The festival spans eight days and four venues, and will showcase over 80 short and feature-length documentaries intended to entertain and inform viewers on a diverse range of topics. The festival aims to exhibit documentaries featuring innovative and thought provoking content, with prizes going to the top documentaries and creators featured across the festival.
MDFF will feature documentaries spanning themes and categories including music, art, food, LGBTIQ, investigative journalism, pop culture, Aboriginal and environmental. The films will be broadcast at Howler, Cinema Nova, Laneway Center, and Longplay.
Day one of the festival will see Howler hosting a binge-worthy 12-hour session of back-to-back documentaries in their Art Space, starting at 11am. The lineup includes films covering gender issues such as Girl Power, a feature-length film about a female graffiti artist from Prague and her plight in rounding up graffiti artists from all around the globe, and Play Your Gender, a film which explores the underrepresentation of women in the music industry.
Howler’s screenings will also include films such as Generation Start Up, which takes a look at youth and entrepreneurship, and music documentaries such as Lunar Orbit, covering innovators of ambient house music, and Placebo: Alt Russia which details Placebo’s journey through Russia. Additionally, you can catch films at Howler such as The Road Movie, which compiles dash-cam footage showing why Russian drivers depend on the technology when filing insurance and police reports of traffic accidents.
Longplay will host film nights every weeknight and across the closing weekend of the festival between 6.30pm and 10.30pm. Monday night will showcase international short documentaries over two consecutive sessions, with the following nights showing two feature-length films each evening and three films across Saturday and Sunday nights.
The films cover various topics relating to immigration and refugees such as Migrant Dreams, detailing the stories of migrant farm workers and their struggles to resist oppression from their employers. Miss Kiet’s Children investigates the journey of immigrant children who are introduced into new environments and schooling systems, which teach in languages they don’t speak.
Longplay will also host LGBTIQ films such as Jewel’s Catch One which tells the story of a black, poor, queer female who fought oppression, going on to change laws and influence her community in LA through her nightclub Catch One.
Laneway Center and Cinema Nova will help close the festival with a weekend of screenings at both venues. Laneway Centre’s CBD venue will host two sessions over Saturday and Sunday morning, with Sunday morning featuring four charity documentaries including Dogs of Democracy, which details the lives of stray dogs in Athens, and Are You Racist, a social experiment exploring how science can reveal why individuals are racist, and what can be done to combat the issue.
Cinema Nova will host documentaries such as The Gateway Bug – which explores how eating insects can serve as a solution to sustainable eating in the world’s current state of unsustainable agricultural practices. Additionally, Cinema Nova will host an evening session of Aboriginal documentaries including Wardbukkarra – The First Song, Walking For Country, Lingjura – Spirit People Creation and Wirridji, films which explore Aboriginal communities, culture and the stories of creation they have passed through generations.
Give your Netflix account a break for a night, by checking out some of the outstanding documentaries MDFF 2017 has to offer.
