Featuring a remarkable lead performance from nine-year-old Sofia Otero, 20,000 Species of Bees is an empathetic exploration of gender and generations.

Discover the musical legacy and enduring friendship between celebrated Papuan musician George Telek and Not Drowning, Waving’s David Bridie.

Bold works from emerging Australian and New Zealand filmmakers.

Preview the next generation of homegrown directors.

In Christian Petzold’s Silver Bear–winning drama, a summer getaway on Germany’s Baltic coast unravels against the backdrop of looming wildfires.

Love seeps through the cracks in this touching tale of same-sex desire in metropolitan Nigeria, which won the Berlinale’s Teddy Award.

From Cannes Critics’ Week comes a heartbreaking and unforgettably tender portrait of a six-year-old French girl’s bond with her Cape Verdean nanny.

A mix of sci-fi genre-bending and apocalyptic tension, this debut uses an alien invasion to peer across the stakes of faith and family in Morocco.

A deeply moving story of ordinary grief experienced in extraordinary circumstances.

This dryly humorous, Wiseman-esque film about an esteemed Czech art school asks: who gets to decide what art is?

Impassioned narratives from this continent’s best.

In this chilling political coming-of-age film, a young housekeeper is drawn into the sinister orbit of his influential boss.

A gripping, darkly funny portrait of a middle-aged Iranian man whose life is rapidly unravelling.

Jennifer Connelly and Ben Whishaw star in this blackly comic debut about an ex–child star who attends a spiritual retreat in search of enlightenment.

Franco-Senegalese director Ramata-Toulaye Sy’s first longform work is a haunting fable of star-cross’d lovers set in a rural village.

A collection of the best short films from the festival, as chosen by the MIFF Shorts Awards jury and the MIFF Shorts programmers.

This pulse-racing nonfiction thriller follows the individuals risking their lives to defect from North Korea and the pastor granting them passage.

In this modern reimagining of Frankenstein, the give-and-take of motherhood is tested through a collision of grief, creation and horror.

An enchanting animated take on Haruki Murakami’s short stories starring a gregarious talking frog, an existential bank teller and an elusive cat.

A chance encounter after dark offers an autistic man a moment of transcendence.

Deep in the US’s Catskill Mountains of the 50s and 60s sat a refuge for transgender women and cross-dressing men to experience life without fear.

Australian New Wave stalwart Bruce Spence (Stork; Mad Max 2) stars as a senile man haunted by events he can’t recall.

Restored by the National Film and Sound Archive, this film recounts how a haven of Indigenous dance and activism arose from segregated postwar Perth.

Frederick Wiseman’s third foray into dramatic features centres on Sophia Tolstoy’s complicated marriage to her novelist husband.

Oscar-winning Amy and Senna director Asif Kapadia fuses horror and expressionistic dance in this haunting ballet inspired by Woyzeck and Frankenstein.

A disgraced former football star finds himself at a dangerous crossroads after witnessing a murder.

In this Cannes Directors’ Fortnight hit, two debt collectors face the absurdity of their jobs while dwarfed by the majestic Moroccan desert.

Flirtation and violence are dangerous bedfellows in a budding teen romance.

Cynthia Erivo and Alia Shawkat shine in the stirring new work from Anthony Chen, which explores how friendship can salve the traumas of the past.

Two loners from different worlds find fleeting intimacy in this enchanting and stylish short film.

This delicate, absorbing portrait of motherhood follows a young Black woman caught up in a spiral of institutional disadvantage.

A double Berlinale award winner capturing the joys, heartaches and rhythms of rural Mexican life as seen through the eyes of children and young women.

A maximalist mixtape of videogames, pop music and red paint, at once joyous and disruptive.

In this Kafkaesque comedy for the selfie age, a woman must confront just what makes her identity her own after her face abruptly changes overnight.

This heartfelt Sofia Coppola–produced drama explores the intricacies of a father–daughter bond blossoming amid queer liberation and the AIDS crisis.

Three children spread their wings as they farewell their parents and enter a boarding school for students who are blind or have low vision.

A twisted tale of broken legs, painkillers and phone sex that explores the dark heart of transactional relationships – and the sick thrill of a scam.

‘Would you choose them as your mates?’ asks this dark and dreamlike snapshot of a teenage friendship group.

A revisionist western inspired by author Judith Wright’s family history – the first narrative work to feature the Barada and Darumbal languages.

This rare Aussie take on the popular exorcism subgenre builds to a brutal finale you won’t be able to excise from your mind.

Footage of orbs in the skies of the Blue Mountains raises questions over the unexplained disappearance of the filmmaker who recorded them.

A maximalist, kaleidoscopic visual essay of hurt and healing, and a one-of-a-kind statement of bodily sovereignty from wunderkind Fox Maxy.

A 10-year-old girl becomes newly aware of her cultural identity in this impressive debut that received a Tribeca Narrative Short Special Jury Mention.

A sun-drenched, hormone-laden trip of teenage kicks turns dark in this compellingly contemporary navigation of sexual politics.

Making mixtapes becomes a means of survival for a troubled 12-year-old Italian-American in this ferociously energetic, 80s-set coming-of-age story.

Hit the town and seek out the next illegal rave in this euphoric, multisensory joyride about the 1980s Acid House movement.

The first Jordanian film to screen at Cannes takes ferocious aim at the country’s ingrained misogyny.

This hypnotic, transcendental debut feature follows a young man’s mystical journey across a beguiling rural Vietnam.

This deeply moving Clermont-Ferrand International Special Jury Prize winner follows a troubled teen’s last-ditch attempt at freedom.

“When will you return?” This haunting question – familiar to many an expat – is asked of a Senegalese student in West Berlin.

In this award-winning film, two strangers are brought together by shared grief, experienced from vastly different perspectives.

A multi-award-winning Melbourne director shows how trauma can radically reconfigure our worldview.

Bangarra Dance Theatre’s Elma Kris and Waangenga Blanco lead this film about a Torres Strait Islander woman whisked away from her thankless job.

Naturalistic and brimming with empathy, this debut drama unfolds over 24 hours in a marginalised Muslim community in India.

Mark Coles Smith (Sweet As) faces down a traumatic event from his past in the hope of helping young First Nations men in the Kimberley.

Lars von Trier (Melancholia, MIFF 2011) revisits the wacky, disturbing world of Kingdom Hospital in his cult series’ long-awaited final chapter.

Winner of Rotterdam’s top prize, this moving documentary explores the lives of Cameroonian children at the edge of a war zone.

A wildly imaginative, hilarious and heartbreaking trip into a teenage girl’s mind, depicted as a phantasmagoria of self-loathing and angst.

A rollicking deep dive into the life of one of rock ’n’ roll’s most exhilarating personalities, whose queerness was hidden in plain sight.

A SXSW Audience Award winner, this doc traces the unlikely ascendancy of one of rock’s most influential yet under-sung figures: Pavement’s Gary Young.

This Berlinale Silver Bear Jury Prize (Short Film) and Teddy Award for Best Short Film winner depicts a Yankunytjatjara man’s search for belonging.

The first virtually produced Australian feature, Mercy Road is an unrelentingly tense psychological thriller from Tracks director John Curran.

Bright Horizons Jury member Saul Williams presents this restored indie classic in which he plays a young Black prisoner who seizes poetic justice.

A dazzling 4K restoration of Taiwanese auteur Hou Hsiao-hsien’s sensual 2001 tale of an adrift bar hostess at the turn of the millennium.

The thrilling, debauched and frequently hilarious adventures of the legendary Melbourne post-punk band, in their own words.

A snapshot of a Vietnamese-Canadian family’s routines during its matriarch’s final days.

An intimate kaleidoscope of stories from the best emerging filmmakers working in Canada today.

Moving cities is the perfect excuse to throw a party … and unpack some awkward home truths.

Abandoned by an indifferent government, a remote Siberian village stands united in the face of a massive forest fire that threatens its future.

Love Is Strange (MIFF 2014) director Ira Sachs embraces the art of French cinema in this queer, Paris-set musing on a complicated relationship.

This time capsule of an extraordinary unseen history is a work of documentation and preservation – both of a moment in time and of the moving image.

Man Ray’s classic shorts are reimagined for their 100th anniversary alongside an ecstatic soundtrack from SQÜRL members Jim Jarmusch and Carter Logan.

Direct from Cannes comes a charming, lo-fi fantasy caper for adults and children alike that’s destined for cult status.

Safi Faye’s groundbreaking 1983 ethnographic documentary uses one Senegalese woman’s experience to comment widely on gender and society.

Cannes Best Actress winner Zar Amir-Ebrahimi anchors this Sundance award-winning portrait of a mother seeking a new life for herself and her daughter.

The rivalry between teenage brothers reaches dangerous heights in Toronto’s 2022 Best Canadian Short winner.

Witchcraft, revenge and Indigenous rancour swell in this atmospheric, anti-colonial bildungsroman set in 19th-century Chile.

The supernatural encroaches on a woman’s simple existence in this FIPRESCI Prize–winning tale of folklore, deception and retribution.

Cartoon villain, master manipulator, traitor or true patriot? You decide in this engrossing portrait of Donald Trump’s wily adviser Roger Stone.

With a title derived from the Latin phrase ‘sighs from the depths’, Dario Argento’s most famous film is a masterwork of skin-crawling terror.

A cast of neurodivergent teens prepare to come of age and hit the stage in their school’s time-travelling, John Farnham–themed musical.

A deft exploration of the brutal scars of colonialism whose genre twists and turns give new meaning to ‘the horror of war’.

This dazzling rabbit hole of a film, which evokes cinephile Everest La Flor (MIFF 2019), sketches the ‘before’ and ‘after’ of a woman’s disappearance.

Described by its maker as a “meditation on access and loss”, this trailblazing film reframes cinema from a d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing perspective.

Activist and filmmaker George Gittoes follows the frontline artists daring to stand up to the Russian invasions of Ukraine and Afghanistan.

In this meditation on the Australian migrant community, a Filipino teen follows his mum through the bleak landscape of Melbourne’s northern suburbs.

In this gorgeous new 4K restoration, Hungarian slow-cinema master Béla Tarr finds metaphysical horror in a nascent revolution.

Mud Crab director David Robinson-Smith returns with a stirring cine-poem about the rental crisis, starring Thom Green (Of an Age).

From Star Trek to actual space travel, 92-year-old William Shatner has done it all. Alexandre O. Philippe beams us up with this touching tribute.