The 72nd Melbourne International Film Festival kicked off with a bang at cinemas across the city last week. Running from August 8th until August 25th, the festival is a celebration of the Australian and International film industry.
Events like MIFF are a great way to broaden your movie genre horizons and to feel inspired by the world around you.
But if you were hesitant to buy tix after checking your bank balance this week, don’t fret.
This year, MIFF has created an Under 26 membership pass so you don’t need to worry about your savings balance in exchange for world-class culture.
You can nab a one-off membership for $25 and then you’ll get free admission to any three off-peak standard sessions across the festival. Off-peak means screenings on Monday to Friday that start before 5pm. Perfect if you’re a uni student with a free period or fancy taking a half-day off work in order to soak up Melbourne’s movie magic.
If you’re not eligible for the U26 pass, MIFF is also providing film buffs with $10 (!) Rush Tix. Each day at 12pm, MIFF will release a bunch of discounted Rush Tix to select films. You can keep an eye on the sessions via MIFF’s Instagram stories and online.
But, it’s first come, first served, so be sure to stay on top of the drops for those sweet, sweet discounted tickets.
While film festivals are an amazing way to experience movies you wouldn’t normally watch and provide you with a fail-safe date night idea for a good three weeks, in my experience, these incredible programs can often create a bit of decision fatigue. How do you choose a handful of movies when you want to watch them all?!
To help you cut through the decision fatigue (and actually book in a few flicks before the festival passes you by), we tapped MIFF’s Programmer Kate Jinx on the shoulder to ask for her top picks this year.
Welcome Space Brothers
If you only have room for one documentary about a group of cosmic visionaries in California who believe in using past-life therapy to contact extraterrestrials, and also set up their own state-of-the-art film studio in the 1970s this MIFF, let it be this one. Directed by Jodi Wille (The Source Family), this documentary gives a non–judgmental insight into unconventional creativity.
Black Dog (Selling Fast!)
Out on the solitary planes of the Gobi Desert, Lang (Eddie Peng) has just been released from prison and is in need of a job. Back in his hometown where his dad ran a dilapidated zoo, the ghosts of his crime continue to haunt him, but he finds an unexpected friend in a whip–thin stray dog, the very one that he’s been hired to catch. It’s a coolly gripping film.
Flathead
Flathead is a terrific Australian documentary by Jaydon Martin and executive–produced by Amiel Courtin–Wilson about two men confronting their own belief systems and looking for spirituality in Bundaberg, Queensland.
From fish and chip shops to baptisms, Buddhism and bingo, this is beautifully shot in black and white. The director will also be speaking at the free MIFF Talk Documenting Fact & Fiction: Trust Issues on the 20th of August.
Good One
Good One is a stunning first feature by India Donaldson. It follows queer teenage girl Sam, her dad, and her dad’s best friend on a multi–day hiking trip in upstate New York. Prickled by microaggressions on their climb, Sam’s trip becomes quietly life–changing.
Universal Language
There’s a bit of a focus on Iran at this year’s MIFF with the 26-film-strong retrospective strand Iranian New Wave: 1962–79, and new features from that country like My Favourite Cake and The Seed of the Sacred Fig. But Matthew Rankin’s film Universal Language offers a unique lens on the region by making Winnipeg, Canada look like Iran in the 1980s.
Rankin has described it as an “autobiographical hallucination”, and I can do no better than that. It’s funny, it’s odd, it’s tender, and it won the first ever Audience Award at Cannes this year. The director will also be speaking at the free MIFF Talk Universal Language & Iranian Cinema on the 18th of August.
Hoard
This debut feature from British director Luna Carmoon scooped up four prizes at Venice last year, and I have not stopped thinking about it. Hoard stars newcomer Saura Lightfoot Leon and Stranger Things’ Joseph Quinn as two oddballs who come through the same foster house, and engage in a grimy folie à deux relationship.
Matt and Mara
I really fell in love with this prickly, gentle comedy at the Berlinale earlier this year. The film explores the troubling life and marriage of a young literature professor in Toronto (Mara, Deragh Campbell) when her old college friend (Matt, BlackBerry’s Matt Johnson) turns up out of the blue. She’s a little loopy but with a no–nonsense head on her shoulders, while he — with his rep as the bad boy of the lit world — bounces off the walls. A real gem that you can also watch at home via MIFF Online, all around Australia.
Sasquatch Sunset
Be mesmerised by the star power and pure acting chops of Riley Keough and Jesse Eisenberg playing two members of a Sasquatch family. Yes, they are in costumes the entire time and no, there is no dialogue, only grunts. The new film by the Zellner Brothers is bonkers, funny, weird and profound. Who knew that watching Bigfoots traverse the beautiful redwood forests of Northern California could bring me to tears? Not I! And yet…
Godzilla 70th Anniversary Marathon
A night at the museum? Meh. For us, it’s all about a night at the Astor Theatre — particularly when it’s a movie marathon celebrating the 70th anniversary of the one and only Godzilla. Kicking off the seven-title, 699-minute movie marathon at the Astor on August 17th is the 1954 original, newly restored in 4K.
Sunlight
We already knew UK comic and ventriloquist Nina Conti was a total star thanks to her regular Melbourne International Comedy Festival shows, but now to go and write and direct her own film, in which she also stars, that’s a fantastically bleak black comedy, executively produced by Christopher Guest?! Quite rude, really.
In brief: Conti stars as a woman who refuses to take off her monkey suit and goes on a road trip with her real–life partner, the comedian (and co-writer) Shenoah Allen, who plays a man who wants to dig up his father’s dead body.
MIFF runs in cinemas across Victoria from the 8th–25th of August. You can see the full program and buy tickets here.
Lead images supplied via MIFF.
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