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The 2025 Melbourne International Film Festival Bright Horizons retrospective celebrates the 'ones to watch'

As we count down the days until an epic 18-day celebration of world cinema, we've partnered with MIFF's programmers to showcase past contenders for one of the richest film prizes in the world.

L-R: Banel & Adama, Aftersun, How To Have Sex, Shayda.

L-R: Banel & Adama, Aftersun, How To Have Sex, Shayda.

The Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) returns to cinemas August 7-24 for its 73rd edition. The program, now on sale, includes over 275 features, shorts and XR experiences, and 10 contenders for MIFF's prestigious Bright Horizons film prize.

The flagship Bright Horizons competition, now in its fourth year, celebrates filmmakers on the rise, with a global line-up of first- and second-time filmmakers competing for one of the richest film prizes in the world: $140,000 (presented by VicScreen).

The 2025 contenders include: If I Had Legs I’d Kick You by Mary Bronstein, First Light by James J. Robinson, and Cannes Un Certain Regard prize-winner The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo by Diego Céspedes, a child’s-eye view of the AIDS crisis in 1980s Chile. Harris Dickinson’s directorial debut Urchin offers a raw portrait of addiction in London, while Thai filmmaker Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke presents the absurd and eerie A Useful Ghost. German director Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling delves into female repression through dreamlike visuals and sound, and Andrew Patterson returns with the tense Oklahoma-set thriller The Rivals of Amziah King. Rounding out the competition are A Poet by Simón Mesa Soto, April by Georgia’s Dea Kulumbegashvili, and Renoir, a personal coming-of-age story by Japan’s Chie Hayakawa.

As we wait for opening night, we've teamed with MIFF's senior programmers, Kate Jinx and Kate Fitzpatrick (aka 'The Kates') to curate a special collection of past contenders (and one winner) of Bright Horizons past, to give you a taste of what to expect.

Aftersun (2022)

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Calum (Paul Mescal) with Sophie (Frankie Corio) on a boat. Credit: Sarah Makharine
Kate Fitzpatrick: This film stood out that year because it's one we were fortunate enough to see before it premiered in Cannes and we all unanimously fell in love with it. It was a really special film from the outset. We were very fortunate that Charlotte Wells was able to come to MIFF to present the film, and then it had this incredible life after,wards: after Cannes, after MIFF, going on for all the BAFTA nominations and Paul Mescal being nominated for an Oscar. It was this seemingly small film, a first time film, and it had this huge world stage all of a sudden, and we felt very privileged to have been part of that journey of that film too. We felt very lucky to have had Charlotte here in Melbourne, it felt really special.

Kate Jinx: Also, it's the one title that comes up every year to describe another, as in, you know, 'Aftersun-esque' or 'reminiscent of Aftersun'. I don't think we've had a title that has been more referenced since. It's quite incredible.

[Editor's note: Charlotte Wells returns to MIFF in 2025 as president of the Bright Horizons jury]

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Aftersun

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2022
drama • 
2022

Animalia (2023)

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Oumaïma Barid as Itto in Animalia.
Kate Fitzpatrick: This is a really beautiful film that premiered in Sundance, about a young woman who's coping from having married up from a poor background; her husband is incredibly wealthy, and her life with his family and is filled with tension. They obviously think she's not good enough for him. Then, when they leave for the day on business, and she gets separated from them, a supernatural event happens, and she has to make her way, heavily pregnant, through Morocco. This takes her on a journey to really reconnect with where she's come from. What is apparent is that she has lost sight of that, having been struggling to fit in with where she is now. She meets all these people that remind her of community and helping one another. It's just a really beautiful, beautiful film.

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Animalia

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Science fiction • 
2023
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Science fiction • 
2023

Banel & Adama (2023)

2023 Winner, Bright Horizons
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Khady Mane and Mamadou Diallo are Banel & Adama.
Kate Jinx: This was a really special one. Both of us actually went to the world premiere at Cannes and just thought it was so beautiful, this film. A first feature by Romata-Toulaye Sy, she's a French Senegalese director, and it's all set in a small town in Senegal. It is about love and relationships but also the traditions of the town, and the superstitions that the town is steeped in. It's about a very modern young couple, Banel and Adama, and Banel had previously been married to Adama's older brother, who was the chief of the village. When they get together, the whole community loves it, you know, they really support it. But as time goes on, the young couple don't want to enter into the more traditional ways of the village. The family, and by extension, the community, start to think that that their union has potentially cursed the village as a big drought comes in. The cinematography is really extraordinary. I really loved that it was a very contemporary story about a traditional way of life. It's something we hadn't really seen before, particularly from that region. And of course it won Bright Horizons that year and we were all just so pleased with that win. And Ramata was here for it and she was just divine.

Kate Fitzpatrick: And she was really moved, I think, with the win. She really wasn't expecting it.

Kate Jinx: Yes, she was really shocked by it. It was very exciting knowing what was coming for her that night.

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Banel & Adama

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2023
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How To Have Sex (2023)

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Mia McKenna Bruce in How To Have Sex.
Kate Jinx: We also had Molly Manning Walker and she was a great guest. We had such great guests that year! And a lot of them hung out together and are still in touch with each other. But that film, that extraordinary film: It made such a splash that year, of course it won the main prize in Un Certain Regard in Cannes. It was interesting to see that Molly Manning Walker went back as the head of the jury at Cannes this year for Un Certain Regard.

Kate Fitzpatrick: There's a great great story in the fact that when she won her prize she was already leaving Cannes; she had to like run back and there's footage of her literally running down the stairs

Kate Jinx: She had to borrow her friend's clothes, especially when it's like a football shorts.

Kate Fitzpatrick: She looks like ready to chill out on the couch and she's running down the stairs to collect her award, it's great.

Kate Jinx: This was her first film, but she was known also as a cinematographer. She did the cinematography for Scrapper, which we played the same year (and is streaming at SBS On Demand).

This is such a great film. The audiences really connected with it at MIFF. We had fantastic post-film discussions about it with Molly. It's essentially a schoolies story about a trio of British teenage girls who go to this small beach town in Crete. They're there to party and blow off steam and they meet a group of people and start hanging out and having a great time and one of them has a sexual experience that doesn't really feel right, and it's about her ... grappling with what could often be seen as a grey area, especially for teenagers. The fact is, she was sexually assaulted and she's unable to tell anyone about it.

What makes this film so great is that really it's such a vibrant film. It's a very important film that has this very important message to it, of course, but it's a really enjoyable film to watch as well. It really is so vibrant: the colours are amazing, it's tightly shot and very sweaty. It's very much connected to Molly's own youth.

Kate Fitzpatrick: And I think it really connected with younger audiences because of that, like the first 20 minutes of it, you feel like you're on holiday in Ibiza or somewhere like that in this rave scene.

Fiona Williams: It's such a clever way to make it though, isn't it? You actually want the people who should see it to see it, but they're not going to if you broadcast it as a 'message movie', are they.

Kate Fitzpatrick: Exactly, you're making it for the audience it most connects with.

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How to Have Sex

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2023
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2023

Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell (2023)

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Le Phong Vu in Thien An Pham's Inside The Yellow Cocoon Shell.
Kate Fitzpatrick: This premiered in Cannes as well and it won the Camers d'Or, which is their own prize for the first feature, which is pretty exciting. It's a really beautiful, dream-like but also melancholic kind of film. This man, his sister-in-law is killed in a crash, but his nephew survives and he takes her body and the nephew back to where he grew up. He's on a search to find his brother to reconnect with him and let him know that his son is still alive and he needs to be looked after. There are a series of almost ghost-like interactions throughout this story of a search for family and reconnecting with your roots. It's shot quite beautifully and the sound design is really fantastic in it as well.

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Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell

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2023
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Mass (2022)

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Ann Dowd in Mass.
Kate Fitzpatrick: This was another Sundance film and oh, it's really, really powerful. This was a real passion project on the part of our artistic director, Al Cossar, who had seen it at Sundance the year before and really, really championed bringing it to MIFF the next year for Bright Horizons. It's a debut by Fran Kranz, who's better known as an actor. We were really fortunate that he was able to make it to MIFF as well. He was a fantastic guest, he;s a real cinephile himself, so he was really keen to connect with other directors and talk to them about cinema and their approach to cinema. But the film itself is essentially, it's almost like a filmed play. It's all in one particular location. Two sets of parents are meeting to discuss this thing that has happened: One of the couples are parents to a child who has committed a mass shooting at the school, and the other couple were parents to one of children who was killed. They have an obviously very fraught meeting where they're supposed to hash out their feelings.

It really features some incredible powerhouse performances, Ann Dowd and Jason Isaacs, but for me the absolute G.O.A.T. is Martha Plimpton. She totally is my favourite in it. In fact, I did a Q&A with Fran Kranz after one of the screenings, and I said to him, 'Now, I'm sure you're not allowed to have favourites, but come on, it's Martha Plimpton, right?' And he pretty much confirmed that she's a fantastic person.

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Mass

drama • 
2021
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2021

Petrol (2022)

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Nathalie Morris as Eva in Petrol.
Kate Jinx: This was also in our first year of Bright Horizons. Alena Lodkina is just such an incredible director. This was her second feature, having made Strange Colours before that, which was just a gorgeous film. I think it took a lot of people by surprise that it was an Australian feature. She makes these otherworldly films that feel very rooted in the Australian landscape — like, Petrol is very Melbourne — but she eschews the cliches of Australian cinema. I just adore this film and I adore her as a filmmaker. This one premiered at Locarno, and then it had its Australian premiere with us in Bright Horizons. It also screened at New Directors New Films in New York at MoMA, so it did go on to have quite a good life. Natalie Morris plays a film student in Melbourne who becomes kind of 'bewitched', I would say, by a gothic performance artist played by Hannah Lynch, has such a great role. I haven't seen Hannah in a lot of things, and this is a great performance. They moves in together, and their lives just kind of start to intertwine and you don't quite know when one, you know, starts and one ends, all the while you see these kind of mystical, mysterious elements come in. You kind of realise that you're seeing Eva's world. And it has really funny scenes of like these young Melbourne art school students that you don't get to see much on screen, not since Love and Other Catastrophes. So I really loved that, like it's so beautiful and mysterious and is has elements like Jacques Rivette films pr Persona, obviously, but then there are all these like very Melbourne house parties, too. I think she's got a very distinct vision and she also worked in like an editing capacity on Athena Rachel Sangari's Harvest, which is screening at MIFF this year.

Kate Fitzpatrick: I think [Alena] is a great example of someone we think is going to go on to do some really amazing things, even beyond Australia. She's already doing that.

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Petrol

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2022
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Playground (2022)

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Maya Vanderbeque and Günter Duret in Playground.
Kate Jinx: Laura Wandel premiered this at Cannes, it was in Un Certain Regard, and it won the FIPRESCI Prize there in 2021, and then her latest film also premiered at Cannes this year, for Adam's Sake [and is premiering at MIFF 2025]. This one was also a real passion of our artistic director, Al. It's about a 7-year-old girl who goes to school and realises that her 10-year old brother, her older brother, is being bullied. She goes to him, she wants to kind of offer any kind of support she can but he swears her to secrecy. She really wants to tell her their father, and she wants to step in, but she's just caught in this like awful predicament of not knowing whether to keep her brother's secret or to see outside this bigger picture of it all. It's just so tightly shot, the cinematography is fantastic: it's essentially from her point of view, so it's a very low, tight little vision. You're really embodying this character. It's quite emotionally wrenching as a result of that, I think. And it's been interesting now to see her second feature as well, which is in a hospital setting but also about a child. You can already see that she's kind of gone on to great things; her new one was produced by the Dardennes. She has a similar vision to the Dardennes Brothers.

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Playground

drama • 
2021
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2021

Shayda (2023)

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Zar Amir-Ebrahimi in Shayda.
Kate Jinx: This one was a really special one for us. It's directed by Noora Niasari and it's her first feature. We actually chose this as our opening night film in 2023 as well as being in Bright Horizons. It had already premiered at Sundance where it had great reviews. It's such an incredible story, aided by the fact that Noora was able to bring in some of her own life into the story. The main character, Shayda, is a mother from Iran, who is living in a women's refuge centre, with a six-year-old daughter, and dealing with her estranged husband who is also in Melbourne, and his controlling sensibilities around parenting and a very ugly custody battle. All th while dealing with the traditions and implications of what's happening at home, in Iran, with her mother.

Kate Fitzpatrick: She is also dealing with the prejudices of her community, like they kind of don't see the abuse on the husband's side in the same way, and they just want them to work it out.

Kate Jinx: The scenes within the home that she lives in with her, show the support and the community that builds between all these women who are in a very similar situation right now but are from very different backgrounds. The scenes of celebration and dancing and sharing their own traditions with each other. It's just... Yeah, just incredible. And Zar Amir-Ebrahimi, just what a knockout performance. There are many great Australian actors in it too, like Leah Purcell and Jillian Nguyen, Osamah Sami; it's just a great cast all around. The fact that it was executive-produced by Cate Blanchet has not hurt either, of course. But yeah, we're all really excited to see what Noora does next.

Kate Fitzpatrick: She was a great guest. Great guest, so eloquent talking about her film and talking about the themes and what she brings to that story herself. It was a really great way for the audience to connect with it. It really was a special opening night.

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Shayda

drama • 
2023
drama • 
2023

Totém (2023)

Special Mention, Bright Horizons
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Kate Fitzpatrick: In the same year as Banel & Adama, we had Totém by Lila Avilés, and she got a special mention at the awards, which was also really lovely, because that's another film that Kate and I had seen it together in Berlin, and we thought it was just beautiful. It's so delightful, all shown through the eyes of this seven-year-old girl at a birthday party for her terminally ill father, and she doesn't quite understand what's going on, but she can recognise enough in the little whisperings throughout the family that there is something going on. It's so intimately shot: Lila's got a great knack of capturing that family dynamic in a really intimate way. Not to use a cliché, but you feel like you're seated at the table with these people. And there are so many design elements of that film: the house, the extraordinary house; and Kate knows I was obsessed with a jumper one of the women is wearing in the film!; and the lighting of it is really special too. Lila also was here, so that was a fantastic, emotional thing for her too, I think, to get that special mention. We hadn't done the year before, but it was one of those times where we really had a tie here, we couldn't decide.

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Totem

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2023
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2023
Stream all of the films in the the MIFF Bright Horizons Retrospective at SBS On Demand. The 2025 Melbourne International Film Festival takes place from August 7 to 24. Browse the 2025 program here.
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By Fiona Williams
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