Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) is celebrating its 70th birthday this year. And to mark the milestone, it’s just unveiled a bumper 2022 program full of world premieres, headline-grabbing international features and platinum-anniversary events.

The first in-cinema festival since 2019 will run from August 4 to 21 across Melbourne – with screenings throughout regional Victoria from the 12th to the 21st. And there’ll also be a substantial online component, which will run from the 11th to the 28th.

Released today, the full program includes 257 features, 102 shorts and 12 XR (extended reality) works. Among them are 18 world premieres and 177 Australian premieres, plus a record 61 films straight out of Cannes.

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“MIFF in 2022 marks an extraordinary welcome back to Melbourne cinemas and beyond following two years of Covid-19 disruption – a full-scale program, suburban and regional expansions across nine country Victorian settings, and Australia-wide access to an incredible film program via MIFF Play,” artistic director Al Cossar said in a statement.

The headliners include Holy Spider, which follows a journalist as she descends into the dark underbelly of the Iranian holy city of Mashhad (she’s played by Zar Amir-Ebrahimi, who recently won Best Actress at Cannes) and Three Thousand Years of Longing by local director George Miller, which features Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba.

There’s also Triangle of Sadness, the winner of this year’s Palme d’Or – Cannes’s highest honour – by Swedish director Ruben Ostlund. It’s been billed as a class warfare comedy and it earnt an eight-minute standing ovation at its Cannes premiere. Also from Cannes comes an all-encompassing, technicolour journey through the life and work of icon David Bowie, with artfully restored and never-before-seen footage.

You can also catch Normal People’s Paul Mescal in family drama Aftersun; Margaret Qualley and Joe Alwyn in the sexually charged Stars at Noon, based on the 1986 novel; and Viggo Mortensen and Kristen Stewart in body horror Crimes of the Future.

There are also 11 premieres within the MIFF Premiere Fund, including opening night film Of an Age, a beautiful coming-of-age tale by up-and-coming Aussie filmmaker Goran Stolevski; and the environmentally centred Franklin by Kasimir Burgess.

Other highlights include The Stranger, a tense true-crime thriller starring Joel Edgerton and Sean Harris, and Petrol, the second feature by Alena Lodkina.

“On top of everything,” Cossar added, “We turn 70 years young – a milestone to celebrate by charting, across our program, the special connection MIFF has with Melbourne itself.”

The festival’s Melbourne on Film retrospective lines up with MIFF’s book release, Melbourne on Film: Cinema That Defines Our City, and features such films as black comedy Death in Brunswick and the Michael Hutchence-led Dogs in Space.

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This year’s program will also help catapult rising talent with the launch of the Bright Horizons Competition, the winner of which will receive a $140,000 prize.

And a raft of special events will be happening across the state. That includes Hear My Eyes at the Astor Theatre, a re-scoring of iconic Aussie crime drama Chopper by Bad Seeds member (and multi-instrumentalist) Mick Harvey. At Hamer Hall, Orchestra Victoria will perform scores from beloved Victoria-shot films like Mad Max and Picnic at Hanging Rock, and Bluey’s creator Joe Brumm will appear in conversation.

MIFF runs from August 4 to 28 across Victoria, with tickets on sale on July 15. Find more information and the full program online.

miff.com.au