Today, Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) offers its first look at the 2026 program, announcing 25 films and special events, among them six MIFF Premiere Fund titles, a selection of 17 international and local highlights and special live events, many of which will make their Australian premiere at this year’s 74th edition.

Running 6–23 August across Naarm, regional Victoria, with MIFF Online screening nationally until 30 August, this year’s festival arrives with 18+ days of thought-provoking, eye-opening cinema, featuring some of the most hotly anticipated films of the year, fresh from Cannes, Berlin, Sundance and beyond.

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Previewing what’s ahead for this year’s blockbuster 2026 program, MIFF Artistic Director Al Cossar, said: “We’re thrilled to share these First Glance titles as an early taste of what to expect when MIFF returns to Melbourne screens this winter. From the year’s most anticipated films to bold new voices and discoveries, this selection offers a glimpse of the festival to come: a world on screen, alongside the very best in new Australian storytelling. These incredible films are just the beginning of a program that will showcase more than 300 titles. We’re proud to unveil them today – and even more excited about everything still to announce at the 74th Melbourne International Film Festival when the program goes live on 9 July!”

The much-loved MIFF Regional showcase returns with the support of VicScreen – reaching audiences where they are – travelling to Bendigo, Ballarat, Castlemaine, Geelong, Healesville, Rosebud, Sale and Warrnambool across two festival weekends of screenings and filmmaker talks (14–16 and 21–23 August).

MIFF Schools continues its dedicated offering for teachers and students, while MIFF Online ensures audiences can make the most of the festival or take part from anywhere. Streaming on Cinema 3, ACMI’s on-demand platform, MIFF Online extends the festival for an additional week beyond closing night, offering 17 days of viewing from 14–30 August.

Rounding out the festival on Saturday 22 August, the MIFF Awards celebrates cinematic excellence through one of the world’s most significant filmmaking prize pools, headlined by the $140,000 Bright Horizons Award, supported by the Victorian Government through VicScreen.

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The full MIFF 2026 program, including the Bright Horizons Competition lineup, will be revealed Thursday 9 July. Award category nominees and this year’s esteemed festival Jury will also be announced in late July.

Nearly two decades on, the MIFF Premiere Fund remains one of Australia’s most significant supporters of local screen talent. Having invested in more than 100 Australian feature films to date, the Fund co-finances original features making their world premiere at MIFF, backing the bold ideas and distinctive voices shaping the future of Australian cinema.

Digby & Camille

Archibald Prize-selected painter Digby Webster and trainee chef Camille Collins have been inseparable since meeting in a Sydney pub eight years ago – and in Digby & Camille, award-winning filmmaker Trevor Graham (Make Hummus Not War, MIFF 2012) simply pulls up a chair and joins them. Webster, who co-directs the film, weaves several years of fly-on-the-wall footage with animated sequences drawn from his own art, building a portrait of a couple in their thirties who are living with Down syndrome and dreaming, with considerable passion and occasional frustration, of marriage, children and a home of their own. Tender, intimate and quietly humorous, it’s a love story told entirely on its own terms.

Mad Rush

Melbourne’s laneways and street corners become a gauntlet of dread in Mad Rush, presented by Rydges Melbourne, a debut from Accelerator Lab alum Maddelin McKenna (Patterns of the Afternoon, MIFF 2022). When a phone call about fraudulent bank activity sends a rootless Gen Z spiralling through the city over the course of a single frantic day, McKenna transforms the familiar CBD into something altogether more sinister – a gritty, disorienting urban wonderland. Senuri Chandrani (Of an Age, MIFF 2022) anchors the film with a performance that makes Madisha’s prickly vulnerability impossible to look away from. A micro-budget gem that turns financial panic into existential reckoning, Mad Rush confirms McKenna as a sharp new voice in Australian cinema.

Jebediah: Are We OK?

In the late-90s Australian indie scene, Jebediah were the ones who were supposed to make it, and for a while, they did. Arlo Dean Cook’s documentary Jebediah: Are We OK? traces the Perth alt-rock quartet’s thirty-year arc from high school beginnings to Triple J darlings to the darker terrain of what sustained success actually costs – and whether lifelong friends can find a way to keep the music alive. Drawing on three decades of archival and home-movie footage and firsthand perspectives from local music icons Tim Rogers, Phil Jamieson and Janet English, the film is as much a candid cautionary tale as a rollicking celebration of one of Australian rock’s most enduring friendships.

Death of a Shaman

Death of a Shaman plunges audiences into the Ecuadorian Amazon, where Indigenous shaman Rafael Santi is running out of time to pass sacred knowledge onto his teenage grandson and to protect his community from the mining and oil corporations closing in with government backing. Australian filmmaker Dan Jackson spent over a decade building trust with the communities of Amazanga to earn the access that makes this documentary possible, weaving intimate family footage with protest recordings, archival imagery and vivid ayahuasca sequences into a film of rare textural richness. Depicting a struggle that resonates as urgently here in Australia as anywhere – this is raw filmmaking that earns every one of its ambitions.

Hard as Puck

The Garden Island Pirates are the best para ice hockey team in Western Australia – and also, for now, the only one. Isaac Elliott’s debut documentary feature Hard as Puck, embeds itself in this scrappy Perth-based club following a mixed-gender cast of amateurs as they wrangle sponsorships, navigate bureaucratic politics and strap into sledges under the stoically deadpan watch of founder Dan Perrett. Part underdog sports doc, part behind-the-scenes institutional comedy, the film brings together the spirit of Cool Runnings, the committee-room intrigue of Rats in the Ranks (MIFF 1996) and the irrepressible community warmth of The Golden Spurtle (MIFF 2025). A laugh-out-loud edge-of-your-sled ride about people who show up anyway, against Norway, against the United States, and against a booking system that won’t give them the rink.

Sweet Milk Lake

Raw, funny and achingly felt, Sweet Milk Lake marks Harvey Zielinski as a debut filmmaker with something deeply personal to say. In the remote country town of Sweet Milk, a young trans man discovers that the easiest place to finally belong is the one built on a lie, and that the most complicated relationship to repair might be with himself. Zielinski draws on his own experiences and pulls double duty in the lead dual roles of Jake and his cisgender twin, crafting a fish-out-of-water dramedy of quiet emotional precision. A budding romance with Hunter Page-Lochard (Kid Snow, MIFF 2024) gives the film a tender, charged counterweight to the web of deception quietly tightening around its protagonist.

Guided by Horses

The Kimberley region of Western Australia is among the most breathtaking landscapes on earth – and home to one of the world’s highest youth suicide rates. In Guided by Horses, filmmaker Sean O’Reilly documents the work of pioneering Aboriginal researcher Professor Juli Coffin, whose own life was once saved by a horse and who now runs a groundbreaking program pairing First Nations teenagers with horses as a culturally safe path to healing, reconnection and adulthood. Combining observational footage with first-person testimony against a stunningly cinematic Kimberley backdrop, and executive-produced by Hunter Page-Lochard, Mark Coles Smith and Stephen Page among others, the film is full of charm, joy and gentle humour with an epic quality that belies its quiet, human heart.

Phenomena

The natural wonders most likely to stop you in your tracks turn out to be the ones invisible to the naked eye and Melbourne-based debut filmmaker Josef Gatti has spent a decade finding a way to show them to us. Training a high-powered camera on Petri dish chemistry experiments across 10 thematically structured chapters, and scoring the results to music by Nils Frahm and Rival Consoles, Phenomena transforms intangible scientific concepts into kaleidoscopic, psychedelic spectacle – built entirely without AI. Gatti’s articulate voiceover narration, crafted with his father, a physics teacher, grounds the visual pyrotechnics in genuine scientific illumination, producing a documentary that has toured film festivals around the world on its way to this mesmerising full-length debut.

The full MIFF 2026 program will launch on Thursday 9 July. Full details here: https://miff.com.au