Calling all cinephiles: the Sydney Film Festival just launched a huge program for 2025, and a galaxy of engrossing screen stories is set to take over cinemas across the city. Running from June 4–15, the regal State Theatre once again serves as the glittering centrepiece of the action, and this year also sees the addition of the iconic Sydney Opera House as a screening venue.
In 2025, the Festival will present 201 films from 70 countries – including 17 world premieres, 6 international premieres, and 137 Australian premieres, bringing together hundreds of new international and local stories.
This year’s festival will open with the Australian-made Together. The debut feature of Michael Shanks, it brings the gross-out body horror The Substance stans love to shriek at, as a co-dependent couple played by real-life lovers Alison Brie and Dave Franco get a bit too close for comfort.
With 201 films from 70 countries in store, the program also includes retrospective sidebars on persecuted Iranian New Wave filmmaker Jafar Panahi, American game-changer Elaine May and acclaimed Indian documentarian Nishtha Jain, there’s tonnes on offer. But where to begin? We’ve got you covered – read on for our critic’s picks.
Here are our top ten top picks for the 72nd Sydney Film Festival:
Dangerous Animals
After decades of America cutting our lunch with wave after wave of killer shark movies, the home team bites back. The Loved Ones director Sean Byrne’s Dangerous Animals, drifting in direct from the Cannes Film Festival, casts Suicide Squad actor Jai Courtney as a Gold Coast-based tour guide by day and hark-obsesses secret serial killer by night. He sets his nefarious sights on Yellowstone lead Hassie Harrison’s imperilled surfer in this snappy scream-a-thon. (Find screening details and book tickets over here.)
Blue Moon
Ethan Hawke has chalked up a bunch of beautiful films with director Richard Linklater since appearing opposite Julie Delpy in dreamy romance Before Sunrise an astonishing 40 years ago. Hawke’s far from heartthrob territory in their latest collaboration, bittersweet biopic Blue Moon. Debuting at Berlinale, this stagey film traces the tragic decline of once-great lyricist Lorenz Hart as he’s set adrift from his former writing partner, composer Richard Rodgers (Andrew ‘hot priest’ Scott), on the night Oklahoma! Debuts. (Find screening details and book tickets over here.)
Lesbian Space Princess
Mighty Adelaide filmmaking duo Leela Varghese and Emma Hough Hobbs’ fun and sweary animated debut feature took out the queer Teddy Award at this year’s Berlinale. With big Adventure Time vibes, it follows the woe-to-go intergalactic adventures of Princess Saira (Shabana Azeez). She’s just been brutally dumped by her bounty-hunter girlfriend Kiki (Bernie Van Tiel) but sets out to rescue her from kidnapping straight white maliens, as voiced by Mark Bonanno, Broden Kelly and Zachary Ruane (aka Aunty Donna). (Find screening details and book tickets over here.)
Sorry, Baby
A big buzzy bundle of joy when it premiered at Sundance, Sorry, Baby is Billions star Eva Victor’s debut feature as writer and director. She also stars as Agnes, a small-town English lit college professor. When Mickey 17 lead Naomi Ackie’s Lydie comes to visit, it becomes clear that a painful memory hovers in the air between them. Told in a wistful, non-linear style, this is less a film about that past trauma and more about what comes after, as the embrace of friendship and resilience leads to healing. (Find screening details and book tickets over here.)
The Mastermind
Josh O’Connor cut a roguish dash as a nattily suited tomb raider in Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher’s luminous La Chimera. He’s up to no good again as an art thief in The Mastermind, a ‘70s Massachusetts-set heist flick with a difference from Certain Women director Kelly Reichardt. Also starring Licorice Pizza lead Alana Haim – aka one-third of the eponymous pop trio Haim – it’s set to debut in competition at Cannes and also features First Cow actor John Magaro. (Find screening details and book tickets over here.)
On Swift Horses
If Aussie star Jacob Elordi got you thirsty with his appearance in Saltburn, slurp up another chance to see him in queerly beloved mode in this sweeping 1950s Kansas-set drama from director Daniel Minahan. Adapted from the novel by Shannon Pufahi, On Swift Horses casts Elordi as Julius, a poker player who’s just back from the war and put up by his brother Lee (Will Poulter). Only, Lee’s fiancé Muriel (Daisy Edgar-Jones) has the hots for them both, and Julius has his own secret passions. It’s bound to get emotionally messy. (Find screening details and book tickets over here.)
All That’s Left of You
If you’ve been distraught over the atrocities live-streaming out of Gaza daily and increasing settler violence bubbling up in the West Bank, as detailed in powerful Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land, you might find succour in this Sundance debuting drama from Palestinian-American filmmaker Cherien Dabis. Taking us from the 1948 Nakba until almost now, we follow the fate of one family as their world is turned upside down, and how hope remains even in the face of desolation. (Find screening details and book tickets over here.) (You may also wish to check out Areeb Zuaiter’s documentary Yalla Parkour.)
Death of an Undertaker
You might know him best as Oly’s flighty big bro Bowie on Bump, or as one of the tortured soldiers in the Elordi-led war drama The Narrow Road to the Deep North, but Sydneysider Christian Byers steps up to his debut directorial feature at this year’s SFF. An ambitious experimental film shot over eight years in a real Leichhardt funeral parlour with non-professional actors, it also features Byers as a part-time attendant grappling with mortality and possibly coming apart at the seams in this eerily absurdist undertaking. (Find screening details and book tickets over here.)
Deaf
One of the most devastatingly beautiful films bowing at this year’s Berlinale, where it won the Panorama Audience Award, writer/director Eva Libertad’s debut feature (a big theme this year) expands on her lauded short of the same name. Both star her remarkable real-life sister Miriam Garloa as Ángela, a sculptor and deaf woman expecting a baby with hearing partner Héctor (Álvaro Cervantes). But after a traumatic birth, their loving relationship is stretched to its limits by their wildly diverging experiences as new parents. (Find screening details and book tickets over here.)
Chain Reactions
Documentarian Alexandre O. Philippe delivers wicked deep dives on everything from how zombie movies reflect our rotten society to the mythological fear-mining of Ridley Scott’s Alien via the liminal nightmares of David Lynch. His latest sacrificial offering, Chain Reactions, examines the eviscerating impact of Tobe Hooper’s 1974 classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre through the bleeding eyes of horror icons, including best-selling author Stephen King and Australia’s very own occult oracle, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. (Find screening details and book tickets over here.)
The 72nd Sydney Film Festival runs from June 4–15, 2025. Tickets and Flexipasses are on sale now, visit sff.org.au for info and bookings.
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