Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) has unveiled a selection of more than 275 titles for its 73rd edition, including the 10 features vy
Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) has unveiled a selection of more than 275 titles for its 73rd edition, including the 10 features vying for Australia’s biggest film prize.
The festival is set to run from August 7-24 across Melbourne, regional Victoria and online, and will open with Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. The US murky comedy about an overwhelmed mother pushed to her limits premiered at Sundance before going on to play the Berlinale, where Australian actress Rose Byrne won the Silver Bear for best performance.
The film will also play in MIFF’s Bright Horizon’s Competition, which has a focus on first and second features and comes with a grand prize of A$140,000 ($92,000).
Also selected for the competition is The Mysterious Gaze Of The Flamingo by Chile’s Diego Céspedes, winner of the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes in May; Urchin, the directorial debut of Babygirl star Harris Dickinson, which also won two awards at Cannes; and Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s Thai satire A Useful Ghost, winner of the Cannes’ Critics’ Week grand prize.
Further titles include Sound Of Falling by German filmmaker Mascha Schilinski; US crime thriller The Rivals Of Amziah King, directed by Andrew Patterson and starring Matthew McConaughey; and A Poet from Colombia’s Simón Mesa Soto, which won Cannes’ Un Certain Regard jury prize.
The competition is rounded out by April from Georgia’s Dea Kulumbegashvili; Chie Hayakawa’s Renoir, which played in Competition at Cannes; and First Light, the feature directorial debut of Australian-Filipino filmmaker James J. Robinson.
The jury will be presided over by UK filmmaker Charlotte Wells, whose award-winning debut Aftersun played in the first Bright Horizons competition in 2022. She will be joined by Australian performer Tamala, US filmmaker and actor Alex Ross Perry, Greek filmmaker Athina Rachel Tsangari, IMDb founder and executive chairman Col Needham, Vietnamese-Australian writer Nam Le, and Australian composer Caitlin Yeo.
Further highlights of the programme include Bi Gan’s Resurrection, which premiered in Competition at Cannes; Eva Victor’s debut and two-time Sundance award-winner Sorry, Baby; Joshua Oppenheimer’s first narrative feature The End; Christian Petzold’s Mirrors No. 3, which debuted in Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes; and Exit 8 from Japan’s Genki Kawamura.
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