Festival Programme

Films by Venue

SkyCity Theatre

Abang Adik

Jin Ong

Two undocumented brothers live on the edges of Malaysian society, one quiet and law-abiding, the other reckless and furious. Jin Ong’s emotionally powerful debut is a moving story of love, injustice and survival.

Crocodile Tears

Air mata buaya

Tumpal Tampubolon

Generational tension comes to the fore in Tumpal Tampubolon’s atmospheric debut focusing on the relationship between a neurotic mother and her son as life in their crocodile park starts to crumble.

Deaf

Sorda

Eva Libertad

A woman navigates the experience of motherhood as a deaf person in a hearing world in Eva Libertad’s crowd-pleasing, feel-good drama which collected the Panaroma Audience Award at Berlin this year.

Ellis Park

Justin Kurzel

Australian composer Warren Ellis takes us through a personal tour of music, addiction, rehabilitation and animal conservatism in this inspiring and seamless blend of music biography and environmental advocacy.

Homebound

Neeraj Ghaywan

Class, religion, and gender intersect in Neeraj Ghaywan’s personal approach to life in Northern India. A life-long friendship is put to the test when a shared dream leads two best friends in different directions.

Hysteria

Mehmet Akif Büyükatalay

A film shoot sparks fear and anger when a holy book is desecrated in the name of art in this intense German thriller, fanning the flames of contemporary conflict into a taut and tangly blaze.

Late Shift

Heldin

Petra Volpe

Plunging through the corridors of a surgical ward, this frantic Swiss drama charts the pulse-racing worklife of an overstretched, underappreciated nursing professional.

Love

Kjærlighet

Dag Johan Haugerud

What is love? Through the stories of a straight woman and a gay man, Haugerud defies conventions with humor and compassion, in an eloquent and moving masterwork on human relations in the 21st century.

MA – Cry of Silence

The Maw Niang

In the midst of a civil war following a military coup a group of young women in Myanmar organise a strike when the boss of their foreign owned garment factory hasn’t paid them in two months.

Magellan

Magalhães

Lav Diaz

Legendary Filipino auteur Lav Diaz recounts a decade in the life of famed explorer Ferdinand Magellan in haunting and poetic fashion, following his colonisation of SE Asia and his tragic descent into damnation.

Shepherds

Bergers

Sophie Deraspe

An enterprising young man leaves the comforts of home swapping a suit and tie for a shepherd's crook, but soon enough the arduous nature of pastoral life in the south of France serves him a healthy dose of reality.

Sound of Falling

In die Sonne schauen

Mascha Schilinski

German cinema celebrated the arrival of a bold new auteur in Cannes, as Mascha Schilinski unveiled her ghostly epic of women in one house visited by catastrophe and its echoes over generations.

Stranger Eyes

Mò shì lù

Yeo Siew Hua

In a world where everyone has a camera in their pocket, the government has cameras on street corners and businesses have cameras in their lobbies, when can you be sure that you're not being recorded and who can you trust?

TOITŪ Visual Sovereignty

Chelsea Winstanley

Unprecedented insight into the curation of the Toi Tū Toi Ora: Contemporary Māori Art exhibition reveals the struggle for Māori artistic sovereignty within the structures of Aotearoa New Zealand’s cultural institutions.

Urchin

Harris Dickinson

This gritty and empathetic portrait of addiction and the self-destruction that comes along with it is filled with pitch black humour. Frank Dillane puts on a masterclass as he takes his character to rock bottom.

A Useful Ghost 

Pee chai dai ka 

Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke 

After her death by dust poisoning, a woman returns as a haunted vacuum cleaner to comfort her grieving husband. Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke blends absurd comedy and class politics into a fable that’s as strange as it is moving.

What Marielle Knows

Was Marielle weiß

Frédéric Hambalek

Panic around a new digital Big Brother era underpins a clever, absurdist send-up of bourgeois hypocrisy, as a married couple are put on the spot by their daughter’s all-pervasive telepathy.