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Couldn’t make it to the red carpet this year? No worries. We’ve brought Cannes to you. NZIFF 2025 features a hand-picked selection from the world’s most glamorous and influential film festival, with bold new works, major prize-winners and future classics from around the globe.

Opening the Festival is this year’s Palme d’Or winner, It Was Just an Accident, a politically charged thriller from acclaimed Iranian director Jafar Panahi. After years behind bars and under a filmmaking ban, Panahi returns with a gripping road movie about vengeance, memory and power. The story follows Vahid, a former political prisoner, who sets out to confront the man who tortured him. Along the way, he picks up a vanload of fellow survivors, each with their own story to tell. The result is dark, absurd, and emotionally raw.

Our Closing Night film is Sentimental Value, a Cannes Grand Prix winner directed by Joachim Trier (The Worst Person in the World). Elle Fanning and Stellan Skarsgård star as a daughter and estranged father, forced to reconnect when he announces plans to make a film about their turbulent past. Smart, moving and quietly hilarious, it is a beautiful portrait of a fractured family and the stories we

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What do this year’s films from Aotearoa reveal? That our filmmakers are asking big questions, pushing into new territory, and telling stories with wit, courage and care. It is a line-up full of range and ambition, from gothic thrillers and offbeat comedies to powerful documentaries and deeply personal portraits.

Kicking things off is The Weed Eaters, a horror-comedy with bite. A mysterious strain of weed turns a group of stoner mates into reluctant cannibals, and things unravel fast. Shot on a shoestring and powered by pure creativity, it’s chaotic, clever and destined to gain cult status. NZIFF Artistic Director Paolo Bertolin calls it a “positively crazy finding”, and one of the “must-see thrills” of this year’s festival. 

If you prefer your chills with a slower burn, Went Up the Hill delivers in spades. Filmed in rural Canterbury and starring Dacre Montgomery (Stranger Things) and Vicky Krieps (Phantom Thread), this gothic psychodrama brings ghosts, grief and some genuinely unsettling twists. 

Workmates finds charm, heartbreak and humour in the wings of a crumbling Auckland theatre. Directed by Sophie Henderson and Curtis Vowell, this romantic dramedy draws on real-life experience to celebrate the chaos of creative work and the moments of magic that

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Since 2012, the Wairoa Māori Film Festival and Pollywood have been part of NZIFF, curating the annual Ngā Whanaunga Māori Pasifika short film programme. The name “Ngā Whanaunga" was gifted by Huia Kaporangi Koziol, who described it as meaning relatedness and connectedness between peoples. Māori are part of the great Pasifika whānau; our Polynesian peoples journeyed on the same waka from Hawaiiki, and are related by culture, language and blood and in wairuatanga (soulfulness) across our vast sea Moana-nui-a-kiwa. From the beginning, screening Māori works alongside Pasifika was symbolic of whānaungatanga and connectedness.

In 2025, we now evolve into Ngā Whanaunga: Aotearoa New Zealand’s Best, with the best of Māori and Pasifika filmmaking now alongside the best films made by everyone in Aotearoa. Wairoa Māori Film Festival founder Leo Koziol (Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāti Rakaipaaka) and Pollywood Film Festival founder Craig Fasi (Niue) continue their role in short film programming, focusing their lens upon Ngā Whanaunga: Aotearoa New Zealand’s Best 2025 Indigenous talent in their role as co-curators. Artistic Director Paolo Bertolin, Programme Manager Michael McDonnell and programmers Carmen Gray and Huia Haupapa (Te Ātiawa,Ngāti Mutunga) round out the selection committee. Notes on each film are provided by the selection committee.

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On this fine Friday 13th, we’re shining the spotlight on our lineup of kooky, creepy, weirdly wonderful and out-of-the-box films, aka the nocturnal strand.

First up - you asked and we listened - David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds is coming to NZIFF 2025! Featuring Cronenberg’s affinity for the macabre, the film follows a recently bereaved app developer who creates GraveTech, a bizarre new technological frontier involving ‘shrouds’, which reproduce the body in the grave as a 3D model that mourners can watch decompose remotely via their smartphone.

Also among the lineup, OBEX blends horror, sci-fi, old-school gaming nostalgia and Lynchian dread into a heady and undefinable mix that will haunt your dreams. The story of a reclusive nerd who must enter a video game to fight a demon and rescue his dog, OBEX is a surreal analog nightmare for anyone who remembers a world before tv’s were flat.

Kiwi comedy-romance, Workmates, will have its world premiere at NZIFF 2025!

Directed by Curtis Vowell (Baby Done, The Outlaws, Seize Them!, Fantail) and written by Sophie Henderson (Baby Done, The Justice of Bunny King, Fantail), Workmates is a funny, heartfelt love story starring Sophie Henderson (Human Traces, Fantail) and Matt Whelan (Narcos, Go Girls) as Lucy and Tom - best friends, theatre-makers, and co-workers.

When an accident threatens to shut down the tiny, underfunded theatre they’ve built together,
Lucy realises she would do anything to save the theatre and keep her friend… who she might be in love with.

Grab your festival Multipass for best value tickets!