Short days and cold nights mean a lot of things for the great city of Melbourne, but one of the biggest events on the Victorian capital’s winter calendar is the glorious Melbourne International Film Festival.
MIFF 2017 is set to take over screens across the inner city from early August, and organisers today have revealed the first look at what’s to come in this year’s gargantuan programme.
The First Glance of this year’s program sports a hefty 30 flicks, and is being headlined this year by a rather unusual screening of Jane Campion‘s hotly anticipated second season of ‘Top of the Lake.’
Ahead of its premiere in September, MIFF is playing host to the entire second season of the drama series, which this time around features Nicole Kidman starring alongside season one main player Elisabeth Moss.
The entire six-episode second season will screen in three concurrent two-hour sessions this coming MIFF, and will follow Moss as Detective Robin Griffin, returning to Sydney to rebuild her life. This time around, the plot follows Griffin as she investigates the mystery surrounding the body of an Asian child, washed ashore in Bondi.
Elsewhere, burgeoning US director Alex Ross Perry will bring his latest feature ‘Golden Exits‘ to MIFF for its Australian premiere. Sporting an ensemble cast that features Chloe Sevigny, Emily Browning, Jason Schwartzman, and Adam Horowitz, the film is reportedly a moody and unnerving exercise in minimalism that premiered at Sundance earlier this year.
Also receiving its Australian premiere at MIFF 2017 is James Gray‘s glorious-looking adventure epic ‘The Lost City of Z,’ based on the real-life explorer Percy Fawcett‘s attempts to locate the mythical city of El Dorado.
If Charlie Hunnam, Robert Pattinson, and Sienna Miller hauling themselves through the steamy Amazon sounds like your idea of a good time, you’re gonna want to start queuing up for tickets now.
Australian director Kriv Stenders is pulling double duty at this year’s festival, firstly with ‘The Go-Betweens – Right Here‘: a deep and meaningful dive into the storied history of one of Australia’s most beloved indie bands…
…and the heartstopping ‘Australia Day,’; set over an intense 12-hour period on January 26th when three unrelated worlds collide. The film takes an extremely close look one of Australia’s most fraught debates, with Bryan Brown heading up an extensive cast.
Other highlights dotted throughout the First Glance programme include Terrence Malick‘s pseudo musical ‘Song to Song‘ starring Ryan Gosling, Rooney Mara, Michael Fassbender, and Natalie Portman; a singing comic satire of post-Brexit England in ‘The Party,’ starring Kristin Scott Thomas and Patricia Clarkson; and Raoul Peck‘s Oscar-nominated documentary ‘I Am Not Your Negro,’ which focuses on the race relations issue in the US through the eyes of civil rights activist and queer icon James Baldwin, with accompanying narration from Samuel L. Jackson.
But one that’ll undoubtedly garner enhanced buzz as the festival gets closer is ‘Patty Cake$,’ starring young Aussie actor Danielle Macdonald as a “plus-sized white girl” from New Jersey seeking fame and fortune as a gangster rapper. Macdonald received a standing ovation for her performance at Sundance, in a role that saw her heralded as the breakout star of this year’s festival.
There’s heaps more to wrap your eyes around just in the First Glance alone, and you can scope out all the films in the first little look at the programme over at the MIFF official website.
MIFF 2017 is scheduled to run across Melbourne from August 3rd until August 20th.
Hell yeah, folks. Go get yourself a good flick.
Source: MIFF.
