Change Award

AFF’s influential Change Award, established in 2020 for cinema with a positive or environmental impact and which express new directions for humanity, sees five films competing for a $5000 cash prize. The Jury comprises three young women leaders in environmental, social and cultural change – campaigner Aira Firdaus, marine biologist Anita Thomas and AACTA-nominated producer Bonnie McBride. The films are Dust to Dust, directed by Kosai Sekine, about a renowned Japanese fashion designer who is creating a new material from fast fashion’s dumped cheap synthetics; Every Little Thing, by award-winning Australian director Sally Aitken, about a retired Los Angeles writer and teacher who finds solace and wonder in rehabilitating injured hummingbirds; I Am the River, the River Is Me, from director Petr Lom, a visually stunning documentary that follows a five-day canoe journey down the Whanganui River, Aotearoa/New Zealand’s first river to be recognised as a legal person; Plastic People: The Hidden Crisis of Microplastics directed by Ben Addelman and Ziya Tong; and Union, directed by Stephen Maing and Brett Story, the ‘David and Goliath’ story of a fired Amazon worker daring to take on a multi-national. Dust to Dust is due to be premiere ahead of the festival on 11th October in partnership with Adelaide Fashion Week.

World Cinema

The World Cinema program of films, many of them award winners, come from local, national and international filmmakers from countries including Portugal, Georgia, Bulgaria, Poland, Denmark, the US, Taiwan, Iran and China. Amongst the many highlights of the World Cinema program are the winner at this year’s Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival, Black Dog, from Chinese director Guan Hu; acclaimed Iranian director Mohammad Rasloulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig, which he presented at Cannes only after fleeing Iran on foot; US filmmaker Theda Hammel’s Stress Positions, a biting, queer comedy on Brooklynites coping in the early days of the pandemic; winner of four awards at the Locarno Film Festival including Golden Leopard Award winner, Toxic, from Lithuanian director Saulė Bliuvaitė; Sasquatch Sunset, a description-defying creature feature starring Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough as you’ve never seen them – that is, in elaborate bigfoot character makeup – by directors David Zellner and Nathan Zellner; and a second Iranian film, My Favourite Cake, about one night, two lonely hearts, and endless possibilities, set in Tehran and directed by Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha.

World Documentary

The World Documentary program sees the Australian film The Pool (Director: Ian Darling), which celebrates the iconic Bondi Icebergs pool and the community it nurtures, alongside the winner of the 2024 Sundance Grand Jury Prize for World Cinema – Documentary, the Norwegian film A New Kind of Wilderness, directed by Silje Evensmo Jacobsen, and Black Box Diaries, about a young Japanese journalist who, after being sexually assaulted by an influential figure, investigates her own case, setting into motion a movement for change.

Other highlights include Berlinale Winner Dahomey which explores cultural restitution following the return of 26 cultural objects to Benin (Director: Mati Diop); The Contestant, the unbelievable true story of a Japanese game show contestant nicknamed ‘Nasubi’ (‘Eggplant’), who was left naked, alone and starving in a room for 15 months - unaware he was being broadcast to over 15 million TV viewers a week (Director: Clair Titley); Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger, narrated by Martin Scorsese and directed by David Hinton; No Other Land, winner of Best Documentary at Berlinale, an affecting film from an Israeli–Palestinian collective that has won over audiences around the world; and Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, one of the most acclaimed and original documentaries of the year, exploring the events leading to the assassination of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba in 1961, which intertwines political intrigue with the vibrant cultural backdrop, highlighting jazz legends like Nina Simone, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie and John Coltrane (Director: Johan Grimonprez).

Music on Film & Horror

Continuing the musical theme is AFF’s beloved Music on Film program which this year sees films about trailblazers such as Devo, Peaches, The Dandy Warhols and the Brian Jonestown Massacre. And it wouldn’t be AFF without some Horror in the program, which this year includes a screening of the newly restored, in breathtaking 4K, Australian classic Wake in Fright (Director: Ted Kotcheff) and a Halloween one-off presentation of Carnage for Christmas by 20-year-old Adelaide director Alice Maio Mackay.

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