Explore the far reaches of your imagination with the fourth annual Science Fiction Film Festival

Unseen

In 2023, The Science Fiction Film Festival will present the most expansive program of local and international speculative storytelling in the event’s history – 16 feature films and 33 shorts, representing visionaries from 22 nations and offering local audiences an unprecedented 32 Australian Premieres.

Opening Night honours have gone to Michael Luke Littwak’s Molli and Max in the Future, starring Zosia Mamet (Girls; The Flight Attendant) and Aristotle Athari (Silicone Valley; Saturday Night Live) in an adorable sci-fi/rom-com crowdpleaser that asks the question, “Can true love save two people whose orbits repeatedly collide over the course of 12 years, 4 planets, 3 dimensions and one space-cult?”

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Best Film winner at the 2023 Sci-Fi London, Serpil Altin’s Once Upon a Time in the Future is a viciously funny, bewilderingly satirical black comedy that pits family members against each other in a subterranean world as the Earth bakes under climate distress.

Direct from its US theatrical season is Marc Turtletaub’s Jules, starring Oscar-winner Ben Kingsley as a suburban recluse whose world is upended when a UFO crashes in his flower bed and he must care for the occupant.

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Iranian star Shahab Hosseini (About Elly; A Separation; The Salesman) makes his directing debut with the afterlife drama, Residents of Nowhere; Canadian auteur John Barnard captures small town terror in Wintertide, a bleak and brilliant vision of deteriorating human contact and possession; and, thrills and giggles await in the ol’ fashioned deep-space animated adventure, Forbidden World, from Brazilian Alê Camargo.

The festival’s retrospective line-up celebrates ‘80s Hollywood, that great golden era of sci-fi and fantasy. The rousing family romp The Last Starfighter, the man-vs-computer romance Electric Dreams and a 40th Anniversary screening of the cult classic Twilight Zone The Movie in the Closing Night slot promises waves of Gen-X nostalgia and a lot of big hair and high jeans.

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For the first time, the Sydney leg of the festival will set up basecamp at EVENT Macquarie, one of the largest multiplex venues in the country. A major public transport hub, with train and bus stops only metres away, and with loads of shopping centre parking, EVENT Macquarie promises to be an exciting new meeting point for Sydney’s science fiction community.

Screening At Macquarie and Brisbane MC From August 24-27. Full details here.

AUSTRALIAN PREMIERES

First-Ish Contact
Directed by Kai Smythe
A ‘Dark Matter Surveyor’, a government employee assigned to map the nothingness that is deep space, becomes the first human to make contact with an alien species. It is a workplace development for which he is not, in any way possible, satisfactorily prepared.

Algodreams
Directed by Vladimir Todorovic
Algodreams are created by prompting AI systems to dream about the future of life on planet Earth. Their stories, animations and sounds are shaped by numbers, predictions and mathematical models. W.A. artist and academic Vladimir Todorovic will introduce his groundbreaking work – a dizzying vision pulled from the new digital consciousness.

EXO226
Directed by Denai Gracie
Deep space miners are overseeing the extraction of EXO226, a vital compound found only on a distant planet. But mining operations have dug up more than EXO226, leaving our heroes to evade their deepest fear whilst attempting to get the serum back to Earth.

NSW / QUEENSLAND PREMIERE

Return Chute: The Survival Of The Small Town Video Store
Directed by Simone Atallah
In 2018, Rod O’Hara bought Bellingen Video Connection on the NSW far-north coast at a time when video stores were already considered a dying breed. Against all odds and after facing many personal setbacks, Rod and the local community have kept this iconic bastion for lovers of television, film and screen culture alive – but for how long?

SYDNEY PREMIERE

Echo Pines
Directed by Stephanie Begg
Newly-minted Detective Barnes takes the lead on a missing child case, only to encounter a one-two punch of unexplainable phenomena in a nearby forest and no support from her fellow officers.

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QUEENSLAND PREMIERES

The Star To Every Wandering Bark
Directed by Patrick Traynor
In a futuristic alternate world where humanity has abandoned love and intimacy, a young man and woman discuss whether they should begin a romantic relationship.

Beam Me Up
Directed by Daniel Weaver
After a night out on the booze, a young man claims he was abducted by aliens. Was he, or has his drinking habit gone too far?

Victorian Premieres

Unseen
Directed by Alex Nesic
Stranded on an alien planet, a wandering Vagabond and her invisible robot companion follow a signal source – her last link to home. When an encounter with the planet’s strange inhabitants leaves her droid damaged, she must find the planet’s pulse and save her friend before the foreign land consumes them.

Host Destination
Directed by Eleni Modinos
Katerina is an artist living on Earth who chooses to terminate her unplanned pregnancy. In another world we meet Sloane, a consciousness awaiting in the Cosmos for their flight to Earth and to meet their assigned host Katerina. Sloane’s journey to Earth is shortly delayed but this isn’t the end to their story.

Lost Souls Archive
Directed by Connor McRae
In the near future, amateur inventor Nicholas is overseeing his most ambitious creation; a rehabilitation archive that stores the souls of grieving and depressed humans, subjecting them to only happy memories in an attempt to make them better. When the download of a new client begins to cause havoc inside the Archive, Nicholas has to determine whether his device is helping his clients or keeping them, and him, firmly in the dark.