2024
Al Cossar
Cinematically synonymous with the bluster of a Melbourne winter, MIFF’s return in 2024 heralds a heady voyage and a venturing into films far from our doorstep, and far from the rickety pseudo-imaginations of the entertainment currently clogging up the screens, feeds and brains of Melburnians.
Prepare to have the vanilla-dopamine hits of your non-MIFF-season entertainment shattered, once again, by cinema.
The festival starts with a hometown celebration of one of our finest Melburnian moviemakers: Adam Elliot’s long-awaited MIFF Premiere Fund–supported Memoir of a Snail – dark, delightful and attuned to the shonkily beloved wavelengths of Australian suburbia (not to mention the joys of a Chiko Roll). Opening Night will be a moment you must be there for – along with so many others this year.
From Justin Kurzel’s portrait of Warren Ellis in Ellis Park, a film so contemporary in the binds it makes between compassion and creativity, to our world-premiere Family Gala of Magic Beach, Robert Connolly’s ambitious adaptation of the beloved Australian children’s classic (and don’t forget the repeat screening at Peninsula Hot Springs for a more aquatically immersive movie-going time!), there are films to be found for everyone among this year’s bumper 250+ film crop.
Films that will hone your mind to the urgent matters of the world around you; others that will take you far from any semblance of reality; there are the formally adventurous and the experimentally leaning, the hilarious, the terror-inducing, and those that are warm hugs to reset your heart amid the cold days.
This year, we’re particularly thrilled to present a major retrospective program uniquely curated for MIFF from The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) New York’s landmark Iranian Cinema before the Revolution, 1925–1979 retrospective. Iranian New Wave: 1962–79 is an expansive collection of underseen and outrightly unseen greats of the Iranian cinema canon from the 60s and 70s, also including nonfiction and rarely screened work from the golden era of Iranian animation. It’s a rare onscreen opportunity not to be missed.
Elsewhere, our Bright Horizons competition is unmissable cinema – returning for its third year, a lightning rod for the most important breakthrough voices in world cinema, as we celebrate the new, the next, the bold and the best. All presented in Australian premiere (and many with IMAX screenings!), and with a number of international filmmakers on the ground in Melbourne, Bright Horizons flips the film-competition model to focus on discovery, on ascent into auteurship – a chance for audiences to meet the most important new filmmakers as they shape cinema before your eyes. I hope you’ll check out what has come to be one of the most singular and exciting destinations for film within the program-at-large.
MIFF, again, continues to meet you where you are: within metropolitan Melbourne, alongside weekend expansions to seven country Victorian towns, or all across Australia at your place, with a selection of festival highlights screening via MIFF’s online season on ACMI’s virtual Cinema 3.
Being part of an audience these days is not a passive pursuit, and that is at the heart of the modern MIFF. Our hometown’s own brand of cinematic maximalism, a path forged across hundreds of movies – it’s a beautiful thing, and it is back to enjoy. Thank you, as ever, for being a part of MIFF, and for your support of and interest in the festival. We at MIFF hope this program catches your curiosity. We’ll see you in the cinema this August.