The best fortnight of the Melbourne winter starts on Thursday. The Melbourne International Film Festival runs from 6 to 23 August — 18 days of in-cinema programming that quietly takes over a good chunk of the city's screens and gives everyone a reason to be somewhere dark and warm.
It opens with a gala: the Australian premiere of Wicker, from directors Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer, which the festival is billing as cheeky, star-studded and irresistible. Opening night is the one session that reliably sells out first.
The spread of venues is the part worth planning around. Nine metropolitan cinemas are hosting: ACMI, The Astor Theatre, The Capitol, Forum Melbourne, Hoyts Melbourne Central, IMAX Melbourne, Kino Cinema, Cinema Nova and Village Cinemas Crown. Between the Astor, the Capitol and the Forum, a decent share of the festival plays out in rooms worth seeing a film in for their own sake.
For anyone outside the city, nine regional venues are also screening, on 14 to 16 and 21 to 23 August — Showbiz Cinemas in Ballarat, Star Cinema Eaglehawk in Bendigo, Theatre Royal in Castlemaine, The Memo in Healesville, Peninsula Cinemas at Rosebud, Sale Cinema, Capitol Cinema in Warrnambool, and both The Pivotonian and Village Cinemas in Geelong.
The program leans on names that reward a big screen. Work from Pedro Almodóvar, Valeska Grisebach, Ryūsuke Hamaguchi and Andrey Zvyagintsev features, alongside a strand devoted to the Argentine director Lisandro Alonso, Frontiers. Documentaries get their own run, as do XR experiences, music on film and nature films.
The Bright Horizons competition returns as well, sitting alongside local features, short films and international titles. Among the pieces flagged in the lead-up are The Airport Chaplain, Rose and Dead Man's Wire.
If none of that fits around work, there is a streaming season running 14 to 30 August, which extends past the end of the in-cinema program and picks up the people who inevitably miss the session they meant to book.
It caps a genuinely strong winter for Melbourne's cultural institutions, arriving while ROME is still drawing crowds at Melbourne Museum. Between a Roman blockbuster and 18 days of cinema, the argument for staying indoors until spring is looking fairly comfortable.
