The 2025 Adelaide Film Festival, running this October, includes 27 world premieres and 37 Australian premieres among the 123 films from 27 countries.
Opening up proceedings this year will be Sophie Hyde’s much anticipated ‘Jimpa’, starring Olivia Colman, John Lithgow and Aud Mason-Hyde. . . And to bring it all to a close will be the equally anticipated ‘Wolfram’, from Australian director Warwick Thornton.
‘Wolfram’ stars Deborah Mailman alongside Erroll Shand, Joe Bird, Thomas M Wright, Matt Nable and Pedrea Jackson.
In another exclusive, Adelaide Film Festival will present ‘The Fox’, directed by Dario Russo, and starring Emily Browning, Jai Courtney, and Damon Herriman. It’s a darkly comic folktale of an ordinary bloke and the fox who offers to solve all his problems.
This year’s Special Presentations comprises of film titles from all the major festivals, like ‘Frankenstein’ by Guillermo Del Toro, ‘Bugonia’ by Yorgos Lanthimos, ‘Rental Family’ by Hikari, and ‘Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere’ by Scott Cooper, starring Jeremy Allen White.
Take a look back through the 2025 Retrospectives programme, offering a special tribute to David Stratton and his favourite film ‘Singin’ In The Rain’. The programme also features Robert Connolly’s ‘Balibo’.
This year’s Jury, considering both the Feature Fiction and Feature Documentary Awards, is headed by our own Murray Bartlett (‘The White Lotus’), who is joined by First Nations director Jub Clerc (‘Sweet As’), Pavel Cortes Marion Pilowsky, and Australian film, TV and theatre director/writer John Sheedy.
In the Feature Fiction competition this year is ‘A Useful Ghost’, from Thai writer/director Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke, the Austrian/Slovakian film ‘Perla’ by Alexandra Makarová; the lyrical ghost story ‘Phantoms of July’ by German director Julian Radlmaier; another Critics’ Week selection, ‘Reedland’, by Dutch director Sven Bresser; and the Mexican film ‘Vanilla’ from director Mayra Hermosillo, a layered, bittersweet portrait of belonging, survival and love.
There are five films in the Feature Documentary Competition: ‘Cast Off’, ‘North South Man Woman’, ‘Sanatorium’, ‘She’, and ‘The Tale Of Silyan’.
Meanwhile, the $5,000 AFF Change Award is for positive of environmental impact, and cinema expressing new directions for humanity. This year, film-lovers can expect ‘Black Water’, ‘Only On Earth’, ‘Power Station’, ‘Trade Secret’, and ‘Until The Sky Falls Quiet’.
Leaving our backyard is the World Cinema collection, with many new experiences for audiences to discover, including American director Richard Linklater’s ‘Blue Moon’, the Palestinian family epic ‘All That’s Left Of You’, Sundance winner ‘Cactus Pears’, Cannes winner ‘Resurrection’, and many more cinematic gems from China, the UK, Indonesia, Germany, Lithuania, Iraq, the US, India and Brazil.
Music lovers can look forward to the likes of ‘It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley’, ‘Jimmy Barnes: Working Class Man’, and the evocative ‘Marlon Williams: Ngā Ao E Rua - Two Worlds’.
Short films, of course, get a look-in as well – AFF will present programmes like World Shorts, Australian Shorts, Animation Shorts, Queer Shorts and Made in SA.
“Every year we seek to curate a programme that inspires us, provokes us, fills us with awe and with rage, makes us laugh, makes us cry, and reminds us that we are all part of this vast and diverse community of humans,” AFF CEO & Creative Director Mat Kesting says. “I am very proud of the 2025 Adelaide Film Festival programme and warmly invite all to share in experience of exploring the 120+ films in the programme.”
Check out the full programme.
Adelaide Film Festival 2025 is on from 15-26 October.
