The Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) has revealed the first films for its 2026 program.
Running from 6 to 23 August across Melbourne and regional Victoria, with MIFF Online screening nationally until 30 August, this year’s festival comprises promises thought-provoking, eye-opening cinema, featuring some of the most hotly anticipated films of the year, fresh from Cannes, Berlin, Sundance and beyond.
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Titles announced for MIFF 2026: highlights
Extra Geography
Two best friends, one oblivious geography teacher and a self-assigned mission to become more ‘worldly’ before Oxbridge: BAFTA-winning TV director Molly Manners announces herself as a feature filmmaker with Extra Geography, set for its Australian premiere this MIFF.
A funny, bittersweet ode to teenage girl friendship in the lineage of Ghost World, Clueless and Booksmart, the story follows Minna and Flic as their extracurricular project – to fall in love with the first person they see – quietly detonates the cosy co-dependency at the heart of their friendship.
Adapted by Miriam Battye from a short story, with newcomers Galaxie Clear and Marni Duggan delivering remarkably convincing performances.
The Sun Never Sets
After nearly a decade away from features, mumblecore luminary Joe Swanberg (Drinking Buddies, MIFF 2013) returns with canny and heartfelt love-triangle dramedy, The Sun Never Sets, featuring a radiant Dakota Fanning, handsome 35mm photography, and the wide-open Alaskan skies as his canvas.
The same candour and improvised wit that helped Swanberg forge the mumblecore lexicon, and launch the career of Greta Gerwig, are all accounted for in this Australian Premiere, elevated by a warm confidence that marks a filmmaker hitting a new stride.
Rose
Among this year’s early Headliners is Rose, in which Sandra Hüller, Academy Award-nominated star of Anatomy of a Fall (MIFF 2023), took home the Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance at this year’s Berlinale for a tour-de-force turn that may be the finest of her career.
Austrian filmmaker Markus Schleinzer (Angelo, MIFF 2019) draws on hundreds of historical accounts of gender transgression to craft a precise and unsettling 17th-century folktale of identity and deception. Not to be missed, Schleinzer’s third feature is a fascinating and quietly devastating fictional character study.
Queen at Sea
Juliette Binoche and Tom Courtenay star in Queen at Sea, an unflinchingly knotty drama about a woman and her stepfather at odds over her dementia-stricken mother – the first feature in 18 years from writer/director Lance Hammer, whose debut Ballast (MIFF 2008) collected a slew of accolades across the global festival circuit.
Delicately complex and staunchly humanist, the film is thematically adjacent to, and equally as shattering as The Father and Amour (MIFF 2012). For their exceptional performances as Martin and Leslie, Courtenay and Anna Calder-Marshall shared the Berlinale’s Silver Bear for Best Supporting Performance.
Dead Man’s Wire
Gus Van Sant (Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot, MIFF 2018) slides into a paranoid 70s groove with MIFF Headliner, Dead Man’s Wire, a blackly comedic retelling of the Indianapolis kidnapping that put a shotgun-wired hostage on national television and made the captor a folk hero.
Bill Skarsgård plays Tony Kiritsis, a bullish businessman convinced he’s been duped by his mortgage brokers and determined to extract debt forgiveness, an apology and $5 million at gunpoint, with Al Pacino and Dacre Montgomery (Went up the Hill, MIFF 2025) as the father-son duo on the wrong end of his grievance, and Colman Domingo (Sing Sing, MIFF 2024) as the local soul DJ narrating the unfolding media spectacle.
Minotaur
Minotaur, winner of this year’s Cannes Grand Prix award, is what fury looks like when channeled with exquisite precision. Andrey Zvyagintsev (Loveless, MIFF 2017) having spent years in exile, recovering from a near-fatal coma and watching his country consume itself. Reinterpreting Claude Chabrol’s 1969 classic The Unfaithful Wife as a mercilessly contemporary thriller, Zvyagintsev sets a wealthy CEO’s marital and professional unraveling against the machinery of Putin’s war.
Shot in Latvia with a cunning eye for detail and a savage streak of dark humour, the feature marks the dissident director’s long-awaited return to form after a decade away.
I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning
Winner of the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight Audience Award, I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning arrives as one of the year’s most compassionate portraits of a generation promised more than it received. Writer/director Clio Barnard (The Selfish Giant, MIFF 2013) and co-scenarist Enda Walsh (Hunger, MIFF 2008) adapt Keiran Goddard’s acclaimed novel to trace five Birmingham friends across the fault lines of late-stage capitalism – from gig-economy humiliation to lonely wealth – as economic reality quietly dismantles what growing up together once made unbreakable.
Daryl McCormack, Joe Cole, Jay Lycurgo and Say Nothing breakouts Lola Petticrew (Tuesday, MIFF 2024) and Anthony Boyle deliver performances so lived-in they ache, grounding the film’s social-realist rigour in something far more personal.
We Are Aliens
Also bowing at Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, Kohei Kadowaki’s debut We Are Aliens is a bittersweet, beautiful reckoning with lost innocence. Rendered in a dynamic, at times dreamlike blend of rotoscoped and hand-drawn 2D animation, the film recalls Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Monster (MIFF 2023) in its preoccupation with the lasting impacts of childhood cruelty, and Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon in a bisected structure that fills gaps of memory and offers alternative views on what has passed between them.
The Samurai and the Prisoner
Kiyoshi Kurosawa – the eclectic genre master behind Cloud (MIFF 2025) – adds the samurai film to his formidable repertoire with this adaptation of Honobu Yonezawa’s award-winning 2021 novel.
Set inside a 16th-century fortress under siege, The Samurai and the Prisoner pairs a career-best Masahiro Motoki (Departures) against Masaki Suda’s razor-witted envoy, two men on opposite sides of a locked door forced together by an inexplicable murder within the castle walls.
Drawing on the contemplative classical simplicity of mid-20th-century Japanese cinema, it’s an epic crowdpleaser that proves no locked room can contain Kurosawa for long.
The Only Living Pickpocket in New York
John Turturro plays a veteran fingersmith with a heart of pilfered gold in The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, actor-turned-director Noah Segan’s compelling, light-fingered Sundance debut that steals its vibe from the pockets of 1970s and 80s New York cinema.
When Harry picks the wrong mark, his collegial world comprising Steve Buscemi as his fixer, Giancarlo Esposito as NYPD detective, and Rosie as his ailing wife, is suddenly and violently under threat. Evoking Cassavetes and Spike Lee, Altman and Elaine May, Segan’s feature is neither a lament for the analogue past nor a sneer at digital natives, but a celebration of the evergreen value of human connection and well-honed skill.
Mum, I’m Alien Pregnant
An accidental alien pregnancy is already inconvenient – being an underachieving millennial still living with your oversharing single mother makes it considerably worse. In Mum, I’m Alien Pregnant, directing duo Sean Wallace and Jordan Mark Windsor, aka THUNDERLIPS, expand their 2024 short into a gleefully gloopy body-horror comedy positively dripping in extraterrestrial bodily fluids, visceral practical effects and tentacled prosthetics.
Hannah Lynch (Petrol, MIFF 2022) shines as the unapologetically pissed-off Mary, navigating dismissive doctors, a useless parenting partner and a host of discombobulating physical side effects as she fights to reclaim autonomy over her body and her life.
The Airport Chaplain
Melbourne Airport becomes a purgatory of missed connections and heavy personal baggage, and Hugo Weaving (The Rooster, MIFF 2023) is the scruffy, rule-bending chaplain in a hi-vis vest holding it all together. Commissioned by SBS and set to have its World Premiere this MIFF, multi-award-winning showrunner Elise McCredie (Stateless) and co-creator Jude Troy built The Airport Chaplain from a seed as simple as a lost handbag, expanding it into something morally complex and entirely its own.
With Melbourne director Bonnie Moir (Not Dark Yet, MIFF 2022) warmly illuminating a fully booked flight of Aussie talent including screen legend Claudia Karvan (The Big Steal, MIFF 2017) to rising stars Shabana Azeez (The Pitt; Lesbian Space Princess, MIFF 2025), Thomas Weatherall (Heartbreak High) and more.
The Best Summer
In December 1995, Tamra Davis (Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child, MIFF 2010) brought a Sony Hi8 camcorder to Australia on tour with her new husband, Mike D of the Beastie Boys, then accidentally made one of the great rock documentaries.
Thirty years later, discovered in a shoebox while evacuating her home during the Los Angeles Palisades wildfire, that footage captures Beastie Boys, Pavement, Sonic Youth, Foo Fighters, The Amps and Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna at Summersault, an upstart Australian festival with ambitions to outshine the Big Day Out.
Raw, intimate and buzzing with the scrappy underground camaraderie of a scene on the cusp of arena superstardom, The Best Summer is a wistful last hurrah for a particular moment in alternative music.
The full MIFF 2026 program, including the Bright Horizons Competition lineup, will be revealed Thursday 9 July. Award category nominees and this year’s esteemed festival Jury will also be announced in late July.
