St Ali Italian Film Festival 2025

From September 17 to October 22, cinemas across the country will screen a bellissimo line-up of award-winning films, box-office favourites and hidden gems. This year’s St Ali Italian Film Festival takes place across Canberra, Adelaide, Sydney, Melbourne, Ballarat, Brisbane, Perth, Byron Bay and Ballina, at select Palace Cinemas, Cinema Nova, Luna Palace Cinemas and Palace Nova Cinemas.

It opens with Paolo Genovese’s record-breaking hit rom-com Somebody To Love (FolleMente), before moving to the program centrepiece: Oscar-winner Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grazia, fresh from its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival and starring Toni Servillo, Anna Ferzetti and Massimo Venturiello.

Migrant stories are at the heart of the 2025 program, with documentaries and dramas that reflect Italy’s connection to Australia and beyond. Signorinella: Little Miss, narrated by Greta Scacchi, celebrates the resilience of Italian women who shaped the Italian Australian community, while Academy Award winner Gabriele Salvatores’s Napoli – New York follows two Neapolitan children in 1949 on a hopeful journey across the Atlantic.

Other highlights include The Mountain Bride – Vermiglio, a Venice prize-winner set during World War II; Ferzan Özpetek’s couture drama Diamonds; and actor Elio Germano’s dual turns in Sicilian Letters and The Great Ambition. You can also catch powerful contemporary stories like The Boy With Pink Trousers, My Place Is Here and Fuori, alongside comedies like The Illusion and When Mum is Away … With the In-Laws.

To celebrate its 25th anniversary, the festival closes with a newly restored screening of Italian Australian classic Looking for Alibrandi. For late-night cinephiles, a retrospective of Italy’s Giallo thrillers – featuring restored prints of Dario Argento’s Deep Red and Lucio Fulci’s A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin – offers a plunge into cinema’s darker corners.

Browse the full program and book tickets.

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