Women @ 71st Melbourne International Film Fest – Alexandra Heller-Nicholas reports

Melbourne was hit hard by the Covid-19 pandemic, the south-eastern Australian city second only to Buenos Aires in terms of the longevity of the lockdown period that stretched well beyond 2020 into mid-late 2021. Running in August every year, the Melbourne International Film Festival was one of many of the city’s major cultural events that was thrown into turmoil, landing readily on its feet as it transitioned to a virtual fest in an effort to keep its momentum going. While MIFF returned to cinemas in 2022 – albeit with a parallel “MIFF Play” online component now a seemingly permanent addition – it was really only 2023 that MIFF, well, felt like MIFF again. Mask sightings were rare, the festival’s famous long queues wound snake-like around major city blocks once again, and if not for the unseasonably warm weather it felt like business as usual.

With in-cinema programming running from 3 to 20 August – primarily in Melbourne, with a few regional showcases dotted around country Victoria – and MIFF Play streaming from 18 to 27 August, MIFF is not just a lengthy festival when compared to a number of other key international fests, but also one of the longest running; founded in 1952, its first edition was only a year after the first Berlin Film Festival, and it predates both the Toronto International Film Festival and Sundance by decades. TIFF is perhaps the most useful point of reference when it comes to trying to capture the tone of MIFF for those in the Northern Hemisphere; while both have a significant industry portion (amongst other things, MIFF hosts the annual 37ºSouth Market), both festivals are marked by a kind of proud, public facing euphoria and share a similar spirit of accessibility when it comes to welcoming audiences from all walks of life, not just industry players going through the motions.

For its 71st edition, the MIFF program included 267 films which included new features, retrospectives, short films, documentaries and XR experiences. Its opening night gala at The Capitol cinema – an art deco jewel in the crown of Melbourne screen culture – welcomed a packed house to a screening of the Melbourne-made Shayda, Noora Niasari’s semi-autobiographical film about being raised by an Iranian immigrant single mother desperately trying to flee an abusive marriage with your young daughter in the 1990s. The film had its world premiere at Sundance and has just been announced as playing TIFF’s forthcoming Centrepiece program, and stars the 2022 Cannes winner for Best Actress Zar Amir Ebrahimi in an exceptional performance complemented beautifully by that of her young co-star Selina Zahednia who plays the title character’s young daughter.

Zahednia established a trend across the festival for breakout performances from young girls, hers one of many jaw-dropping performances from pre-pubescent girls. Lola Campbell dazzled in Charlotte Regan’s joyful feature debut Scrapper as a kid whose mother has died and decides to raise herself. Nine-year-old Sofia Otero was the youngest person to ever win a Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance at the Berlinale earlier this year, an accolade fully deserved for her starring role in Lucía in Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren’s 20,000 of Bees, a beautiful story of a young trans girl’s struggle with her family’s varying responses to her identity. Louise Mauroy-Panzani plays a six-year-old whose world is shaken to its core when her Cape Verdean nanny announces she is returning home from France in Ama Gloria. And in Lila Avilés’s sophomore feature Tótem, seven-year-old Sol (Naíma Sentíes) spends the day with her family as they busily prepare themselves for a final birthday party for Sol’s terminally ill father.

Tótem, Shayda and Ama Gloria were featured in the festival’s Bright Horizons competition to champion the first and second films made by some of the world’s most exciting emerging filmmaking talents. Now in its second year, the Bright Horizons competition boasts one of the world’s largest film festival award prizes and this year also included Savanah Leaf’s Earth Mother, Sofia Alaoui’s Animalia and Molly Manning Walker’s How to Have Sex, amongst others. While Avilés and Tótem received a special jury mention from the jury headed by co-presidents Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman (co-directors of last year’s Bright Horizons Award-winning Neptune Frost), the $140,000 AUD (approx. $90,000 USD) main prize went to Franco-Senegalese filmmaker Ramata-Toulaye Sy’s astonishing Banel & Adama, the only debut feature in competition for the Palme d’Or at Cannes earlier this year.

Sy’s win marked a high profile year for Senegalese women filmmakers at MIFF, with one of the festival’s major retrospectives dedicated to the work of pioneering filmmaker Safi Faye, who sadly passed away earlier this year. Featuring documentaries, feature films and shorts, this programme included 1979’s Come and Work (the first African film that ever showed at Cannes), 1975’s Letter From My Village (the first feature made by a woman filmmaker from Sub-Saharan Africa), and Jean Rouch’s comedy Little By Little (1970) in which she starred with Damoure Zika, Illo Gaoudel and Lam Ibrahim. Other retrospective highlights included a sold-out screening of Australian filmmaker Sue Brooks’s Japanese Story, a powerful drama starring a young Toni Colette which originally premiered in Un Certain Regard at Cannes that same year.

But like most film festivals, it’s the new release headliners that most reliably get the bums on seats, to opt for the vernacular, and this year’s MIFF was no different. Much excitement understandably surrounded the screenings of Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or winning Anatomy of a Fall, and festival guest Celine Song was in town to introduce her powerhouse A24 smash Past Lives, also appearing in a sold out In Conversation event at the Wheeler Centre. Other big names to feature at MIFF this year from women filmmakers included Jessica Hausner’s Club Zero, Catherine Breillat’s Last Summer, Joanna Hogg’s Eternal Daughter, Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera, and Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up.