Earlier this month, Adelaide Film Festival offered a peek at its 2024 program. Headliners include Anora, a tragicomedy from The Florida Project director Sean Baker, which won the Cannes Film Festival 2024 Palme d’Or for best film; another Cannes winner, gritty musical-drama Emilia Pérez starring Selena Gomez and Zoe Saldana; and the world premiere of SA-made mother-daughter road movie, With or Without You.
Last month, we saw the announcement of Aussie director Zak Hilditch’s We Bury the Dead, a gripping apocalyptic zombie thriller set in Tasmania and starring Star Wars’ Daisy Ridley; Nightbitch, a quirky comedy about contemporary motherhood starring Amy Adams; and the opening night world premiere of The Correspondent, starring Richard Roxburgh as Australian journalist Peter Greste, who was imprisoned in Egypt in 2013.
Today, the festival drops its full program featuring 112 films from 46 countries, all screening between October 23 and November 3. Among the line-up is another Cannes darling, All We Imagine As Light, a dreamy drama about a friendship between three nurses in India – the first Indian film selected for competition at Cannes in 30 years. The film is also part of AFF’s Country Spotlight stream, which this year focuses on India and includes screenings of tender coming-of-age tale Boong; Sundance-winning Nocturnes, which takes audiences into the world of Himalayan moths; and Second Chance about a heartbroken 25-year-old woman who retreats to her family’s summer home in the mountains to find solace.
Other international films making a splash include Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow, a horror-drama involving a mysterious late-night TV show, with music by US singer Caroline Polachek and appearances by Phoebe Bridgers and Fred Durst; Dying, a Berlinale Silver Bear-winning German drama about a successful, middle-aged orchestra conductor negotiating the chaos of his volatile private life; and the directorial debut of revered playwright Annie Baker, Janet Planet, which the New York Times called a “tiny masterpiece” and stars Emmy-winning actor Julianne Nicholson from Mare of Easttown (read our interview with Nicholson here).
AFF’s Music on Film stream continues this year with films about icons such as Devo, The Dandy Warhols, the Brian Jonestown Massacre, and Peaches. The latter is the subject of a Teddy Award-winning doco, Teaches of Peaches, which follows the Canadian musician during her 20th-anniversary tour of the album of the same name and features interviews with musicians Feist, Chilly Gonzales and Shirley Manson.
AFF documentaries include Black Box Diaries about the case that launched #MeToo in Japan; Berlinale Golden Bear-winning Dahomey, which explores cultural restitution following the return of 26 cultural objects to Benin in West Africa; and the winner of Best Documentary at Berlinale, No Other Land, a salient and deeply affecting film that follows the forced expulsion of Palestinians from their homes by Israeli settlers, telling the story through the eyes of a West Bank activist and an Israeli journalist.
Australian films on the line-up include the haunting ghost story Went Up the Hill by Aussie director Samuel Van Grinsven and starring Dacre Montgomery (Stranger Things), and a Halloween screening of Carnage for Christmas by 20-year-old Adelaide director Alice Maio Mackay. The festival will close with the world premiere of Kangaroo Island, directed by SA’s Timothy David and starring Rebecca Breeds, Adelaide Clemens and Erik Thomson. The local film follows a struggling Hollywood actress who returns home to KI and confronts the love triangle that tore her family apart.
Adelaide Film Festival will run from October 23 to November 3. See the full program online.
Additional reporting by Emma Joyce.
