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. 


MIFF2007

MIFF2007 Festival Program

Festival Program
260 feature films and 135 short films were screened from 25 July to 12 August
Full Program

Program in Focus
The 55th MIFF - Richard Moore's first - program featured a focus on debut films from European directors and a reinvigorated Israel cinema industry. Magnum in Motion presented a collection of 19 documentary films centered on the work of the world's most prestigious photographic agency. African cinema was put into the spotlight. Homage was paid to award-winning Japanese writer, director Hirokazu Kore-eda. Forbidden Pleasures focused on human sexuality, and a collection of horror films was screened. 

Filmmaker in Focus
Shohei Imamura
{focus Shohei Imamura}

Opening Night Film
Sicko (Michael Moore, 2007)  
More

As you will read below, the Victorian Government generously granted MIFF extra financial assistance in the recent State budget. We are enormously grateful for this vote of confidence. It will enable us to launch an official industry programme – 37 South: Bridging the Gap – and to implement the MIFF Film Investment Fund as a ‘second door' for Victorian filmmakers. With a little bit of luck, we hope to screen the first results of this fund at MIFF next year. 

It's a privilege and an honour to be at the helm of this organisation at such a critical time in its development. This year, the programme sees the return of some old favourites along with some new programming slots – in particular, a new experiment for the younger members of our community called Next Gen and a new focus on Indigenous filmmaking from around the globe, World Stories. There is much to see and do, impossible to condense in this space, so take your time to go through the programme in detail and enjoy.

I'm immensely grateful to all those who have helped me through this first year, in particular to the MIFF staff and to the highly active and supportive MIFF board. Thank you all.

Richard Moore
Executive Director 

 

MIFF, without stating the obvious, is pleasurably no longer the film calendar's best-kept secret. And its global reputation... astonishing... It's spoken of in hushed tones with glowing exhilaration. 

Even though I've hung out with the provocative, mercurial and entrepreneurial cinematic brain of that congenial party-boy and sly cineaste James Hewison for the past six years, the baton has now been passed onto an equally subversive adventurer in the shape of Richard Moore and we all heartily welcome him to this unique festival. Let's truly assess what we've got. Cannes, Berlin, Toronto and Venice - they all launch the big rockets… Hollywood monoliths, edgy art-house monthly flavour alumni, aberrant thrilling one-offs, controversial prizes, red carpet mania bouncing between timeless artistry and cheap stunts. MIFF is a different deal. We showcase global cinema in the relative sanity of the lower hemisphere. The quintessential MIFF-goer knows and has seriously discovered comprehensive films and moviemaking on all levels – documentaries, features, shorts – homegrown and from Asia, the Middle East, South America, Korea… you name it. Major creative identities have been programmed, then visited and blown us away. Thank you, James, for all of that. And now Richard is opening up Africa. Time to genuinely explore!

Global village? In my youth, it seemed like a reductive term… perhaps we were all slowly becoming the same. Great global cinema proves how different we all really are. The world is not shrinking. It's expanding, demandingly and exponentially. So much to learn, to understand. So much, cocooned in the dark for a couple of hours, to embrace and to treasure.

Geoffrey Rush
MIFF Patron

Introduction taken from the 2007 official guide

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