Festival Programme

Films by Strand

Nocturnal

A late-night strand devoted to films that revel in genre, irreverence, and the unexpected.

Alpha

Julia Ducournau

Titane director Julia Ducournau’s third feature tackles the late 20th-century AIDS crisis in France through her distinctively vivid and brutal lens, a fiery film as visceral as it is profound.

The Blood Countess

Die Blutgrafin

Ulrike Ottinger

Part gothic fantasia, part historical reverie, The Blood Countess finds Ulrike Ottinger at her most audacious, crafting a spellbinding celebration of imagination and cinematic freedom.

Body Blow

Dean Francis

A neon-soaked plunge into Sydney's seductive queer underworld, Body Blow is an unashamedly camp genre-bending odyssey, on the cusp of bursting off-screen and into the audience.

Buffet Infinity

Simon Glassman

Mining from hundreds of hours of footage, Buffet Infinity tracks a town's descent into chaos though local TV footage that slowly grows more unhinged in one of the most original films of the festival.

Chronovisor

Kevin Walker, Jack Auen

Bridging genres as it taps a real 70s scandal about a Benedictine monk’s memory-recording machine, this unique debut was a festival hit at Rotterdam, and is the year’s buzz title in eerie and stylish academia horror-noir.

The Fox

Dario Russo

Upon discovering his fiancée’s affair, Nick makes a deal with a trickster fox in this sly and quirky ‘she'll be right’ Aussie comedy about the lengths (and shortcuts) we'll go for love.

Ghost in the Cell

Joko Anwar

Indonesian genre maestro Joko Anwar returns with a wild mashup of martial arts, horror and comedy, set inside a corrupt prison system, where an evil entity is literally turning prisoners inside out.

The Good Boy

Heel

Jan Komasa

When a picture-perfect middle-class family turns out to be dangerously twisted behind closed doors, Jan Komasa's darkly funny psychological thriller asks who really needs ‘fixing’... and how far is too far.

The Holy Boy

La valle dei sorrisi

Paolo Strippoli

In a small Italian village dubbed the nation’s happiest, a newly arrived teacher learns the ominous truth about a teenage saint with the power to emotionally heal others through his hugs, in Paolo Strippoli’s unnerving supernatural chiller.

I Want Your Sex

Gregg Araki

Provocative and horny as ever, New Queer Cinema icon Gregg Araki’s first film in over a decade is a riotous antidote to the Gen Z sex recession.

The Ice Tower

La Tour de glace

Lucile Hadžihalilović

Lucile Hadžihalilović’s spellbinding 1960s-set fairytale follows a teenage runaway who becomes infatuated with an alluring movie star filming a local adaptation of The Snow Queen.

Jim Queen

Marco Nguyen, Nicolas Athané

Bold, colourful and irreverent, Jim Queen is the elevated campy animation you don't want your mother to watch – but that all your gay friends will die to see.

No Rest For The Wicked

Kasper Kalle

On a remote Faroese island in 1862, a young fisherman is enamoured by a mysterious stranger. When disaster strikes, desire, grief, and superstition collide in this haunting, queer folk horror.

Saccharine 

Natalie Erika James

A medical student creates a sinister diet drug to fight her own eating disorders in this witty, gory body-horror shocker.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

As a maven of pop-culture detritus, American director Jane Schoenbrun’s campground of twisted delights is a heady, horny headtrip of the highest order.