22 Standout Flicks From MIFF’s Stacked 2025 Program

Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) just unveiled the program for its 73rd edition, running August 7–24. With more than 275 features, shorts and extended reality works on offer, it’s a thrilling time for the city’s film lovers, but also a daunting one. Browsing the program can be dizzying, and deciding what to see is no small task. We made our initial picks when the first 26 films and events were announced in June. Now, we’ve combed through the full program to bring you a curated list of the must-see new narrative features at the fest, before tickets go on sale on Tuesday July 15.

Opening night

This year’s opening night feature is Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. The dark comedy is a portrayal of motherhood starring Australian actress Rose Byrne in the role that won her the Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival in February.

Aussie cinema

MIFF is the largest showcase of new Australian cinema in the world. Two of this year’s Aussie highlights are Pasa Faho and Fwends. The former, the debut feature from Igbo Nigerian Australian director Kalu Oji, is a father-son story about an immigrant shoe seller in suburban Melbourne, struggling to retain his business – and his young son’s respect. The latter, from director Sophie Somerville, follows two twenty-something former best friends who reconnect in Melbourne. With its improvised dialogue and raw shooting style, Fwends won Berlin International Film Festival’s Caligari award, which recognises films that are “stylistically and thematically innovative”.

The best of Cannes

This year’s Cannes Film Festival saw Emma Stone defend herself against a bee, and Robert Pattinson eat a horrifying fish. But it also showcased some of world’s finest cinema, with many standout films screening at MIFF.

Jafar Panahi’s Farsi-language road thriller It Was Just an Accident, which won the Palme d’Or, is on the program. So too the Jury Prize-winning Sound of Falling, an intense German drama that tells four intergenerational stories of girls who grew up in the same farmhouse in 20th-century Germany. Then there’s The President’s Cake, about a nine-year-old whose school assignment is making a cake to celebrate Saddam Hussein, which took out the Camera d’Or for best feature film.

Other Cannes highlights at MIFF are the Queer Palm recipient The Little Sister, which also won Nadia Melliti the award for Best Actress; and The Secret Agent, a political thriller set in Brazil that took home Best Director, Best Actor and a critic’s prize. Plus, Eddington, Midsommar and Hereditary director Ari Aster’s divisive neo-Western set during the height of the pandemic, starring Joaquin Phoenix, Emma Stone and Pedro Pascal; The Mastermind, the latest from American slow cinema director Kelly Reichardt (First Cow, Showing Up); Renoir, a coming of age drama set in 1980s Japan; and Eagles of the Republic, a film that’s part celebrity satire and part political thriller and centres on an Egyptian movie star who stars in a propaganda film.

Actors turned directors

Screen stars taking a seat in the director’s chair is nothing new. This year, MIFF will show two anticipated directorial debuts from indie film favourites. Don’t miss Kristen Stewart’s The Chronology of Water, a story about surviving childhood abuse, adapted from writer Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir. And also Urchin, a character study that follows an unhoused addict in London, from Babygirl and Triangle of Sadness actor Harris Dickinson.

Star power

If you’re looking for familiar faces, catch Jessica Chastain in Michel Franco’s cross-class romance Dreams; Jodi Foster as an American psychiatrist in French black comedy A Private Life; three-time Oscar nominee Carey Mulligan as a one half of a reunited folk duo in British comedy drama The Ballad of Wallis Island; Dakota Johnson in screwball divorce comedy Splitsville; Marion Cotillard in the Silver Bear-winning The Ice Tower; and Matthew McConaughey in crime drama The Rivals of Amziah King, the Academy Award-winner’s first film in six years (aside from voice roles).

Festival darlings

Other films that have made waves on the international festival scene are prolific South Korean director Hong Sang-soo’s What Does That Nature Say to You; Familiar Touch, Sarah Friedland’s touching film about an octogenarian living with dementia, told from its subject’s point of view; and Kontinental ’25, a Romanian satire shot on iPhone by Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World director Radu Jude.

Melbourne International Film Festival runs from August 7–24. Tickets are on sale Tuesday July 15.

miff.com.au

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