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. 


MIFF1998

MIFF1998 Festival Program

Festival Program
141 feature films and 89 short films were screened from 7 June to 22 June
Full Program

Program in Focus
The 141 feature films that comprised the main body of the 1998 MIFF program were organised into 12 sections. These included International Panorama, Regional Features, Sushi and a Switchblade, Australian Showcase, Exotic Erotic, Documentaries as well as an animation program, music docos, films using and exploring digital screen culture and multimedia, blaxploitation cinema, film noir and the modern musical. The MIFF international shorts competition and Talking Pictures (a series of lectures, forums, panels and Q&As) were also featured. Rachel Perkin's Radiance screened as the closing night film.

Filmmaker in Focus
Alexander Sokurov
{focus Alexander Sokurov}

Opening Night Film
The Interview (Craig Monahan, 1998)
More

 

This year's programme is the result of having viewed well over 1000 feature and short films. It has been an impressive year of filmmaking and once again we aim to bring you the best from around the world including highlights from the film festivals of Cannes, London, Sundance, Berlin and Rotterdam.

Australia is experiencing a massive increase in cinema attendances. The byline for this year's festival, 'Creating a Scene', draws attention to the fact that cinema-going is not only one of our most popular social activities but also our most popular cultural activity.

Taking the notion of 'creating a scene' literally, the festival recognises its need to examine the relationship between production and exhibition and ask what is the role of the festival within this dynamic? In what way can a film festival enhance the social experience and add value to the commercial imperatives of the film industry? Our challenge is to encourage movie-goers to expand their cinematic horizons and for the festival to create a context within which audiences can feel comfortable about engaging with and contributing to screen culture.

I hope that you will take this opportunity to celebrate the achievements of our film industry, sample the impressive breadth of production from world cinema, reflect on the latest trends in filmmaking style and content, an use the festival as a place for interaction, discussion and debate.  

Sandra Sdraulig
Executive Director

Introduction taken from the 1998 official guide

Sandra Sdraulig

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