Beloved cultural event Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) unveil a huge 2024 program of over 250 features, shorts and XR experiences.
Returning to Melbourne and Victoria in person, and Australia- wide online, the annual screen events Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) unveils a sprawling 2024 program for 8 – 25 August. The 2024 program boasts a world-class roster of international features, a stack of world-premiere local titles, a comprehensive shorts collection alongside immersive XR experiences, curated retrospectives, insightful talks, special one-off events, and international guest appearances.
Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF)
When: 8 – 25 August 2024
Where: Various cinemas and venues across Victoria, and online
Full Program: View here.
Stay up to date with what’s happening in and around the region here.
Following a massive program launch on Thursday 11 July as presented by Yering Station, Artistic Director, Al Cossar, said: “Here it is – the big moment of our annual reveal, packed with anticipation, discovery, a celebration of all things cinema. This year’s MIFF program features over 250 films, with more than 400 sessions across 18 days, bringing together incredible Australian filmmaking, world cinema, drama, comedy, horror, animation, bold experimentation – things you’ve been waiting months to see, and others you never thought you’d get a chance to. The MIFF program this year, like every year, is a multi-faceted festival of cinematic excess, designed to delight, and sure to bring out the best in your imaginations. We’re thrilled to welcome audiences back – come along and settle in for all too many movies at Melbourne’s favourite binge this Winter!”
Popping up in theatres statewide, the festival program also welcomes the return of MIFF Regional showcase, which brings some of the festival’s must-see titles to audiences further afield across the weekends of 16-18 August and 23-25 August. Meanwhile, MIFF Online – streaming via ACMI offers digital access Australia-wide to a limited selection of festival highlights from 9 – 25 August.
MIFF Regional will be hitting screens in regional Victoria, with Bendigo (Star Cinema, Eaglehawk), Castlemaine (Theatre Royal), Echuca (Paramount), Geelong (Village and Pivotonian), Rosebud (Peninsula Cinemas), Morwell (Village) and Shepparton (Village) all participating in this years mammoth program.
Here are some of the festival highlights:
Headliners
Megalopolis
Megalopolis, Francis Ford Coppola’s star-studded, 40-years-in-the-making passion project arrives at MIFF in all its loopy, maximalist glory, in a strictly one-off special screening at IMAX. Steeped in the Roman Empire, Shakespeare and Dickens, and featuring Adam Driver, Jon Voight and Shia LeBeouf, Coppola’s out-of-control ‘fable’ is the stuff of modern-day moviemaking myth. Having invested over $120 million of his own money into the production when no studios would dare bankroll its uncompromising vision and mega-scale ambition – the film sees Coppola at work with unparalleled creative freedom. Dedicated to Coppola’s recently departed wife Eleanor, Megalopolis looms as an indelible vision from the 85-year-old auteur.
All We Imagine As Light
Mumbai-based director Payal Kapadia returns with the highly anticipated fiction follow-up to her striking debut feature documentary A Night of Knowing Nothing (MIFF, 2022). Recently shown in Cannes as the first Indian film to screen in competition in 30 years, All We Imagine as Light is the sensuous tale of three nurses, their romantic entanglements and a mystical trip to the coast. Awarded the 2024 Grand Prix at Cannes, Kapadia has delivered one of the year’s most assured films.
The Substance
Demi Moore satirises Hollywood ageism in an audacious gory feminist body horror that was the talk of this year’s Cannes Film Festival, where it won Best Screenplay. The Substance sees French director Coralie Fargeat (Revenge) ruthlessly marshal Cronenbergian tropes, from 1980s-inspired production design to some truly superlative prosthetics, provocatively depicting the turmoil of ageing as a woman in a patriarchal world. Featuring performances by Margaret Qualley (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, MIFF 2019) and Dennis Quaid.
International Highlights
An Unfinished Film
Chinese auteur Lou Ye (Summer Palace, MIFF 2006) tackles the seismic disruption brought by COVID through an exhilarating blend of drama and documentary. In An Unfinished Film, a fictional crew based near Wuhan stumbles upon 10-year-old footage of a (real) aborted queer film and sets about reuniting the cast to complete it with a new act. But this is early 2020, and fate has other ideas. With the film halted once again, the project comes to morph into something else entirely.
All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt
Named one of the top 10 independent films of 2023 by the National Board of Review, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt is award-winning poet and photographer Raven Jackson’s mesmerising debut feature. Shot in gorgeous 35mm, this ode to a Black woman’s joys and tragedies in the Deep South is propelled by a visceral soundscape and a sparse but revealing script. For fans of Barry Jenkins (who has a producer credit here) and Terrence Malick.
Timestalker
In cult UK comedy treasure Alice Lowe’s second feature, a woman’s misguided fatal attraction to the same pretty bad-boy has lasted six centuries…so far. After co-writing and starring in comedy slasher Prevenge, Lowe is joined in Timestalker by an eager ensemble cast including Hot Fuzz’s Nick Frost, Sex Education’s Tanya Reynolds, Interview With the Vampire’s Jacob Anderson and period-drama darling Aneurin Barnard.
All this and so much more across documentary, Australian titles, shorts, music on film and MIFF XR.
To see the full program, including schedules and ticketing, head here.
