Melbourne Film Festival reveals competition line-up with ‘Shayda’ set as opening film

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Shayda

Source: Sundance Film Festival

‘Shayda’

Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) has revealed the 11 titles in the running for its $93,400 (A$140,000) competition prize, and will open with Shayda by Australian-Iranian director Noora Niasari.

The festival, which runs August 3-20, unveiled the titles at a programme launch this evening (July 11). Debut and second features are eligible for the Bright Horizons competition, which was introduced last year for the 70^th edition, but debuts undoubtedly dominate this year.

Scroll down for full list of competition titles

In fact, the only undeniably second film is Mexican director Lila Avilés’ Tótem. This portrait of a family during a birthday gathering at a time of upheaval – and told through the eyes of a girl – won the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury when it played in competition at the Berlinale in February.

Whether Ama Gloria is French director Marie Amachoukeli’s first or second feature is up for discussion: she directed Party Girl, which won the Camera D’Or at Cannes in 2014, but has worked alongside two others. In Ama Gloria, which opened Cannes’ Critics’ Week, a young girl accompanies her beloved nanny Gloria on a trip to Gloria’s Cape Verde homeland.

Cannes’ fingerprints are on many of the competition films. Pham Thien An’s three-hour Vietnam-set Inside The Yellow Cocoon Shell, about a young many suddenly loaded with serious responsibilities as the result of a sudden death, won the Camera d’Or. Molly Manning Walker’s How To Have Sex, about a trio of UK school graduates partying hard in Crete, won the top prize in Un Certain Regard.

Zar Amir-Ebrahimi, who won the best actress award at Cannes last year for her performance in Holy Spider, returns in Noora Niasari’s Australian feature Shayda, the story of an Iranian mother and daughter who find refuge in an Australian women’s shelter.

Shayda, which won the audience award at Sundance, has been set as MIFF’s opening film and marks one of two homegrown titles alongside Mark Leonard Winter’s The Rooster. Both received financial support from the MIFF Premiere Fund.

The Rooster is billed as a dramatization of masculinity, mental health and the solace found in companionship and will receive its world premiere at MIFF.

Three documentaries with support from the fund, Australia’s Open, Memory Film: A Film Makers Diary and This Is Going To Be Big also have their world premieres in the programme.

The programme comprises 267 films and the closing night title has been set as Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman’s musical mockumentary Theater Camp.

Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman, co-directors of last year’s Bright Horizons winner Neptune Frost, are the co-presidents of the jury. Documentarian Alexandre O. Philippe, past Camera d’Or winner Anthony Chen, Australian performer Zoe Terakes and Indonesian director Kamila Andini are also on the jury.

A new award that recognises a first nations film creative has been introduced this year.

Regional screenings run for most of the period and the festival will retain the hybrid format adoped during the pandemic, with the online schedule running August 18-27.