Sydney Film Festival 2025: A Winter of Reel Imagination, Celluloid Fire and Rebellion.
- T
- Jun 2
- 3 min read
When summer yields to winter in Sydney, it is not the frost but the fire of cinema that ignites the city. From June 4 to June 15, 2025, the 72nd Sydney Film Festival unfurls across the city like a silk screen stitched with rebellion, resonance, and rare gems. With 201 films from 70 countries - including 17 world premieres, 6 international premieres, and 137 Australian premieres - this year’s program reads less like a catalogue and more like a constellation: diverse, radiant, and illuminating the dark spaces of the human condition.
Festival Director Nashen Moodley remarked that 2025’s offerings orbit themes of disruption, resistance, and reinvention - three stars by which we might navigate our turbulent times. And it is in this vein that the retrospective, Jafar Panahi: Cinema in Rebellion, burns most brightly. The Iranian auteur, once muzzled by state decree, remains undaunted. Through The White Balloon, Offside, This Is Not a Film, and No Bears, Panahi continues to speak - softly, defiantly - in the language of subversion. Curated by Anke Leweke, the retrospective is not merely a tribute, but a cinematic act of solidarity.
But the festival is not all solemnity. It is, like the city it inhabits, a symphony of contrasts. The venues themselves are a geographical poem: from the hallowed State Theatre and the cinematic nerve center of George Street’s Event Cinemas to the bohemian charm of Dendy Newtown and the seaside majesty of The Ritz Randwick. Even Martin Place transforms into SFFTV, a public plaza turned public square for cinematic democracy.
Among the premieres, Gabriel Mascaro’s The Blue Trail emerges as a fever dream of resistance - a 77-year-old woman wandering through the Amazon’s spectral foliage in defiance of authoritarian mandates. One senses echoes of The Odyssey, if Odysseus were a grandmother and the sirens spoke in the tongues of vanished freedoms.
Joshua Oppenheimer’s In the End is another landmark - a post-apocalyptic musical starring Tilda Swinton and Michael Shannon, proving that when the world ends, art - and perhaps even joy - remains. Meanwhile, Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind, a 1970s art heist drama, promises cerebral thrills and textured performances from Alana Haim and Josh O’Connor.
For those who prefer their emotional landscapes internal, Michel Franco’s Dreams is an erotic thriller dressed as a geopolitical metaphor - Mexico and the United States played out in longing and betrayal. Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon, starring Ethan Hawke and Margaret Qualley, is an ode to time’s elasticity, set on the eve of Oklahoma!’s premiere in 1943, unfolding in real time like a metronome on stage.
Lighter fare - but no less compelling - comes via The Golden Spurtle, a documentary about the World Porridge Making Championships in Carrbridge. Here, one finds the absurd made sublime, the mundane rendered mythical - the spiritual cousin of Christopher Guest meets the culinary poetry of Jiro Dreams of Sushi.
Documentary offerings also include One to One: John & Yoko, a portrait of Lennon and Ono’s New York years that transcends biopic into meditation. Meanwhile, Marlon Williams: Ngā Ao e Rua delves into the multiverse of bicultural identity, and Make It Look Real lifts the veil on intimacy coordination - a quiet revolution within the industry.
Among the Australian features, Sophie Somerville’s Fwends and the animated Lesbian Space Princess channel youth, queerness, and cosmic imagination with a locally grounded vibrance. As for the international slate, it’s a bounty: Cannes Jury Prize winner Sirât (produced by Pedro Almodóvar), Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, the Dardenne brothers’ Young Mothers, and Hafsia Herzi’s The Little Sister, which took home both the Queer Palme and Best Actress.
There is also The Life of Chuck, Mike Flanagan’s adaptation of the Stephen King novella, which dissects a life in reverse, starring Tom Hiddleston as a man more ghost than memory. And don’t overlook Somebody, a twisted Korean psychological thriller leaping decades with the velocity of a forgotten trauma returning to claim its due.
And then there’s Lav Diaz’s Magellan - 160 minutes of cinematic excavation through imperial histories, told with the gravitas and grandeur that only Diaz can command.
If cinema is the mirror in which we glimpse both ourselves and the world askew, then the Sydney Film Festival is not merely a mirror but a prism - refracting light into voices, visions, and vantage points that refuse to be ignored. Winter may be coming, but within these darkened rooms flickers the undiminished light of human storytelling.
Welcome to Sydney Film Festival 2025 - the season of silver screens, golden rebels, and celluloid fire.
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Words by AW.
Photo courtesy of Sydney Film Festival.
