See what’s new: This year’s premieres at Adelaide Film Festival
Adelaide Film Festival returns with a curated line-up of some of the best films from around the world. From an Australian gore-fest to a Cannes double-award-winner, CityMag discovers some of the hottest new releases heading our way.
Fwends
Sophie Somerville’s Fwends is a breezy, quietly resonant debut that captures the tension between closeness and drift with remarkable clarity.
It follows Em (Emmanuelle Mattana), a Sydney-based lawyer grappling with workplace burnout, who travels to Melbourne for a weekend with Jessie (Melissa Gan), her childhood friend who is navigating a heartbreak. Their easy rapport, built on shared history and quiet understanding, begins to shift.
Improvisation-based storytelling is rarely attempted in Australian cinema, and even more rarely achieved with this much warmth, wit and emotional clarity. Somerville, working with Mattana and Gan as co-writers and performers, creates a work that feels lived-in and attuned to the things we struggle to say aloud.
Fwends lingers in the space between comfort and discomfort, between affection and distance, and asks what remains when intimacy begins to shift in subtle, irreversible ways.
Recognised for its rousing, rare, funny and powerful friendship between women, Fwends premiered at the Berlinale Forum and won the Caligari Film Prize 2025 for stylistic and thematic innovation.
Thursday, October 16 | Palace Nova
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Penny Lane is Dead
Set during the sweltering Australian summer of 1986, Penny Lane is Dead is the ferocious debut feature from writer-director Mia’Kate Russell.
Penny Lane (Bailey Spalding) and her best friends Toni (Tahlee Fereday) and Amy (Alexandra Jensen) are celebrating Penny’s university acceptance with a debauched ‘no dick event’ at a remote beach house.
But the night spirals into chaos when Penny’s volatile cousin Kat (Sophia Wright-Mendelsohn) arrives uninvited, spiked cupcake in hand and a cruel agenda in tow. Things turn deadly with the arrival of Kat’s seedy boyfriend Angus (Ben O’Toole) and his crew – Rodowsky (Fletcher Humphrys) and the menacing Merrick (Steve Le Marquand).
What begins as a night of celebration unravels into a brutal fight for survival. Fuelled by punk-rock energy and pitch-black humour, Penny Lane is Dead tears into internalised misogyny, toxic masculinity and the gendered violence simmering beneath Australia’s sunburnt surface.
With breakout performances and razor-sharp direction, Mia’Kate Russell delivers a bold, blood-soaked genre piece that blends savage satire with cult-cinema attitude – an electrifying new voice in Australian film.
Saturday, October 18 | The Piccadilly | Pink Carpet
Sirât
Sirât begins on a dancefloor carved into the Moroccan mountains, a swirl of light, dust and bass. Luis (Sergi López) and his teenage son Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona) clutch a photo of the daughter, who has been missing for far too long. Following a moving caravan of ravers south, they trade sleep for rhythm, and the night’s pulse for the horizon’s unblinking test.
Sweeping visuals render the epic expanse, reducing humans to scale against ridges and sky. The score moves from pounding techno to ambient drift, letting the music lead the film’s heartbeat.
As the journey turns perilous, what remains is a rite of passage; brutal, beautiful and unfinished.
Winner of the Cannes Jury Prize and the Cannes Soundtrack Award, Oliver Laxe’s latest is both a hypnotic road movie and a haunting reckoning, where survival is measured not in distance travelled, but in what you can carry forward.
Friday, October 17 | Palace Nova | Pink Carpet | After Party
The Fox
Dario Russo, of Danger 5 cult fame, draws on Japanese and Korean folktales, as well as his own upbringing in the Adelaide Hills, with this story of a trickster fox let loose in the henhouse of Australian culture.
Nick is your average good bloke – heart of gold, a bit thick, a dud root, looks forward to schnitty night at the pub. When his fiancée betrays him, Nick is unwise enough to listen to a fox who has a typically cunning scheme for returning his foxy lady to him.
An all-star cast headed by Jai Courtney and Emily Browning, includes Miranda Otto and Kym Gyngell, with the voices of Olivia Colman and Sam Neill. There are also talking magpies, magic holes and lots of yapping Jack Russells.
Russo explores the struggle between domestication, commitment and stability against the wild and primal desire for freedom, novelty and lust – but, most importantly, he does it in a very, very funny way.
Sunday, October 19 | Capri Theare | Pink Carpet
Adelaide Film Festival is taking over local screens from October 15-26, 2025. Session times and tickets at adelaidefilmfestival.org/program
