MIFF, Melbourne's biggest film festival is back with a first look at what's coming this winter.
The Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) 2026 has dropped its First Glance program, revealing 25 films and special events ahead of the full program launch on 9 July.
The 74th edition runs 6–23 August across Naarm and regional Victoria, with MIFF Online streaming nationally until 30 August via Cinema 3, ACMI’s on-demand platform.
Six MIFF Premiere Fund titles lead the local charge, let’s dive in!
MIFF 2026
- Dates: 6–23 August 2026
- Location: Naarm (Melbourne) and regional Victoria
- MIFF Online: 14–30 August via Cinema 3 (ACMI’s on-demand platform), streaming nationally
- Regional screenings: Bendigo, Ballarat, Castlemaine, Geelong, Healesville, Rosebud, Sale and Warrnambool, 14–16 and 21–23 August
- Full program launch: 9 July 2026
- MIFF Awards: 22 August 2026, headlined by the $140,000 Bright Horizons Award supported by the Victorian Government
Stay up to date with what’s happening in and around Melbourne here.
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MIFF Premiere Fund
Hard as Puck embeds itself in Perth’s Garden Island Pirates, the best para ice hockey team in Western Australia and also, for now, the only one — part underdog sports doc, part behind-the-scenes institutional comedy about people who show up anyway, against Norway, against the United States, and against a booking system that won’t give them the rink.
Mad Rush transforms Melbourne’s CBD into something altogether more sinister across a single frantic day, with Senuri Chandrani delivering the kind of prickly, can’t-look-away performance that micro-budget films live or die on.
Sweet Milk Lake sees debut filmmaker Harvey Zielinski pull double duty in lead dual roles, crafting a trans-led fish-out-of-water dramedy with a budding romance opposite Hunter Page-Lochard at its heart.
Digby & Camille is exactly what it sounds like and exactly what you need: a fly-on-the-wall portrait of two people with Down syndrome dreaming of marriage, kids and a home, co-directed by subject Digby Webster himself.
Death of a Shaman is the result of Australian filmmaker Dan Jackson spending over a decade building trust with communities in the Ecuadorian Amazon to capture an Indigenous shaman racing against time to pass on sacred knowledge while corporations and government close in.
And Jebediah: Are We Ok? asks the question the Perth alt-rock faithful have probably been sitting with for years, tracing the band’s 30-year arc from Triple J darlings to the harder terrain of what sustained success actually costs, with Tim Rogers, Phil Jamieson and Janet English along for the ride.
International highlights
The international program is equally stacked.
Minotaur arrives as probably the most anticipated film of the lot: Andrey Zvyagintsev, the dissident Russian director behind Loveless, spent years in exile recovering from a near-fatal coma before emerging with this Cannes Grand Prix winner, a merciless contemporary thriller set against the machinery of Putin’s war.
Sandra Hüller, who you’ll remember from Anatomy of a Fall, picked up the Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance for Rose, a precise and unsettling 17th-century folktale of identity and deception that Austrian filmmaker Markus Schleinzer built from hundreds of historical accounts of gender transgression.
Gus Van Sant is back in a paranoid 70s groove with Dead Man’s Wire, a blackly comedic retelling of a real Indianapolis kidnapping that put a shotgun-wired hostage on national television, with Bill Skarsgård, Al Pacino and Dacre Montgomery.
Queen at Sea reunites Juliette Binoche and Tom Courtenay for a knotty family drama about dementia and estrangement, with Courtenay and Anna Calder-Marshall sharing the Silver Bear for Best Supporting Performance.
Clio Barnard’s I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning, which took the Directors’ Fortnight Audience Award, follows five Birmingham friends across the fault lines of late-stage capitalism in a social-realist gut-punch. And Joe Swanberg, the mumblecore director who helped launch Greta Gerwig’s career, returns to features after nearly a decade away with the sun-drenched Alaskan love triangle The Sun Never Sets, starring Dakota Fanning.
Rounding out the international titles, there’s plenty more worth getting excited about. Kohei Kadowaki’s We Are Aliens is a rotoscoped animated debut reckoning with childhood cruelty and lost innocence.
Kiyoshi Kurosawa, the genre chameleon behind Cloud, turns his hand to the samurai film with The Samurai and the Prisoner, set inside a 16th-century fortress. John Turturro plays a veteran pickpocket navigating a very bad situation in Noah Segan’s 70s and 80s New York-flavoured Sundance debut The Only Living Pickpocket in New York.
Directing duo THUNDERLIPS go full body-horror comedy with Mum, I’m Alien Pregnant, expanding their 2024 short into something gleefully, viscerally chaotic. John Wilson, the cult filmmaker behind How To With John Wilson, somehow made a Sundance feature about concrete that is, predictably, about much more than concrete, born out of the 2023 Writers Guild strike.
And Mark Cousins follows up his Peabody Award-winning 900-minute opus The Story of Film with The Story of Documentary Film, presented across three sessions and nine episodes spanning from 1895 to the present.
Australian titles
On the local side at MIFF, The Airport Chaplain gets its world premiere at MIFF — an SBS-commissioned prestige drama series from Stateless showrunner Elise McCredie, set in the controlled chaos of Melbourne Airport and starring Hugo Weaving, Shabana Azeez, Claudia Karvan and Thomas Weatherall.
And The Best Summer might be the feel-good discovery of the festival: filmmaker Tamara Davis brought a Sony Hi8 camcorder to Australia in 1995 on tour with her husband Mike D of the Beastie Boys, accidentally capturing Beastie Boys, Pavement, Sonic Youth, Foo Fighters and Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna at an upstart festival called Summersault.
The footage sat in a shoebox for 30 years before being unearthed during the LA Palisades wildfire evacuation. Sometimes the best rock docs aren’t planned at all.
Special events are shaping up as unmissable. John Cameron Mitchell, director, playwright and star, is coming to Melbourne in person for a live 4K commentary screening of Hedwig and the Angry Inch at The Astor for one night only, 25 years on from the cult classic’s release. It’s the kind of thing you’ll be annoyed you missed if you don’t go.
Hear My Eyes also returns, presented with Arts Centre Melbourne, bringing a new live score to Christopher Nolan’s Memento in restored 4K. The live score artist is yet to be announced, but the series has built a devoted following over more than a decade of immersive cinema collaborations, so expectations are understandably high.
MIFF Schools returns with multilingual programming across French, Mandarin, Spanish, Japanese, German, English and Greek, aligned with Victorian Curriculum learning areas, and complemented by free Professional Learning webinars from film-analysis expert Dr Josh Nelson.
Two films have been announced for that strand: Phenomena, a science documentary transforming Petri dish chemistry into kaleidoscopic visual spectacle scored by Nils Frahm and Rival Consoles, narrated by Melbourne-based debut filmmaker Josef Gatti and his physicist father; and Guided by Horses, documenting the work of Aboriginal researcher Professor Juli Coffin, whose program pairs First Nations teenagers with horses as a path to healing and reconnection in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, executive produced by Hunter Page-Lochard, Mark Coles Smith and Stephen Page.
MIFF Regional also returns with support from VicScreen, heading to eight regional Victorian locations across two festival weekends, with screenings and filmmaker talks.
With the full program of more than 300 titles still to be announced, this first wave is just a taste of what’s ahead.
For more information, head here.
