The Academy

Across two decades, a filmmaker and her teenage son share the camera to document his transition from female to male in this honest and compassionate family archive.

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.

Revisiting a famed expedition to the Amazon, this discerning documentary considers how Western journalism has historically projected and reinforced colonial and capitalist views on other cultures.

Forbidden feelings surface when a stranger enters the life of a devoted widow in Hong Kong's original art house masterpiece, fully restored and resurrected for a new generation of cinephiles.

Winning awards at Sundance and the Berlinale, this vibrant, vital portrait of lesbian experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer explores her radical life, work and legacy.

Winning the Camera D’or for best debut at Cannes, this powerful drama wrestles with truth, justice and forgiveness during community-based reconciliation proceedings eighteen years after the horrors of Rwanda’s 1994 genocide.

Rediscovered and resurrected into a Sundance-premiering doc by Tamra Davis, this is a raw 90s capsule of life on tour with The Beastie Boys, Sonic Youth, Foo Fighters, Beck, Pavement, Rancid, The Amps and Bikini Kill.

Premiering at Sundance earlier this year, Paloma Schneideman’s coming-of-age debut launches our festival with a tender portrait of 14-year-old Sid, as she tentatively traverses insecurity, identity and desire during the summer of 2006.

Shohei Imamura's appetite for the ugly, the brutal, the painful, is matched this time by a fully justifying subject — the bombing of Hiroshima and its aftermath.

A profoundly personal, revelatory portrait of a family in crisis told through the perspective of a young child as she struggles to understand her older brother’s increasingly unsettling behaviour.

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.

This impressive first feature documentary from photographer Pete Muller has much to say about fractured modern masculinity, without explicitly saying much at all.

While getting ready for her daughter’s wedding in Paris, Gloria reflects on the last time her extended family gathered in ritual, in Guinea-Bissau, to commemorate the loss of her father.

Alexandre Koberidze’s whimsical love letter to his homeland of Georgia, the romance of football and the resilience of art made from nothing, solidifies his reputation as one of the globe’s most inventive arthouse voices.

A missing daughter. A forbidden love. A community the world has never seen on screen – until now.

A shattering portrait of grief that refuses to play by the rules. This year’s winner of the prestigious Un Certain Regard section at Cannes, Everytime is Austrian filmmaker Sandra Wollner's most precise and emotionally devastating work yet.

Told through two siblings’ contrasting viewpoints, this moving drama considers the fallout of a bitter breakup as childhood certainty fades and familial bonds are put to the test.

The cover-up of a worker’s death in West Africa and the arrival of the site manager’s young wife are lit matches to a tinderbox in this strange, sinewy thriller of alienation and exploitation.

A ruthless workplace cover-up by a powerful family throws a nun into existential crisis in this mysterious, meditative drama, beautifully lensed in island greenery and candlelight.

A shape-shifting movie, exploring loneliness and desire among truck drivers, Pierre Le Gall's acclaimed debut Flesh and Fuel may prove the most unexpectedly romantic film you will see this year.

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.

A young Afghan artist records her tough, clandestine journey out of Iran on her smartphone and imagines herself anew in this partly animated tale, the Best Film winner at the world’s largest documentary festival in Amsterdam.

A stunning debut from Maxence Voiseux, ten years in the making, Gabin follows a young boy into adulthood, crafting a tender and deeply affecting portrait of life in rural France.

A bullied 14-year-old sends farewell letters to his classmates and vanishes, but when a girl from his school spots him wandering the streets at night, the two begin to build a fragile, secret world of their own.

John Wilson gives his inimitably magpie-ish style of documentary-making the big screen treatment in this endlessly digressive investigation into a hilariously mundane topic.

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.

A surreal and heartfelt portrait of a young boy caught between his own burgeoning artistic identity and his father's rigid expectations of masculinity, told with visual flair and deep empathy. 

Ian de la Rosa’s queer romance asks how much of yourself can you afford to give when survival is already a struggle, in this Teddy Award winning feature direct from Berlin.

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.

A stunning directorial debut that was a big winner at Cannes – a coming of age story set at the foot of Mount Vesuvius that announces the arrival of a major new talent of French cinema.

This radical, haunting documentary debut from legendary Argentinian filmmaker Lucrecia Martel interrogates questions of truth, power and justice following the 2009 killing of indigenous leader Javier Chocobar.

Willem Dafoe and Greta Lee bring heart and realness to this wistful, unromantic comedy about the fragility of creative ambition and a bygone, bohemian New York lost to a consumerist era of gentrification and influencers.

An historically meticulous period piece examining the philosophy of art and existence, from one of German film’s greatest living master craftsmen.

An evocative, cathartic and groundbreaking documentary hybrid that focuses on a childhood torn apart by war, and what it takes to mend the emotional trauma that comes with it.

In the summer of 2002, a 17-year old must navigate the earnest pressures of teenage life – identity, family, and friendship – while burdened with the profound weight of grief.

Newly restored, Gen-X icon Gregg Araki’s remarkable, aggressively over-censored coming of age classic grapples with the enduring spectre of child sexual abuse, presenting one of the auteur’s bleakest but most essential visions.

Marcelo Martinessi crafts a sultry, political thriller where private longing intersects with authoritarian power.

Renowned American documentarian Ross McElwee confronts the limits of the movie camera as a tool of the heart as he revisits family footage after the death of his son, and reflects on their relationship to and through cinema.

Winning awards in Berlinale's Generation section, this sensitive debut feature honours the power of female teenage friendship in the aftermath of a sexual assault at a New Year’s Eve party.

Based on true events, Turkish director Emin Alper’s latest is a deeply unsettling and atmospheric examination of the roots of atrocity, seen through the eyes of a village leader whose personal insecurities drive him to commit horrific deeds.

Guillermo Galoe’s feature adaptation of his own award-winning short film is a vivid depiction of the maligned, frequently misrepresented Roma shanty-towns on the fringes of Madrid.

In this film seeped in sunshine with rhythmic hints of fleeting childhood fantasy, Jaume Claret Muxart's debut is a sensitive, poetic and intuitive exploration of adolescent awakening.

Coming off a win for Best Film at the San Sebastián Film Festival, Sundays is a coming-of-age drama with the fragility of family and faith at its forefront.

When everyone he loves moves on, one man stays, and finds unexpected solace in the most unlikely of companions. Tender, majestic and deeply humane, it's a film about what we risk losing when the world moves too fast.

As irresistible as it is offbeat, Sarah Arnold's Europa Cinemas Label-winning debut pits farmers against hunters in a fiercely entertaining thriller bursting with humour, suspense and surprises.

Mystery swirls around Hein's return to his native island – is it really him? The villagers hold a trial, while director Kai Stänicke builds a Dogville-like set to stage a tense tale of empowerment.

School bullying and adolescent identity crises are in the spotlight in Kohei Kadowaki’s extraordinary anime feature, We Are Aliens, direct from this year’s Cannes Director’s Fortnight.

In rediscovered 2001 camcorder footage, acclaimed Palestinian director Kamal Aljafari goes in search of a man he once met when they were prisoners, in a heartfelt tribute to the lost of Gaza, and the life that persists.

Three youths head into the punishing Australian desert to escape menacing outlaws on their trail in Warwick Thornton’s tough and uncompromising western-thriller.

A truck in flames, a woman gone, and two sisters left to pay the price... Shot without a script using a real Bedouin family in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, this lyrical debut is a film about what women must sacrifice to survive.