A handpicked array of screenings highlighting feature films, short films, episodic content, music videos, web shorts and XR experiences. This year’s Screen Festival Showcase doubles down on both genre filmmaking and short film collections to highlight the exceptional talent emerging from APAC and beyond.
Our program focuses on distinctive narrative and stylistic works, blending the trappings of horror, comedy, and the surreal with the emotionally resonant, thoughtful and captivating. Every evening, film headliner sessions will be featured in the Darling Harbour theatre every evening, offering a sneak peek of upcoming mainstream releases.
With a program that includes feature films, shorts, TV premieres, music videos, and XR, this Festival wholeheartedly embraces the democratisation of screen storytelling.
Expect the unexpected, with first screenings of some of the most hotly anticipated films likely additions to the SXSW Sydney Screen Festival.
A special student showcase will also be featured, spotlighting young and emerging talent. We want emerging work to be seen, putting people in the room where it happens.
With a program that includes feature films, shorts, TV premieres, music videos, and XR, this Festival wholeheartedly embraces the democratisation of screen storytelling.
This vibrant showcase celebrates the best in global cinema, with a diverse lineup of feature films, shorts, music videos and more. Join industry leaders, filmmakers, and passionate cinephiles as we explore groundbreaking narratives and genre-defying content from around the world.
Josie leads a life of passive mundane displeasure before his psychic ills deform him and sees him roaming the rainforest hinterlands of Queensland.
A Grand Mockery is simultaneously singular and a flashback to underground filmmaking before it became codified. Filmed on soft luminous super-8, tonally playful and structured as a diptych, A Grand Mockery begins as a work of morbid comic realism before the film transforms along with Josie.
Andamooka is a story about a woman whose life falls apart just before she turns 30, she heads to the outback to spend her birthday with her best friend in tiny opal mining town Andamooka.
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Forgotten soap-star and self-appointed Mother of the Year, Ronnie Lipsick is living the life she never asked for. An acting career derailed due to an untimely pregnancy 18 years earlier, dreams of stardom replaced with a suburban performing arts school. A husband, Cormack, who’s lust and love for life has gone as limp as his manhood. Youngest daughter, Norah, who appears to have no use for her and finally, the ungrateful eldest, Audrey, who Ronnie has given the best part of her parenting time to mould into the success she always wanted to be. But when an accident lands Audrey in a coma, Ronnie gets her second chance at the life she actually wanted by taking on her daughter's identity.
In a world where no one speaks, a devout female-led community hunts down a young woman who has escaped imprisonment. Recaptured, Azrael is due to be sacrificed to an ancient evil in the wilderness, but fights for her own survival.
After becoming pregnant from a one-night stand, Eden leans on her married best friend and mother of two, Dawn, to guide her through gestation and beyond.
A diverse collection of films that challenge, inspire, and resonate, Bush Shorts celebrates the rich tapestry of stories from emerging First Nations and Indigenous filmmakers across Australia. Curated by the esteemed Winda Film Festival, this year's selection promises an evocative exploration of identity and connection to country.
WINIMAKU ARA PAPA WIIMATJARAKU
2024 | All Ages | Australia | 5:00 | Dir: Rosalyn Brenda Boko.
DJALBUYAN NAHRA
2024 | All Ages | Australia | 5:00 | Dir: Jahvis Loveday.
HYDRAULIC
2024 | 15+ | Australia | 15:00 | Dir: Nicole Hutton-Lewis.
BEAR
2024 | 15+ | Australia | 17:00 | Dir: Rebecca Parker.
FENCE
2024 | 15+ | Australia | 14:25 | Dir: Samantha Alexis Laughton.
NGURRAWAANA
2024 | All Ages | Australia | 2:54 | Dir: Kieran Mpetyane Satour.
MAHIKA KAI
2024 | All Ages | New Zealand | 10:02 | Dir: Kieran Mpetyane Satour.
FATHER'S EYES
2024 | All Ages | Australia | 4:36 | Dir: Kieran Mpetyane Satour.
74 mins.
CLASSIFICATION: Unclassified 15+
When true-crime podcaster and sleuth Lola visits her hometown at Christmas for the first time since running away and transitioning, the vengeful ghost of a historical murderer and urban legend seemingly arises to kill again. Lola must solve the case before her community is slaughtered. She's up against not only a psychotic killer, but a town haunted by secrets.
In 2008, during the last month of summer before high school begins, an impressionable 13-year-old Taiwanese American boy learns what his family can’t teach him: how to skate, how to flirt, and how to love your mom.
Bruce Brown's The Endless Summer is one of the first and most influential surf movies of all time. Remastered for the first time ever in gorgeous 4K resolution and with 5.1 surround sound, the film documents American surfers Mike Hynson and Robert August as they leave their California home to visit Hawaii, Australia, South Africa and other secluded surfing spots in a search for the surfer's holy grail that Brown dubs "The Perfect Wave."
Damon Gameau (2040, THAT SUGAR FILM) takes eight kids on the ultimate school excursion: a road trip across Europe to seek solutions to the climate crisis.
Millions of children around the world are frustrated by the dire lack of action to protect the planet and their future. Until now, their only avenue to express these concerns has been protesting on the streets. Director Damon Gameau (2040, THAT SUGAR FILM) invites eight children on an epic adventure across Europe in a school bus powered by biofuel. Their mission is to better understand the planet’s predicament, explore solutions and, most importantly, take the conversation from the streets, into the boardrooms of some of the world’s largest polluters and influential companies.
This inspiring and rollicking journey, where ‘School of Rock’ meets ‘An Inconvenient Truth', results in the children forming a ‘Future Council’ to advise and influence the world's most powerful companies on their decisions that impact nature.
January 2021. The UK is in its 3rd lockdown and all entertainment venues remain closed. For theatre actors Sam and Mark, the future looks bleak. As the pandemic drags on, Mark - single and childless - is increasingly socially isolated, while Sam panics about how he is going to support his young family. They spend their days in the online digital world of Grand Theft Auto and when they stumble across a theatre, they suddenly have an idea to stage a full production of Hamlet within the game. This film charts their ridiculous, hilarious and moving adventure as they battle violent griefers and discover surprising truths about life, friendship and the enduring power of Shakespeare.
CNN camerawoman Margaret Moth made the wars in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Lebanon, and Operation Desert Storm in Iraq, real for North American television audiences. While her fellow journalists took cover, Moth ran towards danger, camera in hand, to get the shots. Colleagues including Christiane Amanpour attest to her bravery but it is Moth’s friends and lovers who reveal the self-destructive nature of the artist behind the lens. Innovative reconstructions of her near-lethal assignment in Sarajevo’s Sniper Alley, which turned Moth into headline news, are paired with unsettling interviews with witnesses to her daredevilry, forming the grit of this unconventional portrait. In her directorial debut, actor Lucy Lawless reveals the fearlessness of a fellow Kiwi woman-turned-groundbreaker, one who immortalized war-reporting history.
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A woman pauses her career to be a stay-at-home mom, but soon her domesticity takes a surreal turn.
Get an all-access pass into the masterminds behind Grammy award-winning band The Mars Volta: Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and Cedric Bixler-Zavala. Whittled down from hundreds of hours of footage shot by Omar throughout their lives, the film shows the iconic duo’s journey from the hardcore scene in El Paso, Texas, to rock and roll acclaim; from growing up as minorities to their rise to success; from struggles with loss, addiction, and scientology to their blazing come-back. A uniquely personal chronicle of the life-long friendship between two era-defining artists, the film is a depiction of love, death, and inspiration – with a soundtrack that has defined a generation.
Join Papa Salt at Tumbalong Park on October 19th when they present The Endless Summer After Party. It's the debut of the Papa Salt Paloma, a new premix can, followed with performances by BALTHVS and Touch Sensitive.
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How best to commemorate the career of Pavement, one of the defining indie rock bands of the 1990s? Legendary frontman Stephen Malkmus would likely be opposed to the usual encomiums. A museum exhibition? How about a jukebox Broadway musical? Or perhaps a prestige movie biopic? Alex Ross Perry gives us all of the above and more in his pleasurably rule-flouting sorta-documentary. Fueled by a sardonic, tricky sense of humor reminiscent of Pavement’s caustic, idiosyncratic music, Perry’s film shows little patience for hagiography—or any other orthodoxy—in its nonlinear, absurdist approach. Pavements integrates archival footage of the band at the height of their cult popularity, newly shot material following them during their recent comeback tour in 2022, and a kaleidoscope of semi-scripted contemporary scenes about the shooting of a movie within the movie starring Jason Schwartzman, Fred Hechinger, Nat Wolff, Tim Heidecker, Logan Miller, and a hilarious Joe Keery as an actor seeking awards glory. Above all, Pavements’ irreverent inquiry into mythmaking evinces a deep love for its subject and for a now lost alternative culture.
January 2009 in Tobyhanna, PA. Three young men (Jack Bensinger, Eric Rahill and Conner O’Malley) self-document their attempt to write and record a rap album in one night. Shot on digital video from the era, this hazy portrayal of after-hours suburban life captures the inescapable boredom as a catalyst for bad decisions.
After her mother's unexpected passing, Mattia finds herself thrust into the care of her estranged aunt & her mother’s identical twin. As Mattia grapples with the loss of her mother, a treacherous secret begins to unfold, threatening her life. From beyond the grave, Mattia’s mother possesses her daughter in an attempt not only to protect her from the same fate that befell her but also to find reconciliation with her sister, using food as a gateway.
At 11:30pm on October 11th, 1975, a ferocious troupe of young comedians and writers changed television forever. Find out what happened behind the scenes in the 90 minutes leading up to the first broadcast of Saturday Night Live.
Divine G (Colman Domingo), imprisoned at Sing Sing for a crime he didn’t commit, finds purpose by acting in a theatre group alongside other incarcerated men, including wary newcomer (Clarence Maclin), in this stirring true story of resilience, humanity, and the transformative power of art, starring an unforgettable ensemble cast of formerly incarcerated actors.
A contemporary portrait of America, told through a collection of stories observed within the walls of former Pizza Hut buildings across the country. These nostalgic spaces hold memories of a bygone era, but through the power of transformation, they provide something new and special for the communities that continue to flow through them.
From an LGBTQ+ church in Florida, to a karaoke bar in Texas, to a cannabis dispensary in rural Colorado, these modern-day portraits are paralleled with the origin story of Pizza Hut - one of America's most iconic brands, and the two brothers who founded the company in Wichita, Kansas in 1958.
About to embark on a world tour, global pop sensation Skye Riley begins experiencing increasingly terrifying and inexplicable events. Overwhelmed by the escalating horrors and the pressures of fame, Skye is forced to face her past.
Filmed during The Teaches of Peaches Anniversary Tour in 2022, this documentary seamlessly weaves together exclusive archival gems with dynamic tour footage capturing the transformative journey of Canadian Merrill Nisker into the internationally acclaimed cultural powerhouse Peaches.
From the inception of the stage show to the rigorous rehearsal and riveting performances, the film provides an intimate look at the inner workings of a tour led by this beloved and globally celebrated icon. As a feminist musician, producer, director, and performance artist, Peaches has spent over two decades challenging gender stereotypes, solidifying her status alongside pop and music industry icons. Her fearless originality has challenged social norms, dismantled stereotypes, and confronted patriarchal power structures. Through biting wit, she advocates for LGBTQIA+ rights and tackles issues of gender and sexual identity, leaving an indelible mark on popular culture.
It tells the story of a newly pregnant couple who are forced to take in an ailing, estranged stepmother.
Three ethnic school kids from Sydney's western suburbs form a punk band in the 80s. The Hard-Ons fight racism, the music industry and the rise of grunge with their pop punk noise, irreverent humour and absolute commitment to just being themselves. 'The pricks with the three different skin colours' - Ray Ahn
Anthony Robles, despite being born without a right leg, rises to become a NCAA Division 1 Champion wrestler ultimately winning a national championship against the school that rejected him, national powerhouse Iowa. (Based on the book Unstoppable: From Underdog to Undefeated: How I Became a Champion, by Anthony Robles and Austin Murphy.)
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On the last night of 1999, two high school juniors crash a New Years Eve party, only to find themselves fighting for their lives in this dial-up disaster comedy.
Josie leads a life of passive mundane displeasure before his psychic ills deform him and sees him roaming the rainforest hinterlands of Queensland.
A Grand Mockery is simultaneously singular and a flashback to underground filmmaking before it became codified. Filmed on soft luminous super-8, tonally playful and structured as a diptych, A Grand Mockery begins as a work of morbid comic realism before the film transforms along with Josie.
Andamooka is a story about a woman whose life falls apart just before she turns 30, she heads to the outback to spend her birthday with her best friend in tiny opal mining town Andamooka.
Forgotten soap-star and self-appointed Mother of the Year, Ronnie Lipsick is living the life she never asked for. An acting career derailed due to an untimely pregnancy 18 years earlier, dreams of stardom replaced with a suburban performing arts school. A husband, Cormack, who’s lust and love for life has gone as limp as his manhood. Youngest daughter, Norah, who appears to have no use for her and finally, the ungrateful eldest, Audrey, who Ronnie has given the best part of her parenting time to mould into the success she always wanted to be. But when an accident lands Audrey in a coma, Ronnie gets her second chance at the life she actually wanted by taking on her daughter's identity.
In a world where no one speaks, a devout female-led community hunts down a young woman who has escaped imprisonment. Recaptured, Azrael is due to be sacrificed to an ancient evil in the wilderness, but fights for her own survival.
After becoming pregnant from a one-night stand, Eden leans on her married best friend and mother of two, Dawn, to guide her through gestation and beyond.
When true-crime podcaster and sleuth Lola visits her hometown at Christmas for the first time since running away and transitioning, the vengeful ghost of a historical murderer and urban legend seemingly arises to kill again. Lola must solve the case before her community is slaughtered. She's up against not only a psychotic killer, but a town haunted by secrets.
In 2008, during the last month of summer before high school begins, an impressionable 13-year-old Taiwanese American boy learns what his family can’t teach him: how to skate, how to flirt, and how to love your mom.
Damon Gameau (2040, THAT SUGAR FILM) takes eight kids on the ultimate school excursion: a road trip across Europe to seek solutions to the climate crisis.
Millions of children around the world are frustrated by the dire lack of action to protect the planet and their future. Until now, their only avenue to express these concerns has been protesting on the streets. Director Damon Gameau (2040, THAT SUGAR FILM) invites eight children on an epic adventure across Europe in a school bus powered by biofuel. Their mission is to better understand the planet’s predicament, explore solutions and, most importantly, take the conversation from the streets, into the boardrooms of some of the world’s largest polluters and influential companies.
This inspiring and rollicking journey, where ‘School of Rock’ meets ‘An Inconvenient Truth', results in the children forming a ‘Future Council’ to advise and influence the world's most powerful companies on their decisions that impact nature.
January 2021. The UK is in its 3rd lockdown and all entertainment venues remain closed. For theatre actors Sam and Mark, the future looks bleak. As the pandemic drags on, Mark - single and childless - is increasingly socially isolated, while Sam panics about how he is going to support his young family. They spend their days in the online digital world of Grand Theft Auto and when they stumble across a theatre, they suddenly have an idea to stage a full production of Hamlet within the game. This film charts their ridiculous, hilarious and moving adventure as they battle violent griefers and discover surprising truths about life, friendship and the enduring power of Shakespeare.
CNN camerawoman Margaret Moth made the wars in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Lebanon, and Operation Desert Storm in Iraq, real for North American television audiences. While her fellow journalists took cover, Moth ran towards danger, camera in hand, to get the shots. Colleagues including Christiane Amanpour attest to her bravery but it is Moth’s friends and lovers who reveal the self-destructive nature of the artist behind the lens. Innovative reconstructions of her near-lethal assignment in Sarajevo’s Sniper Alley, which turned Moth into headline news, are paired with unsettling interviews with witnesses to her daredevilry, forming the grit of this unconventional portrait. In her directorial debut, actor Lucy Lawless reveals the fearlessness of a fellow Kiwi woman-turned-groundbreaker, one who immortalized war-reporting history.
A woman pauses her career to be a stay-at-home mom, but soon her domesticity takes a surreal turn.
Get an all-access pass into the masterminds behind Grammy award-winning band The Mars Volta: Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and Cedric Bixler-Zavala. Whittled down from hundreds of hours of footage shot by Omar throughout their lives, the film shows the iconic duo’s journey from the hardcore scene in El Paso, Texas, to rock and roll acclaim; from growing up as minorities to their rise to success; from struggles with loss, addiction, and scientology to their blazing come-back. A uniquely personal chronicle of the life-long friendship between two era-defining artists, the film is a depiction of love, death, and inspiration – with a soundtrack that has defined a generation.
How best to commemorate the career of Pavement, one of the defining indie rock bands of the 1990s? Legendary frontman Stephen Malkmus would likely be opposed to the usual encomiums. A museum exhibition? How about a jukebox Broadway musical? Or perhaps a prestige movie biopic? Alex Ross Perry gives us all of the above and more in his pleasurably rule-flouting sorta-documentary. Fueled by a sardonic, tricky sense of humor reminiscent of Pavement’s caustic, idiosyncratic music, Perry’s film shows little patience for hagiography—or any other orthodoxy—in its nonlinear, absurdist approach. Pavements integrates archival footage of the band at the height of their cult popularity, newly shot material following them during their recent comeback tour in 2022, and a kaleidoscope of semi-scripted contemporary scenes about the shooting of a movie within the movie starring Jason Schwartzman, Fred Hechinger, Nat Wolff, Tim Heidecker, Logan Miller, and a hilarious Joe Keery as an actor seeking awards glory. Above all, Pavements’ irreverent inquiry into mythmaking evinces a deep love for its subject and for a now lost alternative culture.
January 2009 in Tobyhanna, PA. Three young men (Jack Bensinger, Eric Rahill and Conner O’Malley) self-document their attempt to write and record a rap album in one night. Shot on digital video from the era, this hazy portrayal of after-hours suburban life captures the inescapable boredom as a catalyst for bad decisions.
After her mother's unexpected passing, Mattia finds herself thrust into the care of her estranged aunt & her mother’s identical twin. As Mattia grapples with the loss of her mother, a treacherous secret begins to unfold, threatening her life. From beyond the grave, Mattia’s mother possesses her daughter in an attempt not only to protect her from the same fate that befell her but also to find reconciliation with her sister, using food as a gateway.
At 11:30pm on October 11th, 1975, a ferocious troupe of young comedians and writers changed television forever. Find out what happened behind the scenes in the 90 minutes leading up to the first broadcast of Saturday Night Live.
Divine G (Colman Domingo), imprisoned at Sing Sing for a crime he didn’t commit, finds purpose by acting in a theatre group alongside other incarcerated men, including wary newcomer (Clarence Maclin), in this stirring true story of resilience, humanity, and the transformative power of art, starring an unforgettable ensemble cast of formerly incarcerated actors.
A contemporary portrait of America, told through a collection of stories observed within the walls of former Pizza Hut buildings across the country. These nostalgic spaces hold memories of a bygone era, but through the power of transformation, they provide something new and special for the communities that continue to flow through them.
From an LGBTQ+ church in Florida, to a karaoke bar in Texas, to a cannabis dispensary in rural Colorado, these modern-day portraits are paralleled with the origin story of Pizza Hut - one of America's most iconic brands, and the two brothers who founded the company in Wichita, Kansas in 1958.
About to embark on a world tour, global pop sensation Skye Riley begins experiencing increasingly terrifying and inexplicable events. Overwhelmed by the escalating horrors and the pressures of fame, Skye is forced to face her past.
Filmed during The Teaches of Peaches Anniversary Tour in 2022, this documentary seamlessly weaves together exclusive archival gems with dynamic tour footage capturing the transformative journey of Canadian Merrill Nisker into the internationally acclaimed cultural powerhouse Peaches.
From the inception of the stage show to the rigorous rehearsal and riveting performances, the film provides an intimate look at the inner workings of a tour led by this beloved and globally celebrated icon. As a feminist musician, producer, director, and performance artist, Peaches has spent over two decades challenging gender stereotypes, solidifying her status alongside pop and music industry icons. Her fearless originality has challenged social norms, dismantled stereotypes, and confronted patriarchal power structures. Through biting wit, she advocates for LGBTQIA+ rights and tackles issues of gender and sexual identity, leaving an indelible mark on popular culture.
It tells the story of a newly pregnant couple who are forced to take in an ailing, estranged stepmother.
Three ethnic school kids from Sydney's western suburbs form a punk band in the 80s. The Hard-Ons fight racism, the music industry and the rise of grunge with their pop punk noise, irreverent humour and absolute commitment to just being themselves. 'The pricks with the three different skin colours' - Ray Ahn
Anthony Robles, despite being born without a right leg, rises to become a NCAA Division 1 Champion wrestler ultimately winning a national championship against the school that rejected him, national powerhouse Iowa. (Based on the book Unstoppable: From Underdog to Undefeated: How I Became a Champion, by Anthony Robles and Austin Murphy.)
On the last night of 1999, two high school juniors crash a New Years Eve party, only to find themselves fighting for their lives in this dial-up disaster comedy.
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