Australia’s Adelaide Film Festival (Oct 19-30) has unveiled its first line-up since shifting from a biennial to an annual event, including 12 titles in competition.
This year’s event comprises 129 films, of which 22 world premieres, from more than 40 countries.
The competition features include Indonesian thriller Autobiography, which scooped a Fipresci prize at the weekend after playing in the Horizons strand of the Venice Film Festival. The debut feature of film critic-turned-director Makbul Mubarak is about a young man who keeps house for a retired general, finding himself torn between loyalty and justice as the mayoral election approaches.
Also selected to compete is Rodrigo Reyes’s Mexican documentary Sanson And Me, which won best film at Sheffield DocFest in June and chronicles an unlikely friendship between two migrants.
Scroll down for full list of competition titles
The festival will open and close with world premieres of features by filmmakers from South Australia, of which Adelaide is the state capital.
The opening film is Madeleine Parry’s The Angels: Kickin’ Down The Door, a documentary about influential local band The Angels. AFF will close with Causeway Films’ Talk To Me, a psychological horror that marks the feature debut of Danny and Michael Philippou, the brothers behind popular YouTube channel RackaRacka.
Since 2020, the AFF has presented a Change Award for films depicting positive social and environmental impact and the five contestants are Jerzy Skolimowski’s Eo, Becky Hutner’s Fashion Reimagined, Lars Ostenfeld’s Into The Ice, Rhian Skirving and Bruce Permezel’s Greenhouse By Joost and Sinem Saban’s Luku Ngarra.
In recognition of his “outstanding contribution to screen culture”, producer David Jowsey will receive this year’s Don Dunstan Award. The producer of Sweet Country, Mystery Road and Mad Bastards is now producing Ivan Sen’s Limbo, starring Simon Baker and filmed in the mining town of Coober Pedy, which is principally underground.
Several of the world premieres selected for this year’s festival received investment from the Adelaide Film Festival Investment Fund.
They include Matt Vesely’s sci-fi thriller Monolith and Rolf de Heer’s mystery drama The Survival of Kindness, his first solo feature since Charlie’s Country, which won the audience award at Adelaide in 2013 and played in Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 2014.
Documentaries in the line-up that benefitted from the fund include Jolyon Hoff’s Watandar, My Countryman, about a man exploring his Afghan-Australian identity; Laurence Billiet and Rachael Antony’s The Giants, a portrait of Bob Brown, one of the country’s best-known environmentalists; and Larissa Behrendt’s You Can Go Now, about the First Nations artist and activist Richard Bell, who has an installation in the city during the festival.
The Last Daughter, also a fund film recipient and world premiere, sees First Nations woman Brenda Matthews turn the camera on herself and her search for her white foster family. She co-directs with Nathaniel Schmidt.
Adelaide Film Festival 2022 competition titles
Autobiography (Indo)
Dir. Makbul Mubarak
Dos Estaciones (Mex-Fr)
Dir. Juan Pablo Gonzalez
Fledglings (Pol)
Dir. Lidia Duda
The Hamlet Syndrome (Ukr)
Dirs. Elwira Niewiera, Piotr Rosolowski
Heusera (Mex-Peru)
Dir. Michelle Garza Cervera
Hidden Letters (China-US-Nor)
Dirs. Violet Du Feng, Zhao Qing
Klondike (Ukr-Türkiye)
Dir. Maryna Er Gorbach
Metronom (Rom-Fr)
Dir. Alexandru Belc
The Plains (Australia)
Dir. David Easteal
Sansón and Me (Mex)
Dir. Rodrigo Reyes
War Pony (US)
Dirs. Riley Keough, Gina Gammell
Whina (NZ)
Dirs. James Napier Robertson, Paula Whetu Jones
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