When Adelaide Film Festival returns for its 2025 season (Wednesday, October 15 to Sunday, October 26) in cinemas across the South Australian capital, it will do so with a multinational program of 123 films — including 27 international premieres and 37 Australian premieres.
The festival is bookended by the opening night and closing night galas, which will see the premieres of “Jimpa” and “Wolfram.” The former, directed by Sophie Hyde, stars Olivia Colman as Hannah, who travels to Amsterdam with her non-binary teenager Frances (Aud Mason-Hyde) to visit her gay grandfather Jim, played by John Lithgow.
The latter, an Adelaide Film Festival exclusive and sequel to “Sweet Country,” stars Deborah Mailman alongside Erroll Shand, Joe Bird, Thomas M Wright, Matt Nable and Pedrea Jackson in a frontier western story set in 1930s Australia, against a backdrop of industrialism and colonial brutality.
Adelaide Film Festival will also exclusively present Causeway Films’ “The Fox,” directed by Dario Russo, and starring Emily Browning, Jai Courtney and Damon Herriman — supported by the Adelaide Film Festival Investment Fund — in a darkly comic folktale of an ordinary bloke and the fox who offers to solve all his problems.
AFF’s Friday Night Party features a screening of “Sirât,” which won the Jury prize in Cannes this year, where a father and his teenage son dive into Morocco’s outdoor rave circuit in search of a daughter and sister who’s gone missing.
The 2025 Special Presentations lineup features an exciting mix of films that made headlines in the fall festivals earlier this year. There’s the Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi and Mia Goth-starring “Frankenstein” from director Guillermo Del Toro, Yorgos Lanthimos’ Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons-starring dark conspiracy comedy “Bugonia,” Brendan Fraser and Hikari’s heartwarming “Rental Family” and Scott Coopers “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere” biopic starring Jeremy Allen-White and Odessa Young.
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On the retrospective program, there’s a screening of “Singin’ in the Rain” dedicated to the late, great Australian film critic David Stratton, and Robert Connolly’s 2009 war film “Balibo,” starring Anthony Paglia and Oscar Isaac in an on-screen depiction of Australian journalists who were killed investigating the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975. Connolly is also set to be awarded the Don Dunstan Award this year to recognise his contributions to Australian film.
To find out more about the full program, visit the Adelaide Film Festival website here.