The 29th annual Revelation Perth International Film Festival is set to be a journey of sophistication, emotion, new ideas, and change.

Boasting a lineup of over 50 features and documentaries and almost 100 short films, this year’s program is all about risk and adventure for the viewer and the creative community of Perth, with many new Australian short films, feature films and documentaries on offer.

From stories of social justice to high-end arthouse premieres and a strong multi-genre music component, to Trasaharama-agogo, the nastiest short film program in Oz, the free International Family Animation Explosion, tackling ageism in Life In Pictures and the return of the ever-popular City of Vincent Film Project, Revelation once again proves itself as a festival that initiates debate and dares to make a difference.

“Revelation is known for an independent spirit that is not afraid of issues, subcultures, adventurous art and culture and seeing how far it can take audiences and filmmakers,” says Festival Director, Richard Sowada.

“It has flown the flag high for diversity in WA art and culture and while showcasing many enormously sophisticated films, it maintains a real sense of rock and roll and enjoys the power chords it plays.”

This year’s feature films pay testament to that spirit, including Penny Lane is Dead, the rip-roaring debut feature from writer-director Mia Kate Russell that blends pitch-black ocker humour and blood-splattering horror with a distinctly Australian twist.

It’s 1986, and Penny Lane and her best friends Toni and Amy head to a remote beach house to celebrate Penny’s recent university acceptance with a ‘no dick’ weekend of debauchery, durries and booze in tow. What begins as a weekend of fun soon devolves into a fight for survival.

There’s also the erotic thriller Body Blow whereupon a young cop embarks on a risky undercover mission where he meets a captivating male sex worker controlled by a drug lord drag queen. He dives into a perilous world, getting entangled in a deadly police conspiracy.

Anthony Frith’s 2025 spin on The Land That Time Forgot gleefully throws logic overboard and charges straight into chaos. Inspired (very loosely) by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the film strands a thoroughly mismatched bunch of humans on an island where evolution runs backwards, sideways, and occasionally trips over itself. It screens as a double feature with Mockbuster, in which a struggling director documents his journey making a “mockbuster” in six days, descending into the chaotic world of low-budget filmmaking.

Aphelion is a dramatic feature told in real time in a single location. An anxious young junkie trapped in a co-dependent relationship with her increasingly abusive partner must find the courage to escape before he goes too far. If you want to experience what Australian cinema can be in an increasingly conservative creative environment, this is the one for you. It isn’t an easy ride, but it rewards in aces.

Rev’s documentary program is as diverse and compelling as ever, searching for reasons and change. A bracing and ethically charged work, Sentient sees former ABC Q+A host Tony Jones move from political interrogation to something more elemental: the question of animal consciousness, and the systems that deny it. Tony will be in attendance for a special screening at Luna Leederville on Saturday 11th July.

After #MeToo broke the cultural silence on gendered violence, survivors swiftly found themselves facing a new kind of silencing and fear as defamation laws became weaponised against women for speaking out. From International Emmy Award-winning filmmakers Selina Miles and Blayke Hoffman, Silenced is a powerful, emotional and urgent documentary that challenges the devastating flaws maintaining the status quo within the justice system.

Prompt: Make A Documentary explores how artificial intelligence is reshaping filmmaking, tracing cinema’s history of technological disruption and questioning whether AI represents creative freedom or the mechanisation of imagination.

Back for its sixth year, Revelation is proud to present Western Australia’s night of nights – the WA Screen Culture Awards celebrating innovation and achievement in the WA screen sector from over the last 12-months and across all moving image forms.

The event embraces traditional narrative to documentary, short, student, games, television, moving image art and everything in between including a number of craft awards. Followed by our famous post-event celebration, the WA Screen culture awards is a fantastic coming together of the WA screen industry and a must attend event for emerging and established practitioners.

Revelation is dedicated to the acknowledgement, encouragement and support of the local screen sector, and will celebrate this with the Get Your Shorts On: City of Vincent Film Project & Life in Pictures Closing Night on Sunday July 19th from 7pm.

The festival works annually with the City of Vincent and this year they’ve commissioned and executive produced two short documentaries shot in and around the City of Vincent. They also present the finalists of their Life in Pictures filmmaking competition designed to engage communities across WA in discussing positive ageing in the community.

You can find a full list below of Australian films screening through the festival.

Revelation Perth International Film Festival runs Wednesday, 8 July until Sunday, 19 July. The full program is online at www.revelationfilmfest.org.

Feature Films & Documentaries

Acts of Protest
Directed by Zebedee Parkes
A poetic documentary capturing the collective spirit of activism through striking visuals, archival photos, an original jazz score and experimental form. Acts of Protest explores the emotional spectrum of protest amid global crises, offering a sensory experience that explores the contested right to dissent in today’s turbulent world.

Aphelion
Directed by Steve Willems
Aphelion is a dramatic feature told in real time in a single location. Zinaida is a young woman suffering from anxiety and depression, self-medicating with illicit drugs. She struggles to fit into society, feeling judged and worthless, hiding away in her cheap share-house room while taking comfort in the love and affection of another troubled soul. Caleb is a charming grifter, always trying to make the most out of any situation. He makes Zinaida feel special, but uses her need for validation and affection to abuse and control her. Caleb spends her money, isolates her from her friends, and makes her feel that she needs him. From there, it’s all downhill for both characters in this tightly wound character study of crime and control and it’s really something to watch. Unfolding very much as a social realist stage-play, this film is tight, tight, tight! With fantastic performances, it ratchets the tension about as high as it can go and while uncomfortable viewing, there’s no doubting the ability of the cast and crew in presenting us with something fresh.

Body Blow
Directed by Dean Francis
Meet Aiden (Tim Pocock), a musclebound and “totally hetero” cop struggling with a self-diagnosed sex addiction. His latest assignment? Go undercover and infiltrate Sydney’s gay district to investigate criminal malfeasance. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy. But when he meets the alluring twink fatale Cody (Tom Rodgers), a bartender-cum-sex worker who works under the thumb of a feared drag queen crime lord, both set course along a path of destruction that will make audiences feel something down under while Down Under.

Death of an Undertaker
Directed by Christian Byers
Shot over 8 years, Death of an Undertaker is a doc hybrid feature film that features a cast of real funeral workers in a real funeral home , alongside Australian actor and filmmaker Christian Byers (The Tree, Bump, Narrow Road to the Deep North). Blending fact and fiction, the film follows the story of Sparrow, a young worker in the funeral home, whose haunted psyche is cracked wide open when he is confronted with his first exhumation, imminent homelessness and the haunting spirit of a long lost loved one.

Penny Lane is Dead
Directed by Mia’kate Russell
It’s 1986, and Penny Lane and her best friends Toni and Amy head to a remote beach house to celebrate Penny’s recent university acceptance with a ‘no dick’ weekend of debauchery, durries and booze in tow. Before the celebration can even begin, Penny’s dodgy cousin Kat arrives uninvited with a stash of spiked cupcakes and is followed by her menacing boyfriend Angus and his crew of fearsome mates. What begins as a weekend of fun soon devolves into a fight for survival.

Mockbuster + The Land that Time Forgot
Directed by Anthony Frith
Dinosaurs, deserters, and a land that clearly missed the memo on linear time—this 2025 spin on The Land That Time Forgot gleefully throws logic overboard and charges straight into chaos. Inspired (very loosely) by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the film strands a thoroughly mismatched bunch of humans on an island where evolution runs backwards, sideways, and occasionally trips over itself. One minute it’s survival mode, the next it’s dodging prehistoric creatures that look like they’ve wandered in from entirely different films. Alliances form, collapse, and reform again—mostly because getting eaten is a strong team-building exercise. The landscape shifts, the rules don’t stick, and nobody’s entirely sure if they’re progressing or just going in circles. It’s knowingly ridiculous, leaning into its own absurdity with a wink and a nudge—less concerned with coherence than with the sheer joy of watching people try (and fail) to make sense of a world that refuses to behave. Expect adventure, confusion, and at least a few moments where the best strategy is simply to run. A lost world romp that swaps solemnity for mischief, The Land That Time Forgot is a reminder that sometimes the smartest response to the unknown is to laugh and keep moving.

Mockbuster
Directed by Anthony Frith
Everybody has seen and laughed/cheered at films like Sharknado, but this is merely the tip of the iceberg and production company The Asylum have produced more than 200 films in a similar vein – known as mockbusters! Enter South Australia filmmaker Frith who decides to try his luck and reaches out to the production company in the hope of being offered an opportunity to make a film – and then finds himself invited to direct a remake of The Land That Time Forgot! Mockbuster tell’s the story of this ultimate low budget filmmaking experience, offering an insight that is by turns absurdly comic and utterly terrifying as Frith finds himself directing a movie with a low budget, tight schedule and imminent deadline. And for anyone who wants to know how Frith’s gig for The Asylum turned out  Revelation are screening Mockbuster with The Land that Time Forgot in an unforgettable double bill.

Prompt: Make a Documentary
Directed by Zeke Morgan-Hind
Artificial intelligence is no longer an emerging technology in filmmaking. It is already shaping how stories are written, images are created, films are edited, and audiences are targeted. Tools once reserved for major studios and specialised technicians are now accessible to anyone with a laptop, blurring the line between professional and amateur, assistance and authorship, human creativity and machine replication. Set within Australia’s evolving film and education landscape, AI in Film: The Future or Our Destruction? explores this transformation through the voices of filmmakers, educators, researchers, and industry practitioners working at the intersection of craft and technology. The documentary balances those embracing AI as a creative equaliser that enables micro-budget filmmakers and students to compete on an unprecedented scale with those raising urgent concerns about ethics, cultural ownership, labour displacement, and the automation of creativity. Through studio-lit interviews, observational classroom footage, real-world production environments, and stylised AI-generated visual metaphors, the film examines how rapidly accelerating tools are reshaping both industry practice and creative identity. Explainer animations demystify complex concepts such as machine learning, copyright, data training, and algorithmic bias, grounding the conversation in clarity rather than hype.

Sentient
Directed by Tony Jones
A bracing and ethically charged work, Sentient sees Tony Jones move from political interrogation to something more elemental: the question of animal consciousness, and the systems that deny it. Drawing on a growing body of scientific research into cognition, emotion, and sentience across species, Sentient dismantles the long-held assumption that animals exist outside the realm of meaningful experience. Jones threads together laboratory footage, expert testimony, and philosophical inquiry to expose the structures—industrial, scientific, and cultural—that continue to justify animal experimentation. But this is no blunt instrument. Rather than polemic, Sentient places empirical evidence alongside the often-unseen realities of testing regimes. The result is a film that is as rigorous as it is confronting, asking audiences to reckon with the the space between what we now know and what we continue to permit. Measured, unsettling, and morally insistent, Sentient reframes the debate — not as a fringe concern, but as a central ethical fault line of modernity.

Silenced
Directed by Selina Miles
After #MeToo broke the cultural silence on gendered violence, survivors swiftly found themselves facing a new kind of silencing and fear as defamation laws became weaponized against women for speaking out.
International human rights lawyer Jennifer Robinson takes audiences into the courtroom and behind the headlines to reveal how the legal system is being used to discredit, re-victimize and financially ruin survivors.
Robinson brings unrivalled access to the women and journalists at the centre of high-profile legal battles across the globe, including Brittany Higgins, Australian former political staffer, survivor and advocate against gendered violence; Catalina Ruiz-Navarro, Latin American journalist and co-founder of the feminist magazine Volcánicas and Amber Heard, Hollywood actor and advocate who found herself at the centre of the most high-profile defamation battle in the post-#MeToo era.

Displacement and Replacement: A Remixed Narrative of Western Australia
Directed by Alana Hunt
In this accumulating remix of 12 films (commissioned by the state of Western Australia in the 1960s and 70s) in 12 chapters phrases from the film’s original narration have been pulled on to highlight the ideological and material violence of the colonial project — unfolding through the banality of things like roads, railways, mines, agriculture, farming and the weaponisation of things we commonly hold dear, like “community” and “home”. This is a history of Western Australia we all know, but have never seen before.

Short Films

Dark Tales
Ready for a walk on the darker side of life?

Appetite of a Nobody
Directed by Amanda Kaye

Dilemma
Directed by Nick Kozakis

Rotting Hill
Directed by Anastasia Sidorova

ShoeBox
Directed by James Haddad, Ruby Rawlings

Pleasure-seeking
Directed by Michaela Holmes

International Experimental Showcase 1
Experimental cinema, moving image art and hybrid forms converge in this collection of international shorts brought to WA audiences

Fall.Small.Pivot
Directed by Cassandra Tytler

Marks/Marks
Directed by Jacob Tenzin Canet-Gibson and Harrison Waed See

Serene Hues
Directed by Rita Tse

Merlin Horse
Directed by Patrick Anthony Tarrant

Ode (An Acknowledgement of Sea Country)
Directed by Kirsten Hudson

In the Shadow of Small Acts
Directed by Cassandra Tytler

International Animation Showcase #1

If/When
Directed by Courtney Westbrook

Phenomena
Directed by Emily Isabella Blake and Izel Searle-Garduno

Our Choir Has Always Been Travelling
Directed by Judith Pungarta Inkamala, Marjorie ‘Nunga’ Williams and Nelson Armstrong

Trading Cards
Directed by Radheya Jang

NAIDOC
THE NEXT GENERATION: STRENGTH, VISION AND LEGACY
One of our most popular and significant programs, the 2026 NAIDOC program is our best and most beautiful yet.

Kaṉparkanya, The Wanampi
Directed by Duncan Wright, Timo Hogan and Olivia Spoul

Our Choir Has Always Been Travelling
Directed by Judith Pungarta Inkamala, Marjorie ‘Nunga’ Williams, Nelson Armstrong

Cornwallis
Directed by Tully Hemsley

Bringing His Spirit Home
Directed by Dylan Nicholls

Deadly
Directed by Jerome Smith, Joel Stephen Flemming

Uncanny Shorts
It’s all a little bit creepy, a little bit tense, a little bit atmospheric and a little bit weird, but these high quality shorts will take your emotions for a pretty good run around the block and back.

The Creek
Directed by Jim Sidney Fenton

WA Documentary

Penny Lane’s
Directed by Javiera Ortega

Love, Rock en Masse
Directed by Mahalia Fayth Bowles

Kaṉparkanya, The Wanampi
Directed by Duncan Wright and Timo Hogan

The Femme Fatales of Western Australian Wrestling
Directed by Zeke Morgan-Hind

WA Drama and Animation

Dottie
Directed by Scout Mazandarani

Noticed
Directed by Nina Smith

Voiceless
Directed by Darcy Wilson

Threads
Directed by Abbey King

Trading Cards
Directed by Radheya Jang

Father Where Art Thou
Directed by William Oliver Jackson

WA SciFi and Horror
From eerie futures to psychological dread, this selection of Western Australian short films showcases bold local voices pushing the boundaries of sci-fi and horror storytelling.

Reaper 32
Directed by Kian Martinus, Ricky Roy Anderson

Before the Moon Falls
Directed by James Dudfield, Alleyne Aviles

Sacrifice for Love
Directed by Lawson Wallice

The Bunny
Directed by Isaiah Supadi, Oscar Smith

Flowers
Directed by Nic McRobbie

#Doomscroller
Directed by Tim Dean

Where Dead Things Grow
Directed by Emilie Lowe

The Underneath
Directed by Michael Nicholls

WA Off Kilter Shorts
This program of local comedies is guaranteed to bring more than a smile to the face and goes to demonstrate the versatility and depth of the WA film scene.

Body in the Bath
Directed by Yazmin Darling

Magic Bibs
Directed by Hannah Roxby

Throwback
Directed by Marcus McKenzie

e-Mum
Directed by Jessica Londono

Hindsight
Directed by Mikey Hamer

Revelation Perth International Film Festival runs Wednesday, 8 July until Sunday, 19 July. The full program is online at www.revelationfilmfest.org.