“The plasma of space, the tissue of dreams”
MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2025
ACMI
THE CAPITOL
FORUM
HOYTS
KINO
Thursday 7th – Sunday 24th August, 2025
As is tradition, and for when the memory needs a nudge, a record of what was. The beautiful 41-films-seen holiday, and our walks to and from the various theatres, giving us a reflective pause, as our legs did the work.
Monday 11th August
The Love That Remains (Dir. Hlynur Pálmason), 2025
Young Mothers (Dir. Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne), 2025
Samsara (Dir. Garin Nugroho), 2024
The Sealed Soil (Dir. Marva Nabili), 1977
Little, Big, and Far (Dir. Jem Cohen), 2024
Olivia & the Clouds (Dir. Tomás Pichardo Espaillat), 2024
Sorry, Baby (Dir. Eva Victor), 2025
By Design (Dir. Amanda Kramer), 2025
Between all things, yet also, everything. Eight MIFF2025 sessions in. 35, give or take, more to go. From the sharp intake of breath that is the Monkey King mesmerisation of Samsara (@film.samsara) to thinking about dioramas depicting worlds already on the edge of disappearing, and the vast territories between them. The silent, anything but, and the little, big, and far, interwoven.
Thursday 11th August
Lucky Lu (Dir. Lloyd Lee Choi), 2025
Los capítulos perdidos (Lost Chapters) (Dir. Lorena Alvarado) 2024, screened alongside Isabela Costa’s short film Ana & Oto, 2024
Happy Holidays (Dir. Scandar Copti), 2024
Monk in Pieces (Dir. Billy Shebar), 2025
Two Prosecutors (Dir. Sergei Loznitsa), 2025
Hanami (Dir. Denise Fernandes), 2024
Stranger Eyes (Dir. Yeo Siew Hua), 2024
Locating tender moments of awareness and connection lead us to quietly, slowly amassing a library of Venezuelan authors, a remote volcanic island in Cape Verde, and a celebration of finding your own way documentary about Meredith Monk that couldn’t have been better timed.
Of her process, as sound ripples its way through her body to reach her mouth, to Monk “each piece [she creates] is kind of a world, and I feel that the piece tells me what it needs. Does it need images? Does it need light? Does it need objects or not? Is it just a music piece? That’s part of my exploration every time…. What I’m interested in is finding new forms between the cracks of the art forms….”
By sliding the “filter of language” to one side, the things you can tap into! Monk’s revelation, spliced together from a sequence of various interviews over the years, that her “voice could be an instrument, and within [that voice] was the whole world — male and female, different ages, animals, different ways of producing sound, very ancient, and right at the center of the body” tickled a ‘keep going’ nerve. “That was the beginning of knowing that the voice is the primary instrument of human beings. And it has the power to travel through time, from the ancient to now. The voice is the center of my work. The voice is my river.”
Seven more films in, many more to go, and the chance to call in on a family of Eastern-barred bandicoots to see how they are faring.
Saturday 16th August
DJ Ahmet (Dir. Georgi M. Unkovski), 2025
Promised Sky (Dir. Erige Sehiri), 2025
Folktales (Dir. Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady), 2025
Having opened the gate to their pen with a nudge, a flock of sheep wend their way through a forest rave. The bells around their necks tink-tonk a new soundtrack to the music. Things unlocked, in the literal and less literal sense, link our next trip of MIFF 2025 films. The triptch of personal realisations echo the Norns and the Weaving of Fate (from Norse mythology) where ‘the past’, ‘what is presently coming into being’, and ‘what shall be’ come to light. We begin in a farming community in North Macedonia, lured not just by the promise of sheep, but a kelidoscope of music and dance; find community, and hope, however faint, in “everything’s broken” Tunis; and huskies that hold a key that “unlocks something inside a person” in Norway. “The dogs teach us to be more human, maybe more patient.”
18 films so far.
Monday 18th August
little boy (Dir. James Benning), 2024, screened alongside Ting Su’s short film Daily Worker, 2024
My Father’s Shadow (Dir. Akinola Davies Jr), 2024
Familiar Touch (Dir. Sarah Friedland), 2025
Imagine (Dir. Tyson Yunkaporta and Jack Manning Bancroft), 2025
A Private Life (Dir. Rebecca Zlotowski), 2025
From the perspective of memory, rebuffering, two tales revealed from the position of being under the skin of the protagonists chimed. Two young brothers followed their father around Lagos and tried to make sense of the pieces they gleaned from the table of adults. Was it something that happened, or something they wished happened, a day with their father in the moments before the 1993 presidential election in Nigeria? Factual landmarks and ‘if only’ moments, in a rotation of the kaleidoscope, settled alongside one another in both My Father’s Shadow and Familiar Touch, where a former cook navigated her new-old world from the third floor of a care home’s Memory Lane.
A further suite of films to reside within, as the festival rolls on, and the possums, Helena, Harriet, Ed, and Bug get closer to their forthcoming spring release. Everything is letterboxed, in and out of the theatre.
Thursday 21st August
Mr. Nobody Against Putin (Dir. Pavel Talankin and David Borenstein), 2025
The Librarians (Dir. Kim A. Snyder), 2025
Cutting Through Rocks (Dir. Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni), 2025
It Was Just an Accident (Dir. Jafar Panahi), 2025
Black Ox (Dir. Tetsuichirô Tsuta), 2025
Yurlu | Country (Dir. Yaara Bou Melhem), 2024
Four documentaries, two films, six related devastations, as the last weekend of MIFF draws near.
The tenth verse on Oxherding, at the tail of the credits for Black Ox read: “leave the theatre and live in the wild”.
But do so, in the awareness and resulting action that “tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil” (Thomas Mann quote from The Magic Mountain featured in The Librarians title sequence, @thelibrariansfilm).
Clean Up Wittenoom: Help us take action—donate now to support the legal fight to #CleanUpWittenoom and protect future generations.
Ten Verses on Oxherding, Japan, 1278 (The Met)
Friday 22nd August
The President’s Cake (Dir. Hasan Hadi), 2025
What Does That Nature Say To You (Dir. Hong Sang-soo), 2025
Resurrection (Dir. Bi Gan), 2025
Punku (Dir. J.D. Fernández Molero), 2025
Nouvelle Vague (Dir. Richard Linklater), 2025
We head to the lecture theatre in building 80 to give a talk on digital platforms (as part of Art as Enterprise Workshop, School of Art, RMIT University) and how our code of practice of ‘never rushing a possum’ applies equally to other areas in our life. About chip, chipping away at something, little but often, until a path is forged. Someting that yesterday’s documentary about the “first elected councilwoman of her Iranian village, Sara Shahverdi” discovered in her bid to break “long-held patriarchal traditions by training teenage girls to ride motorcycles and stopping child marriages”. The little by little approach, the cutting through the rock face, with persistence. We talked about how we use our site and social media to communicate, reveal (and revel in) the interconnectedness of everything we do, find patterns, and show behind the scenes, but, of course, the only photo we have of this morning session is of two pigeons behind their pigeon spike balcony, flouting the intentions of the people who installed said spikes with an ascribed joyful aplomb. Catching sight of pigeons making a roost in cityscapes, particularly where they are being detered, or cockatoos removing anti-bird spikes with ease and purpose, is, unsurprisingly, a little talked about something that makes us smile. This make-do rebellion, and will to live regardless of human selfishness.
We conduct a phone interview about our Scott Alley commission (@metrotunnelart), perched on the edge of a tombstone, on a walk with Wallaby and Lottie.
We think about the films we have seen. With a shoutout to nine-year-old Lamia and her companion, a rooster named Hindi, in The President’s Cake, who lived in Iraq’s Mesopotamian marshes, set in 1990.
The exclamation of the man several rows behind: “Ah! Why’d you have to show that!?” (During a scene in which an eyeball is extracted from its socket in Punku.)
Five more films down, and eight* to go.
*With apologies to The Ice Tower and Youth (Homecoming)
Sunday 24th August
Maya, Give Me a Title (Dir. Michel Gondry), 2024, screened alongside JR and Alice Rohrwacher’s An Urban Allegory, 2024, which included elements from Chiroptera in collaboration with Paris Opera
Mirrors No. 3 (Dir. Christian Petzold), 2025
Brand New Landscape (Dir. Yuiga Danzuka), 2025
Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (Dir. Quay Brothers), 2024
Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk (Dir. Sepideh Farsi), 2025
The Blue Trail (Dir. Gabriel Mascaro), 2025
It was perhaps folly to think we could get to and remain awake for an early session of Wang Bing’s 152-minute magnum opus on the last day of MIFF (a reflection of our stamina, naturally, as opposed to the film). Folly to think we could emerge from Hong Sang-soo’s What Does That Nature Say To You and not need to partake in such a feast, any feast, with or without the ensuing awkward moment (in the film, that is). Folly, but there you are.
In our tiredness, we have sometimes spliced together films to make our own desired endings. We tear a scene, as if paper, in the spirit of Maya, Give Me a Title, fashioning legs and rewinding earthquake outcomes.
Through the keyhole, through a glass pane, through eyelids mid-blink, through gauze. Deciphering the beautiful, dream-state blur of finding oneself multiple stop animation figures “clack[ing] around in loose slippers” in the Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass.
The last weekend in the artificial world that wraps around Hoyts, the August 24th National Day of Action: March for Palestine before State Library Victoria, and, selected for cinematic close at the Capitol, reading our destiny in the rare blue trail of the snail (The Blue Trail).
Monday 25th August
Compiling my top ten films, in the spirit of a dream feast. If I could only see ten, these are the ten, for me, now.
Samsara
Promised Sky
Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass
Black Ox
Monk in Pieces
What Does That Nature Say To You
It Was Just an Accident
Lucky Lu
Cutting Through Rocks
DJ Ahmet
Farewell, #MIFF2025.
@melbfilmfest
Image credit: Film still from Tetsuichirô Tsuta’s Black Ox, 2025
The title for this memory post is borrowed from The Street of Crocodiles.
“On that night the sky laid bare its internal construction in many sections which, like quasi-anatomical exhibits, showed the spirals and whorls of light, the pale-green solids of darkness, the plasma of space, the tissue of dreams.”
— Bruno Schulz
