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. 


MIFF2005

MIFF2005 Festival Program

Festival Program
276 feature films and 132 short films were screened from 20 July to 7 August
Full Program

Program in Focus
The 54th festival continued to feature films grouped under International Panorama, Australia Showcase, Raw Japanese Cinema, Regional Focus The Middle East in Focus, Documentaries, New Media, Music on Film, Animation Gallery and short films streams. Homage was paid to Japanese director Uchida Tomu and a collection of his features from the 1950s and 1960s was screened. Cinema from Argentina was put under the spotlight, as was new female filmmakers from Europe. Hong Kong's acclaimed iconoclast Fruit Chan was a guest of the festival and a selection of his films were screened. 

Opening Night Film
Little Fish (Rowan Woods, 2005)  
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Each year Melbourne International Film Festival acts as a lightning rod for currents in world cinema, and indeed' chronicles world events. In 2005, we check the pulse of contemporary China via the celebrated filmmaker Jia Zhang-ke and his cinematographer-turned-filmmaker Yu Likwai. Amid the bustle of Hong Kong, Fruit Chan has been revealing, often wittily, the daily travails of the city's people. This year; Chan is our filmmaker in focus.

Again MIFF focuses on the myriad cultures, and sometimes conflicts, of the Middle East, with Kurdish Iranian filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi central to 'Homelands Now'. As member nations of the European Union muse over a future constitution, iconoclasts such as Moodysson and Denis engage with notions' of freedom and identity, as our 'New Europe' spotlight reveals. Meanwhile, auteurs as diverse as Bergman, Ruiz and Tsai put forward arguments for what cinema can and should be.

 Back in Australia, the argument has a rather different tone. 'Australian Showcase' reveals cinema that is spirited, playful and challenging. I believe these filmmakers prove Australian cinema is far from moribund, as some would have us believe. This is an argument I'm prepared to have with anyone!

James Hewison 
Executive Director

Introduction taken from the 2005 official guide

James Hewison

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