Festival Archive 1952-2019

The MIFF online archive contains 68 past editions of the festival (1952–2019) for you to browse or search through. We hope the archive will be a resource used by festival goers, film lovers, students, historians and whoever else would like to learn more about the types of films MIFF has screened over the years, or to track the trajectory of the festival’s curatorship, its directors and its scope.

Search options currently include: ‘Festival Year’, ‘Film Title’, ‘Director’ and ‘Country’.

A big thank you to our MIFF volunteers and partners who have helped make this archive possible.

Please note: this archive is an ongoing body of work. With over 12,000 film synopses and more than 9000 directors’ names, there may appear a few typos here and there as our database comes to terms with special characters (my, there was a huge amount of Eastern European cinema screened at the festival back in the 60s!) and other items that need manual tweaking. Similarly, sometimes the credit information (director, year etc) isn’t available so these fields may be left blank; we are slowly filling these in with further research. 


MIFF1985

Festival Program
79 feature films and 98 short films were screened from 20 June to 30 June
Full Program

Program in Focus
The 1985 festival, with David Stratton as a program advisor, commenced a focus on talks and seminars, not seen as strongly since the festival programs of the early 1950s. Some topics discussed included Productive Prospects for Film and Video in Victoria, Is Film Obsolete?, Initiatives in the Indonesian Cinema and The "New" Heroines, in which feminism and the representation of women in cinemas was discussed.  

Edgar Reitz's Heimat, a thatrical feature film shown in 11 parts, was also screened. Running at 924 minutes, Heimat was heralded as "the longest film ever made and the apex of New German Cinema, and a landmark in the history of world cinema".
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Opening Night Film
Birdy (Alan Parker)
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Retrospective
Oberhausen Retrospective. A retrospective of films from the Oberhausen Festival was screened.
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Paul Coulter

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