Festival Programme

Films by Genre

Historical

Bread and Roses

Gaylene Preston

Preston*Laing’s film adaptation of activist Sonja Davies’ autobiography beautifully captures the heart-breaking social and societal conditions of mid-century women in New Zealand.

Chocolat

Claire Denis

A complex, languorous tale of violence and desire drawing on French auteur Claire Denis’ own childhood growing up in colonial French Africa.

The Innocents

Jack Clayton

Henry James’s 1898 novella Turn of the Screw is vividly adapted for the screen in Jack Clayton’s unnerving, gothic psychological chiller—among the eleven scariest horror films of all time according to Martin Scorsese.

Kidnapped

Rapito

Marco Bellocchio

Direct from Cannes this visually rich costume drama rips the jaw-dropping true story of the abduction of a young Jewish boy by the Catholic church from the pages of history.

The New Boy

Warwick Thornton

Set in 1940s Australia, an Aboriginal orphan arrives in the dead of night at a remote monastery run by a renegade nun (Cate Blanchett) in this spiritual thriller from Warwick Thornton.

Phantom

Yuryeong

Lee Hae-young

Set in Japanese-occupied Korea in 1933, five people are held captive by a security chief determined to find the spy “Phantom” in this stylish, highly entertaining thriller.

The Settlers

Los colonos

Felipe Galvez

Set in on the remote frontier in early 20th-century Chile, first-time filmmaker Felipe Gálvez’s exhilarating and provocative revisionist Western takes a sidelong glance at Chile’s dark colonial past.

Sisu

Jalmari Helander

A one-man death squad will go to outrageous lengths to get his gold back—even if it means killing every last Nazi in his path. Jalmari Helander’s gleefully entertaining actioner delivers gory mayhem by the bucketload.

Sorcery

Brujería

Christopher Murray

An Indigenous girl seeks revenge for her father’s death and finds solace in a secret cabal of witches. This enigmatic folktale of supernatural resistance provides a haunting portrayal of Chile’s colonial past.