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

An aspiring Peruvian performer must decide whether she’s dancing for others or for herself.

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

Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard star in Leos Carax’s bizarre, brazen musical – the Best Director–winning Cannes film on everyone’s lips.

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

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

Zoe Terakes voices a sex-crazed twentysomething in this lurid fever dream of queerness in lockdown.

In the woods, a young woman and man scuffle as they fight for life.

Sex is fodder for black comedy in this scathing portrayal of life in the age of COVID-19.

A chance meeting paves the way for a deeper connection.

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

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

One of world cinema’s most famous locations becomes the backdrop for this intricate relationship drama by Mia Hansen-Løve.

Michael Caine and Aubrey Plaza match wits – and red pens – as a cranky author and peppy publisher in this rollicking literary comedy.

The film that made Tom Hanks a genuine star is now roughly the same age as its grown-up lead was, yet it remains equally as innocent and charming.

Charlotte Rampling guides you through underwater caves filled with bioluminescent creatures in this SXSW Virtual Cinema Competition Audience Award winner.

In this timely and electric Un Certain Regard–premiering drama, a family must contend with the distressing prospect of being separated by immigration officials.

Military rule fuses with ultra-modern digital technologies to open up an ethereal portal that transcends time.

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

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

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

Claudie seeks advice from an old flame as a new love is born from the embers.

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.

At the height of the ‘video nasty’ era, a tightly wound film censor begins to unravel in this clever and subversive ode to the genre.

This uplifting feast of a film goes behind the scenes of an Italian hotel-restaurant staffed by youngsters living with Down syndrome.

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

A sweet, touchingly funny tale about a working-class teen whose newfound passion for singing helps her connect with her deaf family in new ways.

For one family, a wholesome trip to New Zealand’s remote countryside turns into the stuff of nightmares.

Isolated and maligned by her peers, a woodworker crafts a more assured self-image.

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

Two Fijian-Indian sisters escape their cousin’s wedding to get high on disobedience and drugs.

Ryūsuke Hamaguchi returns with another enigmatically melancholy tale of human desire, loneliness and love – one that nabbed Cannes’ Best Screenplay award.

Leah Purcell AM writes, directs and stars in this highly anticipated adaptation – a vivid reckoning with Australia’s colonial history through the tale of one woman’s resilience.

A hypnotic portrait of a young couple surviving life in an off-the-beaten-track, opportunity-starved outback town.

An absurdist study of the human body as a limitless instrument for self-discovery.

In a nondescript place, seemingly forgotten by time, a teenager tries to outrun his loneliness.

A real-life mother–daughter duo play a semi-fictional mother–daughter duo struggling to make ends meet in this charismatic feminist class comedy.

An elegant, neorealist debut that captures the beating heart of Lagos in the stories of two local dreamers struggling with their city’s Kafkaesque capitalism.

The directorial debut from producer Tanith Glynn-Maloney reimagines the 1954 auditions for Charles Chauvel’s iconic final film.

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

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

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

This riveting firsthand account tells the story behind the legendary band that helped inspire the alternative rock sound of the 90s.

This Gen Z Before Sunrise finds tender romance in youthful self-discovery.

The drift of twentysomething life comes under the lens in this celebrated Aussie slacker satire.

Mytho-pagan eco horror meets fungi-infused body horror in the primordial South African jungle.

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

MIFF alumnus and Shorts Award winner Eddy Bell returns with an intimate and critical portrait of one of Australia’s worst droughts.

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

Divorced, lonely and inept with the web, a 50-year-old man decides to try his hand at finding love online – with spectacularly catastrophic results.

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.

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.

Garage-rock faves The Murlocs perform their own reimagined live score to Two Hands, Gregor Jordan’s crime caper starring a breakout Heath Ledger and Rose Byrne.

Misogynist or champion of women? This expansive portrait of a controversial fashion icon captures both light and shade.

Attempting to quell some tension, a mother and daughter head to the hot springs… but more heat isn’t what they need.

Prepare to be astounded as this quacktacular Marvel Comics oddity gets plucked from the depths of history for a glorious 70mm screening.

Tilda Swinton sets the screen ablaze in Pedro Almodóvar’s expressionistic, dangerously dramatic English-language debut.

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

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

In a forest in England, Ben Wheatley builds the folk horror of your most feverish pandemic nightmares.

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

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

Constance Wu stars in this elegiac Hawaiian drama as the late wife of a man haunted by his past and slowly becoming a spectre in the present.

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

Melbourne has never looked sleeker than in this low-key mumblecore piece.

Oliver Stone knows who really killed the president. Now, his new documentary sets out to convince you.

A young woman awakens to find herself in the midst of a living nightmare.

Essie Davis is incandescent as a squeegee-wielding mama bear who won’t stop fighting for those she loves – even if it ruins her own life.

An engrossing profile of a little-known 60s blues and folk icon, executive-produced by Wim Wenders.

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.

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

Ken Russell’s wild mash-up of Anglo-Saxon folklore and Bram Stoker’s final novel pits a baby-faced Hugh Grant and Peter Capaldi against a vampiric snake goddess.

Co-writers Mark Duplass and Natalie Morales depict a modern-age bond in this touching SXSW Audience Award–winning film, told entirely across screens.

Two estranged friends stumble upon each other and reconnect over a shared loss.

This story of a Syrian refugee awaiting resettlement on a remote Scottish island is at once heart-wrenching and humorous.

Co-written by Christos Tsiolkas, this period drama depicts a newly-single father’s efforts to weather the turbulence of change – in his life and in the world around him.

In the 2021 Sundance Short Film Grand Jury Prize winner, a young girl stumbles upon secrets at her local church in Lagos.

In a near-future Melbourne defined by state corruption and constant surveillance, a group of small-time activists hatches a plan to commit a “victimless atrocity”.

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

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

Apichatpong Weerasethakul returns with this hotly anticipated English-language collaboration with Tilda Swinton, which won the 2021 Cannes Jury Prize.

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.

Co-writers Mark Duplass and Natalie Morales depict a modern-age bond in this touching SXSW Audience Award–winning film, told entirely across screens.

Leah Purcell AM writes, directs and stars in this highly anticipated adaptation – a vivid reckoning with Australia’s colonial history through the tale of one woman’s resilience.

This bruising, tender queer drama reminiscent of Beau Travail explores homophobia and repressed desire in the Apartheid-era South African military.

Dash Snow epitomised “live fast, die young”, ascending from New York’s fringe to the major international art scene during his brief existence.

An unsettling, melancholic portrait of what fame did to the talented young star of Death in Venice.

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

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

A timber feller, kept awake by his infant child’s cries of hunger, encounters something perturbing in the woods.

Winner of the Silver Lion at the 2020 Venice Film Festival, this shocking, dystopian thriller is an incendiary indictment of class, racism and power that speaks to our times.

Rachel Perkins’ affecting Aussie classic sees three estranged sisters reluctantly reunite for their mother’s funeral and grapple with long-suppressed family secrets.

The first Iran–US co-production to open in Iranian cinemas since the revolution pits a couple against a malevolent hotel, trapping them in with their secrets.

When the Victorian Government locks down his public-housing building, a teenager responsible for his mother’s welfare is pushed to the brink.

Maliciously outed after his death, musician Billy Tipton is now a transmasculine icon.

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

Steven Soderbergh assembles the starriest of casts, headlined by Don Cheadle and Benicio Del Toro, for this explosive period crime caper.

An uplifting, flower shop–set meet-cute between an apprentice florist and the customer of his dreams.

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

Loneliness is operatic in the latest film by Renee Zhan.

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

In the age of information overload, the challenge is to avoid drowning.

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.

A short-sighted boy uncovers family secrets in an intricate, Tim Burton–esque world.

Be swept away by renowned Chilean composer Claudio Recabarren Madrid’s cosmic keys.

Nicolas Cage is back with the perfect film for his skill set: a revenge thriller centred on a stolen truffle pig, but with a sober tone that showcases the Oscar winner of yore.

Göteborg’s Best Feature Film winner fearlessly dissects the contemporary porn industry through the perspective of a young woman determined to be a star.

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

A daughter explores her mother’s complex punk legacy in this no-holds-barred documentary.

An exquisitely shot insight into dance, dramaturgy and performance featuring dancer Michelle Heaven.

Love and reality go under the scalpel in this story of obsession on the streets of Budapest.

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

A Lynchian depiction of self-transformation in the social media age.

Undead bikies, wealthy witches, Satanic butlers and magic frogs. What more could you want from a cult post-Hammer horror?

This gutsy and charming film about a young Ghanaian-American woman at a crossroads marks the arrival of a filmmaker with a fresh, unique vision.

Nominated for Best International Feature Film at this year’s Oscars, this extraordinary account of a 1995 Bosnian massacre is powerful, essential viewing.

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

You always have to watch out for those early warning signs.

Mads Mikkelsen headlines this ingenious, pitch-black Scandi revenge comedy.

A teenager is faced with the choice between rising up to become the better man or debasing himself for acceptance.

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.

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.

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

This unsettling chamber piece, while wearing the skin of a horror, is at heart a considered meditation on selflessness, loyalty and chronic illness.

Horrific real-world news story becomes giallo-inspired horror in this gleefully deranged interrogation of our conspiracy-fuelled, edgelord-filled times.

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

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

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

An intimidating encounter with a group of teens forces a 12-year-old to ponder her place in the world.

Laura Dern is unforgettable in this 1986 Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner – now digitally restored – as a teen who pursues experiences she’s not really sure she wants.

This ultra-gory animated fantasy is a chaotic ride perfectly calibrated for your inner 1980s teenage dirtbag.

Jillian Nguyen and Mark Coles Smith star as a Chinese erotic dancer and an Aboriginal farmhand in this 1920s period drama.

Co-executive-produced by Ian Thorpe, this sports drama centres on a teenager fighting to stay afloat in the world of competitive swimming – and in his family life.

Sweep the clouds away with this joyous origin story of your favourite childhood TV show.

When a new arrival is alienated by her peers at a girls’ orphanage, she exacts revenge by inventing an activity that takes gameplay to the extreme.

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.

Zoe Terakes and Brenna Harding star as best friends mutually overcoming a tragedy.

A middle-aged woman cares for her elderly father, whose will to live is on the wane.

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

This intimately-made film draws on conceptual art and performance documentation to self-reflexively survey Barbara Cleveland’s then-15-year collaborative relationship.

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.

Rising alt-comedy star Patti Harrison joins Ed Helms in this wry surrogate-pregnancy comedy that upends traditional gender dynamics and subverts expectations.

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.

A tense mother–daughter survival story that paints an empathetic picture of outsider life across the subways and streets of New York City.

After her father unexpectedly hits her, a young girl decides to toughen up.

A family unravels while road-tripping near Death Valley in the California desert.

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

Christian Petzold’s reimagining of an ancient myth will pull you in with its shadowy undertow.

Starring Pamela Rabe, Margot Nash’s acclaimed first feature – now gloriously restored – is a must for the big screen.

Bill Morrison revisits lesser-known chapters of Soviet film history in this hypnotic fever dream that melds art and archive.

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

A Noongar high school student struggles to perform a Shakespearean sonnet for her drama class.

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

From race to religion, flesh to nature, this comprehensive documentary explores how cinema exhumes the old traumas that modernity tries to bury.

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.

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

On the cusp of turning 10, a Jamaican girl is about to learn how not to drown.

Yael Stone and Emily Barclay star as frenemy sisters in this sibling dramedy by Madeleine Gottlieb.

An infamous tweetstorm about a wild, pole-dancing Florida road trip has become one of the most hotly anticipated movies of the year.