The BIFF is back! And screening soon near you …
The 2025 Brisbane International Film Festival has been delayed, but it’s back on track with a line-up that looks like it was worth the wait.
The fate of the Brisbane International Film Festival hasn’t been clear in recent months. The question has been when and if it’s on at all this year.
Here’s the good news – headed by a new team, under the direction of artistic director Sophie Mathisen, BIFF is back in late November for four days. It’s a slimmed down festival but also a major re-launch incorporating exciting venues before returning to a wider program in 2026.
This year there are more than 60 films to savour and more than 20 filmmakers will attend. State Arts Minister John-Paul Langbroek says the festival’s relaunch aligns with the government’s Time to Shine arts policy and its focus on transformational arts and culture leading into Brisbane 2032.
“We want BIFF to be a festival for everyone – one that reactivates the city, strengthens our creative economy and celebrates Queensland as a place where stories are made, shared and loved,” says Langbroek. “This is exactly the kind of cultural moment that will carry us toward 2032 and beyond.”
The 2032 Brisbane Olympics and Paralympics clearly resonate in the choice of the opening film, Agon, a story following three Italian women athletes – a judoka, a fencer and a rifle shooter – as they struggle with injury and their mental health and face technological challenges while preparing for the fictional Olympic Games of Ludoj 2024.
It marks the directing debut of Giulio Bertelli, the younger son of fashion power couple Miuccia Prada and Patrizio Bertelli. Giulio Bertelli will travel to Brisbane for BIFF. Interestingly, the 35-year-old is an accomplished yachtsman who has been to Australia before and we discussed this in our interview at the Venice Film Festival, where Agon premiered.
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“I’ve done a lot of offshore sailing and some of the best has been with Australians,” Bertelli notes. “I’ve sailed a lot with a very important Australian sailor called Chris Nicholson. Once I went from Japan to Melbourne with an Italian team with Giovanni Soldini, which is funny because he’s actually the brother of film director Silvio Soldini. It’s a small world.”
‘I wanted to depict those small, neglected moments in the life of an athlete’
In his early teens Bertelli developed an interest in photography and cinema, so when he came to direct Agon (which takes its title from the Ancient Greek word for a struggle, contest or competition) he was able to combine his two loves, cinema and sport.
“I was trying to have a sensitivity to build this credibility in sport so that the film feels at times almost like documentary, even if it’s not,” he says. “It’s completely scripted. I wanted to depict those small, neglected moments in the life of an athlete and all the sacrifices they make to get to such an important competition.”
While two of the women athletes are played by actors (Yile Vianello and Sofija Zobina, who both appeared in La Chimera), the judoka is the judo champion Alice Bellandi who won a gold medal at the Paris Olympics and is the reigning world champion in the under 78kg category. It was important for Bertelli to have a real-life athlete in the film.
“Professional athletes are very good at performance, like actors or ballet dancers, in the sense that they have such control of their bodies,” Bertelli says. “If you ask them to do something slightly different, at a different tempo, at a different position, they’re just naturally very good at it.”
Bellandi was surprised that she was approached for the role. “I didn’t know how to act but it was a lot of fun,” she tells me.
The story is not Bellandi’s, but Bertelli insisted that judo couldn’t be replicated by an actor. The injury Bellandi suffers in the film isn’t real.
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“It was a prosthetic, a pretend injury,” she says. “I’ve had many injuries but not like that.”
BIFF will screen films by homegrown talent including Jaydon Martin’s Flathead, which tells of an ageing man, Cass (Cass Cumerford), as he returns to his Queensland hometown of Bundaberg, seeking redemption through friendship, faith and quiet resilience. The film won a special jury award at the Rotterdam International Film Festival.
Chinchilla-born George Miller reclaims his role as festival patron and for his patron’s pick he has chosen Robert Altman’s 1970 black comedy M*A*S*H, which reflects Miller’s enduring belief in the power of laughter and satire to make sense of chaos. “This movie, so wildly subversive, had a huge cultural impact,” Miller says.
US director Stephanie Laing (Veep) will personally present her new film Tow, starring Australian actor Rose Byrne in the true story of a homeless Seattle woman who fought to have her impounded car returned to her. Byrne won the best actress prize in Berlin for another American film, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, and now is a strong awards contender.
Also an actor of the moment is Britain’s Josh O’ Connor, who stars in BIFF’s immensely rewarding Rebuilding, in which his Colorado rancher is part of a community struggling with the aftermath of a fire, as he deals with his relationship with his daughter.
O’Connor, who is currently on screens in The Mastermind, is a stand-out in the upcoming Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery co-starring Daniel Craig, and he also co-stars with Paul Mescal in the gay historical drama, The History of Sound, releasing in December.
Several of BIFF’s foreign films are contenders in the international Oscars race. France’s submission is Jafar Panahi’s Cannes Palme D’Or winner, It Was Just an Accident, which the Iranian director shot in his homeland and is a wry critique of the Iranian regime. It tells of a man who accidentally encounters the man he believes was his torturer.
Since he was blindfolded at the time he needs to confirm the identity of the torturer and goes in search of others who the man tortured before he can exact his revenge. Variety says that Panahi’s “punchy and mordantly funny political thriller is like Samuel Beckett crossed with a Tarantino revenge picture”. It also won the prize for best film at the Sydney Film Festival.
Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Brazilian contender The Secret Agent likewise scored big in Cannes, taking out the best director and best actor awards. Wagner Moura (memorable as Pablo Escobar in Narcos) plays a technology expert who returns home to Recife only to discover that the city fails to deliver the refuge he seeks. The Guardian says this “study of a man attempting to escape corrupt politics is a tremendous, novelistic study of corruption in high and low places”.
Brisbane International Film Festival, November 27-30, at various locations. See the website: