MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL Australia (MIFF 2012) - Announces a Slew of Unveiled Titles!

A press conference released today added a diverse cornucopia of exciting CANNES and post-CANNES titles that are confirmed to be playing at MIFF (August 2-19).

Initially the First-Glance titles caused excitement with the news that Michael Haneke's Amour, Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom and festival favourite Werner Herzog's Into The Abyss were announced along with other gems the likes of Miike's Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, the premiere of Australian horror film 100 Bloody Acres, festival darlings Tabu and Beasts of the Southern Wild and Indie delights Your Sister's Sister and Ruby Sparks.

Additional noteworthy titles include the controversial figure of Ah Wei Wei: Never Sorry, the academy favourite about a real football team in Undefeated, Japanese Anime A Letter to Momo and French animation Le Tableau.

The press conference from today adds the following and increases the amazing line-up of films ten-fold.

The titles unveiled this morning include the surprisingly funny No (from director of Post Mortem) and Leos Carax's ingenious Holy Motors; a contemplative, mesmerising work featuring Denis Lavant, Eva Mendes and a singing Kylie Minogue. Also included was The Hunt by Danish director Thomas Vinterberg and Hong Sang-soo's (Oki's Movie, MIFF '11) eccentric romantic comedy In Another Country, starring Isabelle Huppert. Im Sang-soo follows-up The Housemaid (MIFF '10) with another uber-polished tale of seduction in The Taste of Money, Cristian Mungiu's follow-up to the Palme d'Or-winning 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (MIFF '07) Beyond the Hills is a film based on BBC reports that exposed an exorcism case at a Moldavian monastery; Like Someone in Love, Iranian auteur Abbas Kiarostami's (Certified Copy, MIFF '10) surprising and sorrowful romantic tale set in Japan. Also from Japan is veteran provocateur Koji Wakamatsu's (Caterpillar, MIFF '10) radical biopic on the life and death of Japanese icon Yukio Mishima in 11:25 The Day Mishima Chose His Own Fate.

Other real treats include the stylised Bombay thriller Miss Lovely, combining Bollywood pleasures with underworld grime as well as Anurag Kashyap's two-part Gangs of Wasseypur; Part 1 is a Bollywood-influenced gangster epic that follows the trials of two rival clans over 70 years while Part 2 focuses on the generation that follows, Bollywood-obsessed and growing up on an inheritance of vengeance.

The line-up continues with The King of Pigs, a provocative animation about South Korea's corrosive class inequality that was also a triple-award winner at the 2011 Busan International Film Festival; the fascinating documentary Room 237 which dissects a host of obsessive theories around Stanley Kubrick's beloved The Shining; and Ben Wheatley's follow-up to the brutal Kill List (MIFF '11) in the deranged comedy, Sightseers.

Another complete surprise and one I am highly looking forward to is Maniac; Franck Khalfoun's scalp-slashing horror starring Elijah Wood; and For Love's Sake from the prolific Takashi Miike (again), who turns a classic Japanese anime about a doomed love triangle into a genre-twisting musical.

 

Films mentioned in this article:

Feature Film:

Amour (Haneke, 2012, France)

Moonrise Kingdom (Anderson, 2012, USA)

100 Bloody Acres (Cairnes, 2012, Australia)

Tabu (Gomes, 2012, Portugal)

Beasts of the Southern Wild (Zeitlin, 2012, USA)

Your Sister's Sister (Shelton, 2011, USA)

Ruby Sparks (Dayton, 2012, USA)

No (Larrain, 2012, Chile)

Holy Motors (Carax, 2012, France)

The Hunt (Vinterberg, 2012, Denmark)

Beyond the Hills (Mungiu, 2012, Romania)

Sightseers (Wheatley, 2012, UK)

Maniac (Khalfoun, 2012, USA)

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney (Miike, 2012, Japan)

For Love's Sake (Miike, 2012, Japan)

11:25 The Day Mishima Chose His Own Fate (Wakamatsu, 2012, Japan)

In Another Country (Sang-soo Hong, 2012, S.Korea)

The Taste of Money (Sang-soo Im, 2012, S.Korea)

Like Someone in Love (Kiarostami, 2012, Japan)

Miss Lovely (Ahluwalia, 2012, India)

Gangs of Wasseypur (Kashyap, 2012, India)

The King of Pigs (Sang-ho Yeon, 2011, S.Korea)

A Letter to Momo (Okiura, 2011, Japan)

Le Tableau (Laguionie, 2011, France)

Documentary:

Into The Abyss (Herzog, 2011, USA)

Ah Wei Wei: Never Sorry (Klayman, 2012, China)

Undefeated (Lindsay, 2011, USA)

Room 237 (Ascher, 2012, USA)

 

The full program and guests will be launched on Tuesday 10 July with the Festival program online at miff.com.au from Wednesday 11 July and in The Age on Friday 13 July.

Tickets go on sale on Friday 13 July.