Ahead of its full program launch on September 15, the Adelaide Film Festival has announced the Australian Premiere of the Adelaide Film Festival Investment Fund film Agata The Writer. 

Direct from its world premiere at the 2026 Venice Film Festival, Agata The Writer is the debut feature film from Polish-born visual artist and filmmaker Kuba Dorabialski. 

The film is produced by Alex White (Babyteeth). Mia Wasikowska (Leviticus, Club Zero) stars as a Polish-Australian satirical novelist who travels from Sydney to Sarajevo to write a war novel but finds herself within a startling mystery, forcing her to question her role as a storyteller.

The films KUMARANGK: Sacred Women’s Business, Aftermath and The Forbidden Aunt will each have their World Premieres at AFF 2026. All have made it to the screen with the support of the ground-breaking Adelaide Film Festival Investment Fund (AFFIF) which supports screen talent and production in South Australia.

KUMARANGK: Sacred Women’s Business is the major new documentary directed by Ngarrindjeri/Wotjobaluk woman Tracey Rigney that charts the Hindmarsh Island bridge affair. 

Few events have exposed the fault lines of modern South Australia and the nation at large as profoundly. Combining extraordinary character interviews with richly textured archival footage from the 1980s and 1990s, KUMARANGK: Sacred Women’s Business plunges back into the political frenzy that engulfed the state, as Ngarrindjeri women’s sacred knowledge collided with powerful development interests, forcing the courts to rule on what they were never equipped to comprehend. 

Revealing Kumarangk as a living place where birth, burial and ceremony are inseparable, the film restores humanity to a conflict too often reduced to politics and headlines. Producers are Ngarrindjeri man Josh Trevorrow and Carolyn Johnson. 

Aftermath is co-directed by Jared Nicholson and Ben Lawrence (Hearts & Bones, Ithaka). Producers are Rebecca Barry and Scott Baskett. In an era where conspiracy theories threaten the scaffolds of society like never before, Aftermath is a fearless psychological portrait of two lives intertwined by trauma and obsession.

When massacre survivor Wendy Scurr meets filmmaker Jared Nicholson, she is already deep into her decades-long pursuit of truth, having been silenced by authority. What begins as a testament to survival becomes an immersion into memory, belief, and the fragile scaffolding of reality itself. Spanning decades of archive, late-night calls, and intimate confessions, their connection deepens as Nicholson too becomes entangled in a web of misinformation. 

Part confession, part elegy, Aftermath bears witness to the harrowing effects of trauma and illuminates the dark world of alternative facts, where even the most unlikely of people can be ensnared, and where truth is no longer a refuge but a battleground.

In The Forbidden Aunt, noted actress and filmmaker, Bojana Novakovic, travels from Australia to rural Serbia to explore the life of her eccentric and tormented aunt she never knew, unravelling the truth of how violence and trauma shaped the lives of four generations of women. Bojana Novakovic writes, produces and directs this intensely personal story. The film is also produced by Milan Stojanovic and Danielle Redford.

“These five films, four of them supported by the Adelaide Film Festival Investment Fund, are all urgent, compelling stories brilliantly realised for the screen,” says AFF CEO and Creative Director, Mat Kesting. 

“At a time when the world that is fractured and fragmented, each deepens our understanding of what it means to be human. These stories diverse and rich in culture taking us from the traditions of women from Kumarangk and the joy of queer pride in Paris, to the traumas of war in eastern Europe and the aftermath of violence. I am incredibly proud to showcase all these films as part of AFF this October.”

You can find full details about the Adelaide Film Festival here.

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