmann and His Class
This sprawling, tender documentary captures the inspiring relationship between an unorthodox German schoolteacher and his culturally diverse teenage class.

Multiply
A 2020 large-scale participatory-dance work choreographed by the acclaimed Stephanie Lake expresses the inexpressible in lockdown.

My Name Is Pauli Murray
Before Thurgood Marshall, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Rosa Parks, there was Pauli Murray. Remember their name.

No Ordinary Man
Maliciously outed after his death, musician Billy Tipton is now a transmasculine icon.

North by Current
Part road movie, part video essay, this lyrical tour-de-force from Angelo Madsen Minax finds catharsis in confronting family drama.

Notturno
From the director of Golden Bear winner Fire at Sea comes an achingly poetic, humane meditation on life in the shadow of war and the Islamic State.

The Nowhere Inn
Carrie Brownstein and St. Vincent play versions of themselves in this music mockumentary that explores the absurdities of fame and friendship.

Off Country
Indigenous teenagers navigate exams, social dramas and maintaining meaningful connections to home while at boarding school.

One Thousand and One Attempts to Be an Ocean
In the age of information overload, the challenge is to avoid drowning.

Palazzo di Cozzo
Melbourne’s iconic baroque homewares mogul, Franco Cozzo, is the subject of this delightful portrait that offers insights into furniture, family and the migrant experience.

Paper City
Three elderly survivors of the 1945 firebombing of Tokyo fight against bureaucracy and indifference to ensure that the event and its victims are not forgotten.

Piano Under the Stars
Be swept away by renowned Chilean composer Claudio Recabarren Madrid’s cosmic keys.

Poleng
Naina Sen explores the relationship between biracial identity and generational belonging through traditional Balinese dance.

Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché
A daughter explores her mother’s complex punk legacy in this no-holds-barred documentary.

President
This tense and timely docu-thriller, which won a Sundance award for vérité filmmaking, plunges into the chaos of Zimbabwe’s first democratic elections.

Radiograph of a Family
A deeply personal portrait becomes a reflection on Iran’s turbulent political history in this striking, formally innovative memoir.

The Reason I Jump
This Sundance 2020 Audience Award winner is a revelatory, immersive adaptation of Naoki Higashida’s memoir of a neurodiverse life.

River
From mountain high to river deep, director Jennifer Peedom follows her 2017 MIFF hit Mountain with a stunning new cine-sonic journey along the world’s waterways.

Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain
An intimate portrait of the life and death of beloved globe-trotting television presenter Anthony Bourdain from the Oscar-winning director of 20 Feet from Stardom.

Rock Bottom Riser
Erupting with unforgettable images of Hawaii, this boundary-breaking essay film captures the splendour and turbulent colonial history of the island nation.

Sabaya
This daring Sundance Directing Award winner tracks a band of volunteers out to rescue ISIS sex slaves from an infamous Syrian border camp.

Sanrizuka – Peasants of the Second Fortress
Ogawa Productions’ first internationally successful film captures farmers in Sanrizuka, Japan, resisting a government takeover of their land.

Set!
In the ruthless world of competitive table-setting, it’s knives at 20 places.

Seven Songs for Malcolm X
Dramatic re-enactments, interviews and testimonies traverse and illuminate the life and death of Black American revolutionary Malcolm X.

Sisters With Transistors
Laurie Anderson narrates the untold history of the women who blazed a trail through electronic music.

Spirits and Rocks: An Azorean Myth
A meditative guide through the Azores archipelago’s history and its inhabitants’ connection to the volatile land.

Stray
Hot Docs 2020’s Best International Feature Documentary winner offers a dog’s-eye view of life in Istanbul.

Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street
Sweep the clouds away with this joyous origin story of your favourite childhood TV show.

Summer of Soul (...or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)
The “Black Woodstock” of 1969, which was filmed but never seen, finally makes it to the big screen in this Sundance US Documentary Grand Jury Prize winner.

Symphony
Be swept up by Beethoven, Bernstein and Mahler in this joyous, majestic work.

Taming the Garden
Like a real-life fairytale, Taming the Garden is the story of an unseen billionaire who ‘steals’ trees in his desire to build his own private Eden.

This Rain Will Never Stop
Winner of Best First Appearance at IDFA 2020, this formally bold documentary traces a Kurdish-Ukrainian young man’s experiences of an endless cycle of war and peace.

Those Left Waiting
A screen experience like no other, this is the first ever live documentary filmed by refugees from around the world – edited and scored live on stage.

Tobacco Ember
Yugantar focuses on female labour rights in Tobacco Ember (Tambaku Chaakila Oob Ali, 1982), which features factory workers in Nipani.

To Feather, to Wither
This cinematic insight into the craft of a taxidermist illuminates the relationship between artist and animal.

Tom Petty, Somewhere You Feel Free
Newly discovered archival footage provides a time capsule into the making of Tom Petty’s iconic 1994 album Wildflowers, revealing an artist at a career crossroads.

Under the Volcano
Go behind the music at the sunny Caribbean studio that birthed some of the biggest hits of the 1980s.

The Village Detective: A Song Cycle
Bill Morrison revisits lesser-known chapters of Soviet film history in this hypnotic fever dream that melds art and archive.

Wash My Soul in the River's Flow

We Are the Thousand
How do you get the world’s biggest rock band to play in your hometown? Become the world’s biggest rock band.

The Witches of the Orient

With the Cattle
A ruminative film on the interplay between bovine lives and human consumption.

Wojnarowicz
Artist, outsider, writer, queer activist. David Wojnarowicz was all of these things and more, as Chris McKim captures in his fiery documentary.

Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror
From race to religion, flesh to nature, this comprehensive documentary explores how cinema exhumes the old traumas that modernity tries to bury.

Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives
The first feature documentary made by queer filmmakers about queer life – by the Mariposa Film Group – captures an essential moment in the gay liberation movement.

Year of the Everlasting Storm
Jafar Panahi, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Laura Poitras and other global cinema heavyweights reflect on 2020 in this sweeping anthology film for the COVID age.

Your Street
Winner of Best Short Film at the Swiss Film Awards, this documentary observes the impact of time – and historical trauma – on one commemorative street.