At Melbourne International Film Festival 2026, three of France’s great actresses star not in solely French language productions but in multilingual productions where French is one of the languages. Discover Virginie Efira speaking both French and Japanese in the film for which she won a shared Best Actress Award at Cannes with her co-star Tao Okamato; Isabelle Huppert as a glamorous vampire in a camp comedy in German and French; and Léa Seydoux as a wife and mother coming to grips with the emotional, moral and practical fallout when her husband is charged with a shocking crime.
Other prize-winning multilingual films are Belgian director Lukas Dhont’s stirring latest film about a clandestine romance between two young men that blooms in the trenches of WWI, which won its leads a pair of Best Actor prizes at Cannes; the first Central African film to screen at Cannes which claimed the Un Certain Regard Best Actor prize; the Cannes Critics’ Week Grand Prize winning film about simmering desires that erupt among a group of French teens visiting the ruins of Pompeii; and the inaugural Queer Palm Revelation award winner at Cannes that trails the deepening romantic spark that forms between two long-haul truckers.
Rounding out the selection of multilingual films where French is one of the languages are an animated film tackling difficult conversations with family after coming out; a film that bounces between a wedding in France and a funeral in Guinea-Bissau; the latest from Romania’s premier provocateur skewering the ‘good intentions’ of the bourgeoisie; the story of a burnt-out Parisian doctor who travels to an ultra-remote, penguin-populated South Atlantic isle in search of isolation, salvation and perhaps even love; a portrait of an Iranian family long divided by geography but reunited by technology; a story of a Ghanian and a Canadian teenager who are unexpectedly drawn together; an ethnographic odyssey in which a group of women travelling by train are taken hostage by a Mongolian princess; a revisionist western interrogating colonisation; and a post-WWII set film in which an exiled author tours a devastated Germany whose divisions echo his own fractured family.
Among the multilingual films including French at Melbourne International Film Festival 2026 are multilingual documentaries including one about Australia’s own Tina Arena; a nature documentary compiled exclusively from super-8 footage shot on vintage cameras in 25 countries across five continents; a play it loud trip through 70 years of Lebanese history compiled after combing through 20,000 hours of footage drawn from across seven decades; a dive into story of one of the world’s richest men and one of the 21st-century art world’s greatest frauds; and a focus on Chris Marker, the filmmaker, artist and writer who was as visionary as he was famously elusive.
There are also some older, rarer films including a newly restored, long out of circulation elliptical tale of Sapphic yearning in 1930s Shanghai; and a rarely screened early experimental film from director Ulrike Ottinger with glitter, feathers and gender-bending sailors.
Read on to discover these multilingual films where French is one of the languages showing at Melbourne International Film Festival 2026 which started Thursday and runs until 23 August 2026.
DIRECTOR: Ryūsuke Hamaguchi
COUNTRIES: Japan, France, Germany, Belgium
LANGUAGES: Japanese, French
Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto shared Best Actress Awards at Cannes for their sterling work in the latest long-form opus from master filmmaker Ryusuke Hamaguchi, the director’s French language debut.
Marie-Lou (Virginie Efira, Parallel Tales, MIFF 2026) runs an aged-care facility on the outskirts of Paris. She’s devoted to her job and her patients, and firmly believes that the elderly should be treated with dignity. It’s tough work, and, like so many of her employees, she’s dealing with burnout. But her spirit is rekindled when she meets Japanese playwright Mari (Tao Okamoto), who’s staging a theatre piece about the history of mental asylums in Italy. As they plunge headlong into all-night conversations about mortality, philosophy and the degradations of capitalism, Mari and Marie-Lou’s new friendship will change both of their lives.
The Blood Countess/ Die Blutgräfin
DIRECTOR: Ulrike Ottinger
COUNTRIES: Germany, Austria, Luxembourg
LANGUAGES: German, French
Screen icon Isabelle Huppert mesmerises as a glamorous vampire in iconoclastic queer filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger’s high-camp comedy.
Countess Elizabeth Báthory awakens from a four-century-long slumber in modern-day Vienna, costumed in extravagant crimson gowns and a perfectly coiffed copper updo. Reunited with her faithful handmaid Hermine and her self-hating vegetarian vampire nephew Rudi Bubi Baron von Strudl (with his sceptical psychotherapist in tow), the countess sets out to find and destroy an ancient magical book that has the power to end vampire immortality. With police inspectors and a duo of dithering vampirologists in hot pursuit, the eccentric entourage scours the city’s baroque libraries and cathedrals – but the countess soon realises that her nephew’s plans for the book are very different from her own.
DIRECTORS: Meriem Bennani, Orian Barki
COUNTRIES: USA, Italy, Morocco
LANGUAGES: English, French, Arabic
In this striking animation set in a world of anthropomorphic animals, a queer coyote breaks the wall of silence with her mother nine years after her coming out.
Bouchra, a coyote, is a New York–based Moroccan filmmaker in the throes of creating a semi-autobiographical feature. Unable to access the inspiration she seeks, she decides to call her mother, Aïcha, who lives in Casablanca, to address the topic they’ve left untouched for almost a decade: Bouchra’s sexuality. Despite staying in touch, mother and daughter have never discussed Bouchra’s same-sex relationships, nor her ‘out’ life in the US. As the filmmaker starts devising storyboards, we’re pulled into a genre-defying hybrid work that blends memory, fantasy and metafiction.
Winning the top queer prize at the Chicago International Film Festival, Bouchra recalls directors Orian Barki and Meriem Bennani’s 2020 miniseries 2 Lizards in its evocation of a hyperreal world where animals act and interact like humans. Blending live action, photogrammetry and 3D scanning, it uses actual snippets of conversation between Bennani and her mother to launch into confabulation, with Bouchra’s film-within-a-film offering a medium for catharsis, conjecture and wish fulfilment. Empathetic and visionary, Bouchra meditates on the act of mediation itself – how cinema, just like discussions held across distance and time, necessarily hinges on our version of the truth.
DIRECTORS: Jack Auen, Kevin Walker
COUNTRY: USA
LANGUAGE: German, English, Italian, French
In this wild, one-of-a-kind shrine to the wonders of research, an academic falls down a multimedia rabbit hole of hoax, conspiracy and Vatican intervention.
Béatrice Courte (played by real-life professor Anne Laure Sellier) is a polylingual academic with research interests in the darkest corners of philosophy. When she encounters a short paragraph on the Chronovisor – a device built in the 1950s that claimed to “photograph the past” as a kind of spectral, visual time machine – she soon becomes obsessed. Camping out at libraries, poring over pages and chasing up leads in four different languages, Béatrice is hot on the trail of the machine’s inventor: an eccentric real-life Benedictine monk named Father Pellegrino Ernetti. Is he still alive? Is his machine a hoax? And how is the Catholic Church involved?
DIRECTOR: Rafiki Fariala
COUNTRIES: France, Central African Republic, DR Congo, Italy
LANGUAGES: Swahili, French, Sango, Lingala
With its star-making, Cannes award-winning turn, this coming-of-age tale about a teenage refugee whose musical ambitions might just save his life is as poetic as it is uplifting.
Seventeen-year-old Robert is trying his best to make ends meet. But as a Congolese refugee in Bangui, in the Central African Republic, the odds are stacked against him. His parents have been jailed for the ‘crime’ of being refugees, and Robert must look after his four younger siblings. He’s also got his final exams to worry about. He copes by writing songs and lyrics, in the process holding on to his dream of making it as a musician.
Based on director Rafiki Fariala’s own experiences, Congo Boy is the first Central African film to screen at Cannes, where it received a standing ovation along with charismatic star Bradley Fiomona’s Un Certain Regard Best Actor prize. Leading a stellar cast of non-professionals who add a further layer of authenticity to the story, Fiomona shines through Robert’s poignant interactions with his siblings and his thrilling skills on the mic, showcasing a rousing soundtrack of tunes written by Fariala. Shot on location in Bangui, Congo Boy is a paean to the indomitable human spirit and an undeniable pleasure to boot.
DIRECTOR: Lukas Dhont
COUNTRIES: France, Belgium, Netherlands
LANGUAGS: French, Dutch
Lukas Dhont’s stirring latest film – which won its leads a pair of Best Actor prizes at Cannes – depicts a clandestine romance between two young men that blooms in the trenches of WWI.
It’s 1916, and Pierre and Francis have been conscripted to fight on the Western Front. Nicknamed “Quiet Mouse”, the former is a handsome, brawny farmer who struggles to express himself; the latter, a tailor’s son, is flamboyant and creative. Francis is enlisted to direct a theatre troupe that will entertain the soldiers, a role that includes cross-dressing as the female lead. When Pierre is tasked with assisting the troupe, the pair’s opposing qualities draw them together – and collaboration evolves into something more.
Following the Cannes Grand Prix–winning Close (MIFF 2022) and Queer Palm–awarded Girl (MIFF 2018), Lukas Dhont crafts another testament to LGBTQIA+ resistance amid repressive circumstances. But Dhont is less interested in an anachronistic ‘queering’ of history than in holding a mirror to the homosocial foundations of wartime camaraderie. While returning cinematographer Frank van den Eeden (Small Things Like These) doesn’t avoid the conflict’s horrors, his camera observes Emmanuel Macchia and Valentin Campagne (Species, MIFF 2026) with an intimacy recalling Beau Travail (MIFF 2000), their undeniable chemistry fuelling an emotive drama about forbidden love on the front lines.
DIRECTOR: Alain Gomis
COUNTRIES: France, Senegal, Guinea-Bissau
LANGUAGES: French, Creole Portuguese, Manjak, Wolof
A freewheeling family saga bounces between a wedding in France and a funeral in Guinea-Bissau, exuberantly exploring identity and belonging.
Fifty-year-old Gloria has been a devoted single mother to her daughter, Nour. But when Nour announces she’s getting married, Gloria has to look at her own life, from past mistakes to future hopes. Across two grand public ceremonies – Nour’s upmarket wedding in France and a death ritual for Gloria’s late father in his home village in Guinea-Bissau – mother and daughter explore their connection to family, cultural heritage and each other.
Filled with his own family members and interrogating notions of fact/fiction, screen representation and cross-continental cultural identities, Alain Gomis’s vibrant, thematically rich family saga is named after the perpetual circular movement whose flow unites the world. Recalling MIFF 2025 highlight I Only Rest in the Storm with its Bissau-Guinean setting, narrative sprawl, dense conversations and philosophical air, this sweeping cine-mosaic is a uniquely personal and deeply thoughtful work. Premiering in competition in Berlin, Dao is a joyous follow-up to the director’s Silver Bear–winning social-realist drama Félicité (MIFF 2017), marking a triumphant return to narrative filmmaking after his drawn-from-the-archive documentary portrait of jazz legend Thelonious Monk, Rewind & Play (MIFF 2022).
The Diary of a Chambermaid/ Le journal d’une femme de chambre
DIRECTOR: Radu Jude
COUNTRIES: France, Romania
LANGUAGES: French, Romanian
Romania’s premier provocateur returns, as razor-sharp as ever, with a finely wrought parable skewering the ‘good intentions’ of the bourgeoisie.
Gianina is a live-in nanny for a wealthy family in Bordeaux. One of the many Romanians who go to France seeking better economic conditions, she keeps the extravagant home shipshape, cooks the family their favourite Thai meals and cares for their occasionally bratty young son. In the evenings, Gianina divides her time between rehearsals for a play – specifically, a bawdy, experimental adaptation of the titular 1900 Octave Mirbeau novel previously brought to screen by Jean Renoir and Luis Buñuel – and video-calling her daughter, who jealously pines for her back in their home village.
Feted at Cannes, Radu Jude’s latest class satire operates in a realist, somewhat melancholic register closer to that of Kontinental ’25 (MIFF 2025) than to his anarchic Dracula. Anchored by excellent performances from Ana Dumitraşcu as Gianina and Mélanie Thierry and Vincent Macaigne (Suspended Time, MIFF 2024) as her employers – as well as Ilinca Manolache, the irrepressible star of Jude’s 2023 opus Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World – this left-of-field literary riff is both deeply compassionate and merciless in dramatising the sometimes absurd, often humiliating, plight of migrant workers.
DIRECTOR: Lana Daher
COUNTRIES: France, Germany, Lebanon, Qatar
LANGUAGS: English, French, Arabic
A play-it-loud trip through 70 years of Lebanese history.
“Disorientation is part of the journey. Welcome to Lebanon.” So pronounces Do You Love Me, which jams on Lebanese collective memory in ways both joyous and harrowing. Stitching together still photos, home movies, old celluloid, TV clips, radio broadcasts and podcasts, this free-associative portrait of life in Beirut is filled with acts of humanity and inhumanity. From garbage strikes to bomb strikes, news reports to pop-cultural ephemera, this wild ride through the archives is an act of resistance filled with singing and dancing.
Lebanon has no national archive, so filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist Lana Daher set out to make her own. Combing through 20,000 hours of footage drawn from across seven decades, Daher and co-writer/editor Qutaiba Barhamji – whose previous editing work has included Four Daughters, Smoke Sauna Sisterhood (both MIFF 2023) and the Oscar-nominated The Voice of Hind Rajab – forgo talking heads, voiceovers and explanatory intertitles. Instead, their exuberant supercut is shot through with energy, daring and an undeniable sense of humour.
Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press/ Dorian Gray im Spiegel der Boulevardpresse
DIRECTOR: Ulrike Ottinger
COUNTRY: West Germany
LANGUAGES: German, French
Delphine Seyrig stars opposite model Veruschka (in drag) in this acerbic Oscar Wilde adaptation, an avant-garde take on fake news.
As Dr. Mabuse, Delphine Seyrig is the high-femme head of an international media empire. Seeking to boost circulation figures, she has a cunning plan: create a character for her readers to fall in love with, and then ruin him before their very eyes. Dorian Gray (Veruschka von Lehndorff) is just the dandy: young, rich and handsome. Pliable and immaculately dressed, he takes courses in art history and literature; attends philanthropic meetings; and journeys out on memorable trips to the opera, the Press Ball and much further to the underworld. As Dr. Mabuse’s creation begins to take hold in society, a battle of wills emerges.
In the third and final film in her ‘Berlin Trilogy’ (following 1979’s Ticket of No Return and 1981’s Freak Orlando), Ulrike Ottinger borrows loosely from both Oscar Wilde’s 1890 Gothic horror The Picture of Dorian Gray and Norbert Jacques’s infamous Dr. Mabuse character – by way of Fritz Lang’s film series – with a great sense of queer irony to create a delicious satire of ego and capitalism. Ottinger’s own striking production design is complemented by Gisela Storch’s gender-crossing costuming and memorable performances from the two leads, along with frequent collaborator Tabea Blumenschein as Dorian Gray’s love interest
The Enchantment of the Blue Sailors/ Die Betörung der blauen Matrosen
DIRECTOR: Ulrike Ottinger
COUNTRY: West Germany
LANGUAGES: German, English, French
With glitter, feathers and gender-bending sailors, Ulrike Ottinger’s rarely screened early experimental film sets the scene for her work to come.
An exotic sea laps upon the sands of a distant beach, and a woman in an extravagant red gown and matching headdress crosses the dunes, singing. Gay sailors in classic white-and-blue uniforms kiss (years before French artists Pierre et Gilles made such imagery iconic). A woman in a leopard-print party dress fringed with pink, cake-like layers settles in for a solo picnic, while another woman in full-feathered bird regalia prowls nearby, her tinselled wings shimmering in the light. Scantily clad characters cavort and canoodle with bacchanalian pleasure.
An assemblage of vivid imagery, The Enchantment of the Blue Sailors was Ulrike Ottinger’s second mid-length experimental film, following Laocoon & Sons: The Story of the Transformation of Esmeralda del Rio (1972/73), and her first in riotous colour. Notably, it is the only work in Ottinger’s filmography that she shares a directorial credit on: joining her at the helm here is her partner and frequent collaborator Tabea Blumenschein, who also oversaw the film’s costumes and make-up. Both women appear onscreen, with Ottinger playing the “Nymph of German Romanticism” alongside influential queer filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim (It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, but the Society in Which He Lives) as one of the titular sailors.
DIRECTOR: Pawel Pawlikowski
COUNTRIES: France, Germany, Poland, Italy
LANGUAGES: German, English, French, Russian
In Paweł Pawlikowski’s third post-WWII meditation, exiled author Thomas Mann tours a devastated Germany whose divisions echo his own fractured family.
In 1949, ageing German Nobel laureate Thomas Mann breaks his long exile from his homeland to honour Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 200th anniversary in the latter’s birthplace of Frankfurt, West Germany. Next, he plans to visit the city where the literary giant died: Weimar, now in the communist East. Chauffeured by his resentful actor/writer daughter Erika, Thomas crosses a country he barely recognises, even as he waxes poetic about its heritage. Meanwhile, Erika notices in person – as her beloved, tormented brother Klaus does in his fiction – how two divergent but equally compromised regimes are being installed atop the still-festering wounds of Nazism. The country they grew up in is a fading memory; but can this intellectual family even feel at home with one another?
Paweł Pawlikowski’s drama is the third in a thematic triptych of European postwar reverberations – filmed, like its predecessors Ida and Cold War (MIFF 2018), in luminous black-and-white. Pawlikowski’s immaculate road trip through Germany’s cultural crossroads follows a crisp yet elliptical map of details: disgusted looks at parties; silences in half-empty restaurants; dryly ironic new uses for old infrastructure. Meanwhile, the Manns’ repressed tensions emerge gradually in masterful lead performances by Hanns Zischler (Kings of the Road, MIFF 1976) and Sandra Hüller (Rose, MIFF 2026; Anatomy of a Fall, MIFF 2023), whose brilliantly understated turn as Erika captures a breadth of emotions lurking just below the surface.
Flesh and Fuel / Du fioul dans les artères
DIRECTOR: Pierre Le Gall
COUNTRIES: France, Poland
LANGUAGES: English, French, Polish
Awarded the inaugural Queer Palm Revelation award at Cannes, this swooning feature debut trails the deepening romantic spark that forms between two long-haul truckers.
Due to the nature of their work, Étienne and Bartosz are ships – or semitrailers – in the night. And while the Frenchman and the Pole both drive trucks carrying all manner of goods across Europe, they couldn’t be more different: whereas reticent Étienne has been hardened by his experiences, gregarious Bartosz retains his zest for life despite its hardships. What was meant to be a one-off hook-up by the side of the road transforms into a profound, continent-spanning romance.
There’s no dearth of works tackling the difficult pursuit of queer love, but Pierre Le Gall’s indelible answer to God’s Own Country (MIFF 2017) and Brief Encounter enriches its tale of unexpected connection by implicating clashes of culture and economy and exploring questions of self-acceptance, ambition and blue-collar alienation. Bolstered by Antoine Cormier’s sensitive lensing and Paul Sabin’s affecting score, actors Alexis Manenti and Julian Świeżewski enthral as the film’s central couple, magnetically portraying their chemistry and their distinct responses to this tricky relationship. Flesh and Fuel shows how love can bloom in the most unlikely of places, so long as we’re willing to take a different route.
DIRECTOR: Marie Kreutzer
COUNTRIES: France, Germany, Austria
LANGUAGES: German, English, French
Léa Seydoux is riveting as a wife and mother coming to grips with the emotional, moral and practical fallout when her husband is charged with a shocking crime.
When avant-garde concert pianist Lucy agrees to move her family from the city to the countryside, the goal is to provide her husband Philip with respite following a burnout-induced panic attack. Instead, the move leaves her isolated and emotionally unprepared when the police arrive to execute a search warrant on Philip’s computers. As she struggles to process her shattered new reality and to protect herself and her young son, Lucy must untangle truth from love.
Gentle Monster had its origins in a news story that director Marie Kreutzer read while preparing to film Corsage (MIFF 2022). Three years later, she found herself dealing with the collateral damage of a similar story as Corsage star Florian Teichtmeister was charged with the same offence. Here, Kreutzer shrewdly orients her focus around the women left to deal with the emotional aftermath of the crimes men commit, and her leads are up to the task: Léa Seydoux is magnificent as she navigates Lucy’s complex, multifaceted response; Jella Hasse provides a stoic counterpoint as the investigating officer managing her own wayward family member; and Catherine Deneuve is excellent in cameo as Lucy’s suffer-no-fools mother. With a striking score by Camille, Gentle Monster is a psychologically pointed exploration of shifting emotional sands, as devastating as it is vital.
DIRECTOR: Lisandro Alonso
COUNTRIES: USA, France, Germany, Denmark, Mexico, Netherlands, Argentina, Brazil
LANGUAGES: Spanish, French, Danish
A revisionist western interrogating colonisation, Alonso’s beguiling historical feature reinvents itself with a mystifying final act.
Captain Gunnar Dinesen (Viggo Mortensen, Crimes of the Future, MIFF 2022) is a Danish military explorer, charting the lands of Patagonia in the late 19th century. Travelling with his teenage daughter, Ingeborg (Viilbjørk Malling Agger), Gunnar feels under constant threat from Spanish settlers, Indigenous peoples and the myth of Zuluaga, a Danish officer turned wilderness-dwelling killer. When Ingeborg disappears into the desert with a Spanish soldier, Gunnar heads after her alone. Coming face to face with both hostile men and a hostile landscape, he grows increasingly lost and desperate.
Winning the Un Certain Regard FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes and chosen as one of Cahiers du Cinéma’s top 10 films of 2015, Jauja marked Lisandro Alonso’s first work of historical cinema and his first collaboration with Mortensen. Though its vignetted corners and Academy frame give the film an antique appearance, Alonso’s fifth feature is a revisionist western that, in using genre tropes to reflect on the colonisation of Argentina, takes narrative turns as enigmatic as they are unexpected.
DIRECTOR: Ulrike Ottinger
COUNTRY: Germany
LANGUAGES: German, French, Mongolian
In Ulrike Ottinger’s ultimate ethnographic odyssey, a group of women travelling by train are taken hostage by a Mongolian princess.
The carriages of the Trans-Siberian Railway have never seen such a theatrical ensemble of strangers: the chic, high-society ethnologist Lady Windermere (Delphine Seyrig) can speak several languages; American Broadway star Fanny Ziegfeld (Gillian Scalici) is always threatening to break into song; Russian cabaret trio the Kalinka Sisters are always breaking into song; the reserved German schoolteacher Frau Müller-Vohwinkel (Irm Hermann) has a quiet but curious eye; and Giovanna (Inés Sastre) is a naive young woman with little else but a rucksack, a walkman and a yearning for adventure. After transferring to the Trans-Mongolian Railway, their fantastical train journey makes a sharp turn when a group of mounted Mongolian warriors under the command of Princess Ulun Iga (Xu Re Huar) take them as captives to their nomadic summer village. There, the women observe and attempt to adapt to the customs of their new society.
Cast with Western actors and Mongolian non-professionals, Ulrike Ottinger’s 1989 epic was the first feature film permitted to be made in Inner Mongolia by a Western director. An ever-curious artist who would soon after return to film the people, environment and cultural customs of this land for her eight-hour 1992 documentary Taiga, Ottinger has stated that Johanna d’Arc of Mongolia “is not trying to create an exotic image, but to explore the issue of cultural transfer”. Depicting a dazzling clash of traditions and a stunning assemblage of colours and costumes against a vast landscape, this masterwork was frequent collaborator Seyrig’s final performance onscreen.
DIRECTOR : Marine Atlan
COUNTRIES: France, Italy
LANGUAGES: Italian, French
Simmering desires erupt among a group of teens visiting the ruins of Pompeii in this Cannes Critics’ Week Grand Prize winner.
Passionate but put-upon teacher Madame Mercier (Antonia Buresi, Rodeo, MIFF 2022) shepherds 20 of her students from Paris to Naples, where they will visit the sites devastated by Mount Vesuvius two millennia prior. Being in such close quarters for an extended period heightens the high schoolers’ extant dynamics. Boisterous Toni yearns for his best friend James, who canoodles with his classmate Angela, herself vexed by masculine insensitivity. Meanwhile, ostracised star pupil Suzanne observes and fantasises about how she might become embroiled. Surrounded by scenes of calamity, the teenagers confront the crises within themselves.
Inspired by Wilhelm Jensen’s novella Gradiva: A Pompeiian Fancy and Sigmund Freud’s analysis of it, César-nominated cinematographer Marine Atlan’s searing full-length debut is a rare work that dramatises the turmoil of adolescence without recycling tired tropes about caprice or rebellion. Juxtaposing the transitory nature of youth with the timelessness of Pompeii’s ruins, Atlan also captures the human penchant for concealing emotions and their inevitable eruption when surface and substance no longer coincide. Glorious, sun-dappled cinematography enriches the film’s illuminating studies of each character, while the naturalistic performances of its breakout cast bring authenticity and verve to this visionary coming-of-age tale.
DIRECTOR: Brecht Debackere
COUNTRIES: Belgium, Italy
LANGUAGES: English, French
Chris Marker was a filmmaker, artist and writer who was as visionary as he was famously elusive. Now, he forms the mysterious locus of this documentary drawing on his expansive archives.
Chris Marker liked to describe himself as “the best-known author of unknown films”, but perhaps the opposite is true. Today, there is widespread reverence for works such as La Jetée, his fleet but haunting sci-fi almost entirely comprising still images (and that later formed the basis for Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys), and Sans Soleil (MIFF 1983), the existential travelogue that redefined the essay film. But Marker – one of numerous pseudonyms he used in his 91 years – very rarely gave interviews; averse to being photographed, he often used a drawing of his cat as an avatar.
The director’s death in 2012 left behind 550 boxes of archival material. Together with excerpts from his groundbreaking body of work, these materials form the basis for Brecht Debackere’s probing but necessarily oblique portrait of the artist – as narrated by Charlotte Rampling (Swimming Pool, MIFF 2003), the magisterial actor here personifying an archivist. In tune with Marker’s preoccupations, Nostalgia for the Future is a meditation on the slippery persistence of memory, personal as well as cultural: a precious souvenir for existing fans, and a beguiling introduction for anyone who wishes to peer behind his Cheshire grin.
The Oligarch and The Art Dealer
DIRECTOR: Andreas Dalsgaard
COUNTRIES: USA, France, Denmark
LANGUAGES: English, French
The true story of one of the world’s richest men and one of the 21st-century art world’s greatest frauds. Or is it?
Unfolding like a Hollywood thriller, The Oligarch and the Art Dealer unpacks with exquisite precision all the shady details of the Bouvier Affair: a high-profile court case between Russian businessman Dmitry Rybolovlev, the notoriously private owner of the world’s most expensive art collection, and his former trusted art dealer and friend Yves Bouvier, a maestro of freeports – duty-free tax havens-cum-storage lockers for the ultra-wealthy’s Picassos, da Vincis, Klimts and Magrittes. It’s a case that shocked the world, not least because it forced Rybolovlev – a man without a phone number, email address or computer – into the open and shone a spotlight on the clandestine dealings and deliberate secrets of the global elite.
In this engrossing documentary, Andreas Dalsgaard digs into the decade-long battle that began when Rybolovlev accused Bouvier of a billion-dollar scam, blowing up the once-symbiotic relationship that had helped both men to stratospheric financial echelons. Approaching the scandal with an exacting eye, The Oligarch and the Art Dealer allows each man to make his case – Bouvier directly; the elusive Rybolovlev through his lawyers – and the audience to draw their own conclusions. But when the stakes are this high, and the eye-watering sums behind them are even higher, can you trust anyone’s story?
Palimpsest: The Story of a Name
DIRECTOR: Mary Stephen
COUNTRIES: France, Taiwan, Hong Kong
LANGUAGES: English, French, Mandarin, Cantonese
Through a canny postcolonial lens, a filmmaker whose Western name is at odds with her Chinese heritage peels back conflicting layers of family history.
“All my life I’ve been asked about my family name,” reflects Mary Stephen (Justocoeur, MIFF 1981). She was born in British Hong Kong to Hilda and Henry Stephen, respectively known in earlier life as Chan Tik-Fong and Hilda Yik. Like their filmmaker daughter, both parents had a creative streak: she wrote poetry, while he was an avid amateur filmmaker and journal keeper, documenting their family life extensively. Poring over her father’s records, Stephen, as the film’s narrator, uncovers all manner of likely tall tales – including a claim of an Indigenous Australian grandfather – and meditates upon the mechanisms and functions of such mythologisation.
Together with her parents, Stephen emigrated to Montreal at age 15 before moving to Paris, where she would establish herself as the editor of some of Éric Rohmer’s most cherished films, including A Tale of Winter and A Summer’s Tale. Her own directorial work, largely unseen for decades, has recently enjoyed a much-deserved revival thanks to the restoration of her dreamy 1978 debut, Shades of Silk (MIFF 2026). Stephen’s latest film, which received two Golden Horse Awards, proves a richly personal new entry in an oeuvre dedicated to the exploration of identity across borders.
DIRECTOR: Jérémy Comte
COUNTRIES: France, Ghana, Canada
LANGUAGES : English, French
Two lonely teenagers – one Ghanaian, the other Canadian – are unexpectedly drawn together in this compelling debut feature from a MIFF-awarded director.
As a child, Kojo was not too fond of selling fish by the roadside with his father. After his dad disappears at sea, he fills the void by joining Accra’s shady underworld. Meanwhile, in Quebec, Tony spends his days skateboarding and loafing around with friends. He quietly pines for the father he never knew while burdening his mother Chantal, who’s dabbling in online dating. Over time, a series of serendipitous events will bring these two teens onto a collision course that will change their lives forever.
The Berlinale-premiering first feature from Oscar-nominated director Jérémy Comte – whose film Fauve won Best Short Film at MIFF 2018 – is an accomplished work that depicts both the intricacies of culture and the universal adolescent search for belonging. Meticulous plotting carefully reveals the fragility behind the boys’ frivolous decisions, while the striking cinematography by Olivier Gossot (who also lensed Fauve) and sweeping score by Valentin Hadjadj (Close, MIFF 2022) round out an atmospheric and at times dreamlike film. With compassion and candour, Comte shows that paradise may be much closer to home than we think.
DIRECTORS: Morteza Ahmadvand, Firouzeh Khosrovani
COUNTRIES: Iran, Italy, Norway
LANGUAGES: English, French, Arabic
This layered, IDFA-awarded portrait of an Iranian family long divided by geography but reunited by technology exudes a keen and haunting resonance.
Aged 20, Maryam fled Iran in the aftermath of the 1979 revolution, crossing the border into Türkiye camouflaged among a flock of sheep. Now a political exile, she resides in the United States, while her parents still live in the house that she grew up in, which her architect father designed. Longing to somehow bridge the distance, Maryam – herself unseen in the film – has surveillance cameras installed in their home: together with super-8 home videos and archival materials, this dialogue-free footage of her ageing parents, moving around the house or at times performing for the camera, illustrates her reflective voiceover.
Morteza Ahmadvand and Firouzeh Khosrovani previously collaborated on Radiograph of a Family (MIFF 2021), in which Khosrovani explored the impacts of the Iranian Revolution through the prism of her own family history. Past Future Continuous, however, gradually reveals itself to be something more complex than straight documentary, provocatively slipping between historical fact and narrative fabrication – in the process, gesturing towards the tragic broader relevance of Maryam’s story of displacement to families in today’s Iran.
DIRECTOR: Mary Stephen
COUNTRIES: France, Canada
LANGUAGES: French, Mandarin
Long out of circulation, this evocatively elliptical tale of Sapphic yearning in 1930s Shanghai – newly restored – has been hailed as a major rediscovery.
Lysanne and Marlène (the latter played by writer/director Mary Stephen herself) were best friends in high school; perhaps, even then, their bond was underpinned by a desire for and fear of greater intimacy. Time has since separated the two women – both originally from Shanghai, Lysanne is now living in Paris and Marlène in Massachusetts, where she’s studying at Wellesley – but they pine for one another still, each in their own way and to tragic ends.
Stephen’s darkly dreamy and remarkably assured debut – made when she was just 24 years old – was conceived as a loving counterpoint to Marguerite Duras’s India Song, with her similar cross-cultural narrative instead unfolding from an Asian woman’s perspective. For decades, the Hong Kong–born Stephen has primarily been known for her work as an editor, but the 2025 restoration of this 1978 treasure has stirred up overdue appreciation for her directorial oeuvre, spanning fiction and documentary and characterised by an exploration of colonial identity and cultural memory.
DIRECTOR: Ed Sayers
COUNTRY: UK
LANGAUGES: English, French, Thai, Dutch, Icelandic, Punjabi
In a new twist on nature documentary, the old-school format of super-8 offers a stunningly impressionistic, hopeful vision of our footprint upon the world.
Forget ultra-high-definition cameras and highly technical imagery. Compiled exclusively from super-8 footage shot on vintage cameras in 25 countries across five continents, Super Nature offers an unexpectedly rich, gloriously lo-fi view of the world, captured by 40 local volunteer cinematographers – including Australians Oliver Birt, Caitlin Henderson and Fraser Johnston – who filmed nearby nature that spoke to them, providing their thoughts as commentary. From Welsh puffins and Patagonian whales to Italian mountain ranges and Indigenous Brazilian communities, Super Nature is a global love letter to nature, written in all the textures of the human heart.
It’s a testament to Ed Sayers’s lifelong passion for super-8 that he could craft such a coherent narrative from these disparate vignettes, shot by super-8 aficionados as well as biologists, conservationists and environmental activists. Sharing his vision was Oscar-winning filmmaker Asif Kapadia (Amy; Senna, MIFF 2011), who was so inspired by Sayers’s pitch that he came on board as executive producer. Despite our planet’s obvious challenges, Super Nature is full of compassion and hope for its future, reconnecting us to our world through the nostalgic intimacy and vibrant immediacy of its format.
DIRECTOR: Adrian Russell Wills
COUNTRY: Australia
LANGUAGES: English, Italian, French
How do you separate a Melbourne-born Oz music treasure and cosmopolitan star from a resilient woman? Follow the threads of her story, in her own words.
Tina Arena has been in the music business for 50 years; after 25 albums, she’s had enough eras to make other pop stars envious. Born in suburban Melbourne to Sicilian parents, Filippina Arena became Australia’s darling in 1976, aged eight, on Channel Ten’s prime-time variety show Young Talent Time. Her breakout 1990 pop single ‘I Need Your Body’ raunchily repudiated “Tiny Tina”, and she went on to score a soaring run of 90s hits … but self-doubt, misogyny and tall-poppy syndrome drove her to reinvent herself repeatedly in the UK and France: taking to the stage; seeking adventurous collaborations; and singing in Italian, French and Spanish.
Behind Tina the power balladeer and queer icon is the woman her family still calls Pina. This world-premiering documentary from Adrian Russell Wills (Kindred, MIFF 2023) unravels her vulnerable yet tenacious private self in candid, dryly funny conversation. Also appearing in new and archival interviews are Tina’s two sisters; her mentor Johnny Young; and collaborators and admirers including Céline Dion, Marc Anthony, Ronan Keating, Jessica Mauboy, and Jessica and Lisa Origliasso of The Veronicas. In bringing herself undone, Tina movingly shows how music has made and mended her.
DIRECTOR: Loran Bonnardot, Tobias Nölle
COUNTRY: Switzerland
LANGUAGES : English, French
A burnt-out Parisian doctor travels to an ultra-remote, penguin-populated South Atlantic isle in search of isolation, salvation and perhaps even love.
Tristan da Cunha is the most remote place of human habitation in the world. A volcanic speck in the South Atlantic, midway between Argentina and South Africa, it’s visited by only six to eight boats per year, its 230-odd inhabitants vastly outnumbered by penguins. Loran Bonnardot, a jaded Parisian physician with a lifetime serving in Médecins Sans Frontières, has spent 30 years visiting Tristan; now, he’s hoping to permanently relocate there to escape the hectic nature of 21st-century living. As Bonnardot explores the island’s wilderness and tries to integrate into its community, he awaits approval for permanent residency.
Swiss filmmaker Tobias Nölle has found acclaim for his experimental, eerie narrative features, from 2016 Berlinale stand-out Aloys to 2024 sci-fi parable Preparations for a Miracle. Here, directing in collaboration with Bonnardot, Nölle mounts a dreamlike, meditative film that blurs lines between ethnography, documentary and fantasy. With cinematography that evocatively brings Tristan da Cunha’s landscape to life, this is a quiet, contemplative study in both the pleasures and the perils of isolation – the perfect film for anyone with a love of exploration or a desire to escape.
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From Cannes-winning performances and prize-winning dramas to rare restorations and wide-ranging documentaries, these multilingual films show French in conversation with languages, cultures and cinematic traditions from around the world. Together, they offer a richly varied selection to discover at Melbourne International Film Festival 2026.
KEY INFO FOR MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2026
WHAT: Melbourne International Film Festival 2026
WHERE: Various venues in Melbourne
WHEN: 6-23 August 2026
HOW & HOW MUCH:
SINGLE TICKETS
Single tickets are priced as follows and can be purchased via the links above:
- Full $28.55
- Full Off Peak $24.85
- Concession $25.70
- Concession Off Peak $22.40
MULTIPASSES
Multipasses can be shared with friends so if you are going with others you can still take advantage of the discounted pricing.
Multipass 3
- Full price $81.40
- Concession $73.30,
- MIFF Member $69.20
Multipass 6
- Full price $154.20,
- Concession $138,
- MIFF Member $131
Multipass 12
- Full price $291.30,
- Concession $262.20,
- MIFF Member $247.70
You can purchase your Multipass here.
FESTIVAL PASSPORT/ DELUXE MEMBERSHIP
Book a single ticket for every standard session of the festival – only available for deluxe members – buy your deluxe membership for $700 here.
MIFF MEMBERSHIP
Membership prices are as follows:
- Full Membership: $80
- Concession: $70, and
- under 26 : $26
MIFF Membership can be purchased here
Which films are you looking forward to seeing at Melbourne International Film Festival 2026?
