Melbourne International Film Festival launches 2022 program

From new Australian drama Of An Age to David Bowie documentary Moonage Daydream, the Melbourne film festival will appeal to cinephiles and casual moviegoers.

A scene from Brett Morgen’s documentary film about David Bowie, Moonage Daydream

This year marks the Melbourne International Film Festival’s 70th anniversary where it returns to a full-scale showcase of more than 350 films, after Covid reduced the program in 2020 and last year.

It’s a huge event. Running over 18 days, it’s probably the longest film festival in the world, says artistic director Al Cossar. This allows the festival to offer films for a wide range of tastes, from hardened cinephiles to casual moviegoers.

It rolls out at venues in central Melbourne, in the suburbs and in nine regional locations as well.

For those unable to attend in person, there’s also a virtual festival which starts at the midpoint of the main program.

“The month of August is basically MIFF,” declares Cossar, a New Zealander who fell in love with Melbourne and now lives in the city with his Australian wife and two young children.

“You know, everything about it is massive. The scale is one of the things that defines the festival and the fact that there is the audience to warrant that scale. People are that engaged and involved to make it successful. They might take three weeks off work and make it their annual holiday. They want an adventure through cinema.”

Melbourne International Film Festival director Al Cossar. Picture: Peter Tarasiuk

Cossar adds that Melbourne audiences are “willing to go to some pretty unique places”.

“When we program things like Mariano Llinas’s 14-hour Argentinian 2019 film La Flor, it’s one of the things that sells out the quickest in the festival. You have this depth of cinephilia with a Melbourne audience who try to seek out things that they’ll never get to see again. So when you’re talking about the Melbourne winter and the camaraderie of the crowds, queuing in dank alleyways to get into cinemas six times a day, there’s a very unique breed in our audiences that defines us.”

This year there is a large number of Australian films. Opening the festival is Goran Stolevski’s tender Melbourne-set coming-of-age tale Of An Age, and the Australian-Macedonian filmmaker will also be present with his Sundance hit, You Won’t Be Alone, about a young witch discovering life, love and death via the bodies of others. It stars Noomi Rapace and Alice Englert.

George Miller’s similarly mystical Three Thousand Years of Longing will have its first local premiere in Melbourne, after its Cannes debut, and audiences can expect to see a more understated side to the Mad Max director’s talents. Lachlan McLeod’s Australian film Clean, about the late Melbourne “trauma cleaner” Sandra Pankhurst, closes the festival.

Aussie films are bound to be popular, as they were at the Sydney Film Festival, where they figured in three of the top five films in the audience poll: Rowan Devereux’s Evicted! A Modern Romance, Macario De Souza’s 6 Festivals and Sissy directed by Hannah Barlow and Kane Senes. The latter two will screen at MIFF.

A scene from Goran Stolevski’s Of An Age, a coming-of-age story set in Melbourne

“We’re coming out of the Covid period, when you had The Dry and Penguin Bloom and you had a kind of box office reinvigoration regarding what people were interested in and what was available at that time,” notes Cossar. “We have a Premiere Fund slate of Australian features and documentaries where MIFF is a minority financier, and that’s 10 films this year.” These include Sue Thomson’s Under Cover, James Crawley’s Volcano Man, and Of An Age.

“There are also a lot of interesting independent Australian productions which are really distinct in terms of their voice, like Del Kathryn Barton’s Blaze, which has just been in Sydney, and Thomas M Wright’s The Stranger, which is in our competition, as is Alena Lodkina’s Petrol. What a director of promise after 2017’s Strange Colours!” Then there’s David Esteal’s The Plains, a wryly humorous documentary shot entirely from the back seat of a car. “It’s an epic and is completely inspirational on a localised side as well.”

So being in Covid lockdown helped Australian filmmakers to find their voice? “I hope so. And I suspect so. A certain amount of isolation breeds that contemplation and that imagination.”

One of the fun things about attending a festival is hearing filmmakers talk about their work, and Australians will be out in full force. Andrew Dominik will be at MIFF to discuss his Nick Cave films, One More Time with Feeling and This Much I Know to Be True, which screen together at the Astor, punctuated by an in conversation with Thomas M Wright. Justin Kurzel will discuss The Sound of One Hand Clapping with the film’s writer-director, Richard Flanagan.

In MIFF’s Hear My Eyes section, Dominik’s debut film – crime drama Chopper starring Eric Bana – will screen alongside a new original live score from Bad Seeds musician Mick Harvey, who will be accompanied by other prominent musicians.

“Trauma cleaner” Sandra Pankhurst is the subject of a documentary. Picture: David Krasnostein

International directors of films screening in competition have been invited to Melbourne. They include Bolivia-born Natalia Lopez, who will present Robe of Gems, an Argentine-Mexican police procedural focusing on three women, while her award-winning Mexican director husband Carlos Reygadas, also one of the film’s producers, will give a festival masterclass. Brett Morgen (Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, The Kid Stays in the Picture) will fly in to promote his excellent David Bowie documentary Moonage Daydream, which wowed Cannes.

“I expect half of Melbourne to want to be there,” Cossar says. “We’re presenting the film at Melbourne Imax, which will be really special. The Imax format is in­tegral to the film and is important to Brett.”

Cannes best actress winner for Holy Spider, Zar Amir Ebrahimi, is likely to attend. The Paris-based Iranian actress will be in the country to shoot Noora Niasari’s Shayda, about a young Iranian mother who finds refuge in an Australian women’s shelter. Vincent Sheehan, Cate Blanchett and Andrew Upton are among the producers.

American actress Elizabeth Banks, who will be shooting Christine Jeffs’ medical drama A Mistake in New Zealand, will hopefully make the trek to Melbourne to present Phyllis Nagy’s drama, Call Jane, about the abortionists whose actions led to Roe v. Wade. British actor Sean Harris (Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation), who stars with Joel Edgerton in The Stranger, will also potentially make it to MIFF as he is shooting David Michod’s Wizards! alongside Pete Davidson in Queensland.

Joel Edgerton in Thomas M Wright’s film The Stranger

Also newly announced are two documentaries by Italian masters: Luca Guadagnino’s unmissable Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams about Salvatore Ferragamo, and Giuseppe Tornatore’s Ennio about Ennio Morricone. Charlotte Gainsbourg appears in two films: in her directing debut Jane by Charlotte – about her relationship with her mother, Jane Birkin – and in The Passengers of the Night, directed by Mikhael Hers (Amanda).

Two independent American films worth looking out for are Funny Pages directed by Owen Kline (Kevin Kline’s son) about the misguided travails of a young cartoonist; and Robert Machoian’s The Integrity of Joseph Chambers, the director’s follow-up to the excellent The Killing of Two Lovers which also screened at MIFF.

Like Funny Pages, David Cronenberg’s return to body horror, Crimes of the Future, will ­likely generate post-screening conver-sations. Cronenberg remains a master of his craft and to see Viggo Mortensen, Lea Seydoux and Kristen Stewart take on the challenge is worth the price of a ticket.

Marie Kreutzer’s Corsage, a revisionist feminist focus on the ­peculiarities of the corset-loving Empress Elizabeth of Austria (Vicky Krieps) was another Cannes standout and will also make its Australian debut at MIFF.

MIFF runs from August 4-21 in cinemas and from August 11-28 online. See the full program at miff.com.au