Melbourne International Film Festival has offered its first glimpse of 2026, unveiling 25 films and special events that hint at a program built on contrast, scale and risk.
Running 6th–23rd August across Naarm, regional Victoria, and online via MIFF Online until 30th August, the 74th edition promises another sprawling winter of cinema that moves easily between local storytelling, international festival heavyweights, and formally adventurous work.
MIFF builds breadth by bringing together Cannes and Berlin premieres, Australian debuts, archival rediscoveries and live performance events beneath one sprawling festival roof.
Melbourne stories & MIFF Premiere Fund lead the local charge
The MIFF Premiere Fund once again anchors the Australian selection, backing films that push form, tone and subject matter in unexpected directions.
Melbourne itself becomes unstable terrain in Mad Rush, where a routine banking alert triggers a single-day spiral through the city’s streets. The film turns the CBD into a pressure cooker of paranoia and financial anxiety, anchored by Senuri Chandrani in a performance built on escalating tension and emotional fragility.
More intimate but equally distinctive, Digby & Camille follows painter Digby Webster and chef Camille Collins across years of shared life. Blending documentary observation with animation drawn from Webster’s own artwork, the film builds a portrait of partnership shaped by creativity as much as domestic reality.
In regional Australia, Sweet Milk Lake brings a quietly personal story of identity and belonging, while Hard as Puck finds humour and grit inside Western Australia’s only para ice hockey team, balancing underdog sports energy with institutional frustration and community resilience.
International highlights from major festivals
MIFF’s early international slate draws heavily from recent festival circuits, positioning the program firmly within global awards-season conversation.
Sandra Hüller leads Rose, a historical drama exploring gender transgression in 17th-century Europe, while Juliette Binoche and Tom Courtenay star in Queen at Sea, a restrained family drama shaped by dementia and intergenerational tension.
Clio Barnard returns with I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning, adapting Keiran Goddard’s novel into a study of friendship and economic precarity across five interconnected lives in Birmingham.
Joe Swanberg’s The Sun Never Sets shifts the mood toward improvised intimacy, setting a love triangle against the expansive isolation of Alaska.
Genre, experiment and form push the program outward
Gus Van Sant’s Dead Man’s Wire revisits a real hostage crisis through a darkly comic, media-saturated lens, with Bill Skarsgård, Al Pacino and Colman Domingo in key roles.
The Only Living Pickpocket in New York stars John Turturro as Harry, a veteran pickpocket whose world unravels after a job goes wrong. Noah Segan’s Sundance debut channels 70s and 80s New York cinema as Harry’s circle—played by Steve Buscemi, Giancarlo Esposito and Rosie—comes under threat, balancing grit with a focus on human connection.
Kiyoshi Kurosawa expands his genre reach with The Samurai and the Prisoner, a 16th-century siege narrative that folds mystery and historical drama into a tightly contained setting.
Animation and sensory-driven work also stand out. We Are Aliens uses rotoscoped and hand-drawn animation to explore fractured memory, while Phenomena transforms laboratory science into kaleidoscopic visual sequences, deliberately built without AI.
Music, memory and archival cinema take centre stage
The Best Summer reconstructs a mid-90s Australian festival through rediscovered camcorder footage, capturing a raw moment in alternative music history with acts including Beastie Boys, Bikini Kill and Sonic Youth.
Moreover, the film sits alongside a broader interest in how memory is preserved, distorted and reassembled—whether through archival fragments, experimental form, or personal testimony. MIFF’s live events program remains a key part of its identity, with a special anniversary presentation of Hedwig and the Angry Inch.
John Cameron Mitchell will appear in person for a restored 4K screening with live commentary at The Astor, reframing the cult musical as a communal, one-night-only event that blends performance, screening and celebration.
A festival defined by range
Even at this early stage, MIFF 2026 is shaping up as a festival built on movement between extremes, like intimate Australian portraits and large-scale international dramas, historical epics and present-day urban anxiety, experimental animation and archival excavation.
The full MIFF 2026 program will be announced on 9th July, but this first release already sketches the contours of a festival designed to feel less like a schedule and more like a citywide collision of stories.
Tickets go on pre-sale for MIFF Members from 8pm AEST Thursday, 9th July, before going on general sale at 10am AEST Tuesday, 14th July.
