Antenna Documentary Film Festival 2024

Overview

Antenna Documentary Film Festival returns for 2024 from Friday, February 9–Monday, February 19, with 52 titles on its lineup. Opening the event: The Gullspång Miracle, which won an award at the 2023 Tribeca Film Festival, and focuses on a family unexpectedly brought back together via the purchase of an apartment. If you need an example to demonstrate how fact is always stranger and wilder than fiction, Antenna is kicking off with exactly that.

While the bulk of the event's screenings will take place at Dendy Newtown and the Ritz in Randwick, the festival is making a trip to the Sydney Opera House for another of 2024's big standouts. Ryuichi Sakamoto|Opus covers the final recorded concert by the late, great The Revenant composer, who passed away in March 2023, and will screen in Antenna's closing slot.

No stranger to Werner Herzog's docos, the fest also boasts the German filmmaker's Theatre of Thought on its lineup. This time, the Into the Inferno, Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds and The Fire Within: A Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft director explores the human brain.

Still among the big-name helmers, Antenna will screen Wang Bing's Youth (Spring), Claire Simon's Our Body and Alex Gibney's In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon, with the latter joining the Oscar-winning director's resume alongside everything from Taxi to the Dark Side and We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks to The Armstrong Lie and Going Clear: Scientology & the Prison of Belief.

Other on-screen highlights include the Oscar-shortlisted 20 Days in Mariupol, with journalists Mystlav Chernov, Vasilisa Stepanenko and Evgeniy Maloletka in the Ukrainian city immediately after Vladimir Putin announced a "special military operation"; Thank You Very Much, about comedian Andy Kaufman; and A Still Small Voice, hailing from Midnight Family director Luke Lorentzen and following a chaplain-in-training at New York City's Mount Sinai Hospital.

There's also Samsara, which aims to take the audience through the Buddhist concept of birth, life, death and rebirth; Knit's Island, which is shot entirely in the DayZ video game (and from 963 hours spent in it); and Sundance-winner Kokomo City, which is also on the 2024 Mardi Gras Film Festival lineup.

Plus, John Wilson from HBO TV show How to with John Wilson is coming to Antenna in-person to present a selection of films that proved instrumental in shaping his work. In 2023, he did the same at New York's Anthology Film Archives, with Sydney scoring a version of the same series, as well as a masterclass about his approach.

Antenna's DocTalk day of chats is also back, which is where Wilson will get chatting. Heading to the State Library of NSW on Monday, February 12 for a day of discussion about the documentary form — spanning covering Indigenous topics, ways of viewing culture and sound design for docos.