From 4 to 15 June 2025, Sydney Film Festival celebrates its seventy-second program. Presenting over 200 films from seventy countries, including seventeen world premieres, six international premieres and 137 Australian premieres, Kelly Reichardt’s 1970s-set art heist drama The Mastermind is a standout. Direct from the Cannes Film Festival and part of the official competition, it stars Josh O’Connor and Alana Haim.
World premieres include Emily: I Am Kam – a revelatory portrait of legendary Anmatyerr artist Emily Kam Kngwarray from the Utopia community in the Northern Territory – and Australian artist-filmmaker Nikki Lam’s The Unshakeable Destiny – a trilogy exploring the artist’s evolving relationship with Hong Kong, as the city undergoes its own upheavals.
Emily Kam Kngwarray near Mparntwe/Alice Springs after the first exhibition of Utopia batiks, 1980. Photograph: © Toly Sawenko, 2023
Other art-aligned showings include witty drama What Does That Nature Say to You by Korean indie auteur Hong Sang-soo, following an artist who finally meets his girlfriend’s family; the international documentary A Want in Her, following Irish artist Myrid Carten as she confronts her alcoholic mother and her own childhood wounds; and Assembly, also in the international documentary category, tracks artist Rashaad Newsome as he builds an AI-powered, joy-filled, radical queer Black utopia at New York’s Armory – a vibrant collision of art, activism and community.
Additional highlights include the fourteen-hour epic exergue – on documenta 14, about staging the world’s most ambitious art exhibition – co-presented with the Biennale of Sydney – and Marlon Williams: Ngā Ao e Rua – Two Worlds, an aurally exhilarating documentary following the acclaimed Aotearoa artist as he returns home to write his first album in te reo Māori.
