MIFF Online
Watch along with 2025's Melbourne International Film Festival from your couch across 17 movie-filled days.
Overview
If you stream it, they will come: so discovered the Melbourne International Film Festival in 2020, when its biggest commitment to putting its lineup online resulted in the event's larget audience ever at the time. Now that the early days of the pandemic are over, the fest has been back in cinemas for a few years, and gloriously so. But for those located elsewhere around Australia, or folks who can't fit in as many IRL trips to the flicks as they'd like, or Melburnians who want to deploy every way there is to see as many movies possible during the festival, MIFF is still embracing its digital component.
MIFF Online kicks off after the IRL event and runs past its in-person counterpart's end, too. To stare at the big screen, you'll be heading along between Thursday, August 7–Sunday, August 24. To play along from your small screen of choice, the dates are Friday, August 15–Sunday, August 31.
While the range of films available to view on your couch via ACMI's Cinema 3 is smaller, there's still plenty to see — including both features and shorts.
A post-apocalyptic musical starring Tilda Swinton (The Room Next Door), Michael Shannon (The Bikeriders), George MacKay (The Beast) and Moses Ingram (Lady in the Lake), The End hails from The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence's Joshua Oppenheimer — and it's one of the highlights on 2025's MIFF Online program. Fittingly, so is Videoheaven, with Alex Ross Perry (Her Smell) paying tribute to the video-store era via a Maya Hawke (Inside Out 2)-narrated film essay solely comprised from movie and TV clips.
Or, you can visit Inner Mongolia's plains courtesy of To Kill a Mongolian Horse, catch coming-of-age tale Little Trouble Girls, explore a sunny sailing voyage with Kyuka Before Summer's End and join John Magaro (Materialists) for a road trip from Utah to Nebraska in Omaha. Tomorrow We Move from MIFF's 2025 Chantal Akerman retrospective is also available for viewing online, as is the new stop-motion animation Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass from the Brothers Quay (The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes) — plus SXSW-winning documentary Ghost Boy from Rodney Ascher (Room 237, The Nightmare, A Glitch in the Matrix), about a man with locked-in syndrome.
2025's MIFF spans Footy Shorts, a partnership with the AFL that's resulted in five short flicks focusing on the sport — and they're on the MIFF Online lineup as well. For more filmmaking in brief, the Australian shorts package is also making the leap to digital.
Information
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