Overview
Being selected for the Melbourne International Film Festival's Bright Horizons is an achievement. Only one movie each year can take home the competition's $140,000 prize, however. 2025's just-announced victor: A Poet, which follows a once-celebrated literary figure who is having trouble writing, premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival and marks the second feature by Simón Mesa Soto (Amparo).
The fest's annual competition for emerging filmmakers has given its coveted accolade to "a tragicomic satire and microcosm of melancholy
and irreverence", as the Bright Horizons Jury led by Aftersun director Charlotte Wells described A Poet. The same group also made its pick for MIFF's Best Australian Director of 2025, with photographer James J Robinson winning the award for his filmmaking debut First Light.
Bright Horizons has been part of MIFF's program since 2022, when Australia's oldest film festival started its yearly prize for new directorial voices. Afrofuturist musical Neptune Frost won the award in its initial year — which Aftersun contended for — followed by Senegalese-French love story Banel & Adama in 2023, then Canadan dramedy Universal Language in 2024.
"A Poet depicts Óscar, a failed poet turned reluctant mentor drifting between aspiration and self-destruction. The film is a biting fable of art as both an inescapable burden and a personal compass, breaking convention through its refreshingly brisk pace, unpretentious use of 16mm cinematography, deadpan performances by a mostly first-timer cast and pared-back jazzy score," the 2025 jury continued about A Poet.
"The film's balancing act of unflinching character study and social satire marks Simón Mesa Soto as a vital voice in contemporary Latin American cinema."
Dijana Risteska
Of First Light — a Bright Horizons competitor, too — as the Best Australian Director recipient, Wells, Pavements and Videoheaven director Alex Ross Perry, Harvest filmmaker Athina Rachel Tsangari, composer and musician Caitlin Yeo (Last Days of the Space Age), author and screenwriter Nam Le (The Boat), performer Tamala (Late Night with the Devil) and IMDb founder Col Needham said: "James J Robinson's First Light is a moving and powerful meditation on faith, institutional corruption and moral awakening".
"The film is anchored by a pitchperfect performance from Ruby Ruiz [Expats] and a sensorial mise en scène, inviting the audience into the spiritual grandeur of the landscape and the sacred intimacy of the convent to interrogate, alongside Sister Yolanda, not only the crime at hand, but also the Catholic Church and modern society itself."
"As the first Australia–Philippines co-production to debut at MIFF, First Light not only showcases Robinson's promise as a cineaste but also marks a noteworthy milestone in cross-cultural cinema."
2025 is the third year of MIFF's Uncle Jack Charles Award, aka the First Nations Film Creative Award, as won this year by Yarrenyty Arltere Artists the art direction of short The Fix-It-Man and the Fix-It-Wooman.
If you went to the festival and had your say in the Audience Award voting, you also contributed to 2025's winners lineup, too. After Australian documentaries Voice and Left Write Hook shared the accolade in 2024, another has won it outright in 2025: the aged care-focused Careless.
For those who haven't caught them at MIFF, add the recipients of this year's accolades to your must-see list ASAP.
Check out the trailers for A Poet, Careless andThe Fix-It-Man and the Fix-It-Wooman below:
The 2025 Melbourne International Film Festival runs from Thursday, August 7–Sunday, August 24. For more information, visit the MIFF website.
Bright Horizons Jury image: Dijana Risteska.