The Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) returns to flood the streets of Naarm-Melbourne with films, festivities, and all things culture from 7-24 August 2025. This years line-up features an impressive array of Cannes titles, including Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident, Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind, Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague, and Kristen Stewart’s The Chronology of Water, among many other titles.
Joining these Cannes luminaries are the ten titles up for consideration in the Bright Horizons award, with Charlotte Wells’ (Aftersun) needing to determine a winner out of the ten titles in consideration. Paired with this emerging awards-determining competition are the MIFF Premiere Fund titles, short films, panel discussions, and much, much more.
Andrew caught up with Artistic Director Al Cossar to discuss this years festival, how MIFF plays into the ongoing awards discussions, and a few titles that he recommends you seek out.
MIFF runs from 7 to 24 August 2025, with in person screenings and select offerings via MIFF Online. Visit MIFF.com.au for tickets and more information.
When you’re building the line-up for MIFF, you and your fellow programmers are out and about attending film festivals around the world and seeing all kinds of different films. When you attend a festival like Cannes, what is the process you undertake to secure a film for MIFF?
Al Cossar: Programming and creating the festival program every year is pretty cumulative. There might be some films that we've seen and invited a year before. There's always the complexities of the real world when it comes to screen industry and distribution and acquisition and all of those kinds of mechanisms to navigate through at a very practical level outside of curatorial design. There are some films that might be in the festival program early on and others that are discussed or negotiated for months and months and months.
We program films in a variety of ways, through public submissions, through considering and working with the slates of sales agents, local distributors, national film bodies, and going to festivals overseas, to the extent we can, in terms of budget, is always really valuable. You see the energy of the audience in a room. There may be cultural differences in terms of how different audiences respond to different kinds of filmmaking, but it certainly gives you an interesting insight, alongside seeing filmmakers present their work. How these artists engage with audiences is really telling and interesting in terms of the contextual layer of presenting a film, because at a festival like MIFF there's also the collective experience around it and the contextual experience around it in terms of how you frame things, how filmmakers speak to their works, if there are special activations, if there are things which are sort of unexpected in the way that cinema is placed in front of an audience. We certainly consider that in terms of MIFF being a festival creating moments that differ from perhaps the experience of seeing a film in a regular way outside of the festival period.
Going to something like Cannes is a great example. For MIFF, we lock our program in June, and Cannes happens in mid-May. There's typically two of us on the programming side who might be there year to year covering the festival, and we see as much as is humanly possible. We may go to other festival settings overseas, like Berlin has the European Film Market attached to it, and we might use that time of the year to do a lot of meetings with people we might get a chance to see once a year and reconnect with. For something like Cannes, you need to see every film all at once immediately to be able to work through everything. We’ve got over 45 features from Cannes in the festival lineup this year.
Given where our deadline is, you need to be able to work through the practicalities very quickly. That has been increasingly difficult in recent years, with a lot of different kinds of disruption, post-pandemic, the SAG-AFTRA strike, there’s a lot of volatility in the movement of films. But also in terms of, are these films being bought? Are they being bought for Australia? Will the films be held over for TIFF? Is there a US interest on board that has a dated theatrical release for it in the states that needs to anchor everything else that the film does globally? There's all of these sort of considerations that need to play out at speed, and in the middle of that, a lot of European sales agents or other film industry types will go on their summer European beach holiday for three weeks after the festival, and you're sort of left chasing them at odd hours the night across international time zones for a few weeks after so there's always sort of a scramble. We are as prepared as possible, and I think, pretty meticulous with the way we approach programming. But there is also always this extreme deadline moment that we need to hit directly after Cannes, which is a sort of unique kind of pressure.
We kind of know what we want for the program, and we chase it wholeheartedly. We try to remain pretty nimble in terms of a lot of practicalities, and then we're incredibly persistent as well. We're proud out of what's come from that festival this time around.
Over the past few years, film festivals have become increasingly more prominent fields to be testing grounds for possible awards contenders. Parasite’s Oscar wins pushed this to a new level. MIFF is showcasing a lot of films that are expected to get awards attention. Is that something that comes into your mind when you're programming or do you treat awards potential films as being a happy accident?
AC: It's something I think we're conscious of, but I think it's definitely more the latter than the former because it's so far removed from our control. To a degree, it's always been an award setting. I remember the first Cannes I went to was in 2011; The Artist was in competition that year, which became a bit of an award darling through to the Oscars. It does happen, despite the calendar placement. In recent years, Cannes has become the starting point for the awards corridor, and Oscar speculation accelerates from there. It's certainly more prescient and there’s a visible dynamic in it to a degree.
We curate knowing our audience, knowing our passion for films, and knowing how they might fit into the whole of the program. It's built as something that’s at the level of the whole, rather than the individual. But there are certainly films that we look at and we think ‘in six months’ time, there's something in that film that is going to be recognised, or we think should be recognised.’ Last year with Memoir of a Snail, it's almost sort of unthinkable that that wouldn't have been nominated for the Best Animated feature.
There are already films in the festival lineup this year like that. With our opening night film, If I Had legs, I'd Kick You, Rose Byrne has already been recognised with the Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance at Berlin. It’s an absolute tour de force performance that needs that deserves awards recognition later on in the year.
If you look at documentary, Sundance in January is really the start for a lot of non-fiction recognition, as far as next year's Oscars or BAFTAs or anything like that goes. One of the defining documentaries this year is Ryan White's Come See Me in the Good Light. It won the overall festival audience award at Sundance. Ryan is going to be attending this year, which is really special. He's also come previously in 2014 for The Case Against 8. He's a revered documentarian. This film absolutely floored me. It's about a poet laureate who's dealing with stage-four ovarian cancer. It’s largely about the capacity of creativity, and in this case, the capacity of words, given she's a poet, to confront dark times and confront mortality. There's something universal about it. It has reduced absolutely 100% of people to tears, and I think that will absolutely be the case this year. We're passionate about it. We wanted it in the festival from the moment we saw it, but we can also see its potential beyond MIFF. Does that mean we consider it in a different way? I don't think so, but it means hopefully we have one of the films that will be a centre point of cultural conversation in the mix, which is great.
One of the things which MIFF has always excelled at is supporting Australian creatives alongside international creatives. Your opening night film, If I Had legs, I'd Kick You, feels like a perfect blend of that. You've got Rose Byrne and Danielle Macdonald there. Can you talk about getting to be able to spotlight that film with those kinds of talents as the opening night Gala?
AC: It's such an incredible film. I saw it in Berlin with a room of 2000 people all reacting to it, so hopefully it’ll be something on the scale that's equivalent to its opening night placement at MIFF. It's also a film that's within our Bright Horizons competition for first and second time features this year. This is a sophomore feature from Mary Bronstein. Ever since I read the synopsis for this film, I approached it with a huge amount of curiosity. The cast, as you say, are a really fascinating Australian contingent between Rose and Danielle, but also there are names like Conan O'Brien and A$AP Rocky, so the combination of these people on paper is kind of extraordinary, very unexpected and legitimately surprising.
The film itself is a pressure cooker. It’s claustrophobic. What Uncut Gems was to jewellery, this is to motherhood. It's stressful, but kind of in the most incredibly crafted, beautiful, kind of darkly comic way. Rose Byrne is just phenomenal. It's a career best performance. So, in terms of something that spotlights Australian talent in a really significant way, I think this is one of the landmark independent films of the year for me. It’s a film I was really, really compelled by. You always want to open the festival with the film that will get people talking, that will make a mark, and one that you feel strongly and passionately about. I hope this will kick the doors down.
Read Al Cossar’s Berlinale 2025 Report here.
This is the second year you’re running MIFF Premiere with Purpose. Can you talk about what that is and why Prime Minister fits into that mindset for it?
AC: This is a collaboration supported by the DECJUBA foundation. Premier with Purpose was recently added last year, and it’s a gala setting effectively for stories that need telling, where there is a purpose of social impact, or where there are conversations around an issue, a cause, or a particular context to be extrapolated. These are great films and there's a greater meaning that's around them. Premier with Purpose has guests from across film, fashion, philanthropy, and a wide variety of incredible people in the room as well. It's open to public and general audiences. It's there to celebrate cinema, but to all also consider its purpose, the way it makes change, differences, and moves conversations forward.
The film this year is the Victorian premiere of Michelle Walshe and Lindsay Utz’s, Prime Minister. This is a film that launched in Sundance in January, where it won the World Cinema Documentary Audience Award. It's a portrait of Jacinda Ardern’s leadership over a number of years, including the COVID period in New Zealand. It's a proximate, intimate portrayal of a very significant world leader. In terms of depictions of those sorts of political leaders on screen, it's not the sort of thing that usually gets made. I feel like she's very comfortable, she's very transparent, she's very reflective. It feels like you're going behind that sort of puffery that you can sometimes get, meaning it considers the human on screen, as well as the leader. It captures those two things quite effectively.
Her book, A Different Kind of Power, was just released recently, and it’s a really interesting companion piece to think about what this film is. It’s that idea of human leadership, of compassionate leadership, that has captured a lot of global attention over those years. Obviously, there's still divisiveness in terms of some of the community response across those years, and COVID was a particular time where some of that came to the fore in the New Zealand context that the film adeptly works through as well. It's inspiring, and that's a word that can be really reductive and meaningless, but I think when you apply it to a film like this, it actually makes you feel positive about the potential for political change, social engagement, and for that kind of authentically human leadership that seems absent in a lot of the world when you look around these days.
The Bright Horizons award is a major aspect of MIFF. How do you go about deciding who the jury is, and then who determining who the jury president is?
AC: That's a great question. These conversations happen over the course of a year. We want the jury to be a combination of international and Australian people, just as the competition lineup is typically a combination of Australian and international filmmaking. We want a range of different kind of experiences on it. Bright Horizons was introduced in 2022 alongside our 70th anniversary, and over the years we've had some major filmmakers attached, we've had people representing different craft disciplines attached, and we've also had a number of alumni attached as well. I think that's a really significant piece of the equation.
For a lot of films that have been featured over the years, Bright Horizons has been part of their awards path, where their festival path is part of establishing their visibility and their relevance. A lot of what Bright Horizons does is to identify, celebrate, add to the momentum of auteurs on the ascent.
We've also had people like Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman, who were the first-year winners (for their film Neptune Frost), subsequently come back as alumni to be joint jury president. We've got some distinct voices on the jury this year. This year you have someone like Charlotte Wells, whose film Aftersun was part of that initial lineup in 2022 and went on to be a widely celebrated, BAFTA award winning film. Charlotte is returning to MIFF as jury president.
I think another part of the DNA of what Bright Horizons is, is looking for those voices which are really singular and which announce themselves fully formed. So you have people who I think are really good at recognising that because they're such distinctive, singular filmmakers themselves. This year, alongside Charlotte, you have jury members like Alex Ross Perry and Athina Rachel Tsangari who are part of that as well. We also have Nam Le, who is one of Australia's most revered literary talents; Tamala, who is an extraordinary Australian actress next to be seen as the lead in the Australian remake of the BBC show Ghosts; Colin Needham who is the founder and now Executive Chairman of IMDB; and Caitlin Yeo, who's one of Australia's most acclaimed composers in terms of coming in from that very particular craft side. Her work is absolutely phenomenal, and I would expect her to have a perspective that is both different but incredibly valuable in combination with the others.
When you put those people in a room, hopefully you get something that's pretty incredible in terms of the angles at which they approach their consideration of those films. One of the things that's great about Bright Horizons is how it brings people, both filmmakers and jury, together. All the jury are attending in Melbourne. Directors or other members of the film teams will be present as well. There's a lot of spark that can happen when those people are all together, and potentially with Australian industry, in developmental contexts if they're applied within, say, our Accelerator talent labs, there's a lot that happens with the competition outside of the direct presentation of films that really takes Bright Horizons as a competition, and builds practical audience and industry connection, and a lot of valuable experience for everyone involved outside of it as well.
I can't let you go without talking about MIFF Premier Fund, which is one of my favourite sections of MIFF. The lineup of films is like a who's who of who to keep an eye out for an Australian film. There’s well established people like Kasimir Burgess with Iron Winter, alongside emerging talent like Lorin Clarke with But Also John Clarke. What's sticking out for you from the MIFF Premier Fund this year?
AC: Absolutely. In case people don't know, MIFF Premier Fund is a part of MIFF where we invest as a minority co-financier to a slate of films that are aligned to Victoria in some way into the budget spend. The fund has invested in over 100 films at this point, some really incredible works. Every year it's just a thrill to see what emerges for Premiere within MIFF. A lot of the Premier Fund films are world premiering in the festival this year or have come from a significant international festival play over the last few months.
We're doing an IMAX screening of Kas Burgess's Iron Winter; that follows two Mongolian herders in a landscape which is rapidly changing in terms of climate change and urbanisation. It's the most visually spectacular film. The environment is so harsh, and from an Australian perspective, almost other worldly, visually, in terms of where it happens. It will be a magical and fascinating experience in a cinema setting like IMAX. Lorin's film, But Also John Clarke, is going to be such a beautiful celebration. It's a wonderful film. The experience of seeing that with, I think, what will be such a warm audience, remembering John Clarke, iconically, will be something very, very special.
Other films to highlight include Kristina Karskov’s Spreadsheet Champions. This is a coming-of-age tournament mode doc that takes in six young people who are competing in the world championships of Microsoft Excel. If you love films like Spellbound, this very much fits into that style. It's a beautiful heartwarming film. I think five of the six kids from the film will be in attendance. It'll be something amazing. That's in our Australian strand, but it's also playing as part of MIFF school, so hopefully a lot of young people get to see it as well.
There's something like Sue Thompson's Careless, too. Sue's been someone who has been supported via the Premier Fund over a number of films across the years. She had the closing night spot in MIFF years back with The Coming Back Out Ball Movie. Careless is a real call to arms film in terms of the aged care industry in Australia. It's a film that could be grim in it's subject matter, but it is very energising and positive. It's about something that's incredibly important in terms of the core and fabric of our society.
Then you have a film like First Light by James J Robinson, which is the very first Australian-Filipino co-production. It's just extraordinary. It's the most beautiful film starring Ruby Ruiz, who's a prominent Filipino actor who will be at the festival. They were recently seen in Expats alongside Nicole Kidman. There's some incredible works that that are in Premier Fund.
I know all of the films you program are unmissable, but is there one title that you want people to rush along and go and see or that you want to sell out straight away?
AC: Oh gosh, yes. Tricky. I could talk about fifty different things. The one that I was talking about before, Come See Me in the Good Light, because it's something that might not jump off the page in terms of a film that deals with stage-four cancer, but I have to tell you, it's one of the films that's moved me the most this year. As someone who has watched hundreds of films this year, it's just a really left this indelible emotional mark on me. With Ryan White there, I think it's going to be something really special. There'll be lots of big festival blockbusters to go and see, but in terms of the doc and non-fiction side, I'd really encourage that.
Another one is Heads or Tails? People might approach it as a curio. It's out of Cannes and it's the new film by the Italian filmmakers of The Tale of King Crab, Alessio Rigo de Righi & Matteo Zoppis, which screened at MIFF in 2022. That definitely has a Herzog kind of reverence, and this is very much in the mode of reverence for spaghetti westerns. It stars John C Reilly as Buffalo Bill with a touring Western show at the turn of the century in Italy. There's a murder of an official, and Buffalo Bill sets off across the countryside on the tale of a couple of fugitives. It's all shot across 35mm and 16mm. It’s a film that has this really playful reverence for a very particular kind of part of cinema. It's just something that's quite unexpected, and it's just a really lovely, adventurous diversion within the program. I'm not sure if people are expecting that, but hopefully it's the kind of thing that gets their curiosity on the page. It's a good one to throw in the mix.
I'd also encourage you to check out is The Rivals of Amziah King. It's only screened at South by Southwest so far. It's the second feature of Andrew Patterson, who did The Vast of Night a few years back, which was a 500k indie. This is big. It's Matthew McConaughey and Kurt Russell. It's a really fascinating film. I think he'll be someone quite major, potentially, in a Hollywood sense, in a few years’ time, if not immediately after this film. There's an IMAX screening on the last Sunday that would be well worth experiencing.