Five of the most-hyped films coming to Adelaide next month
Cannes Film Festival favourites to Olivia Coleman falling in love with a wicker man, here are some of this year’s most anticipated films at the Adelaide Film Festival. See our video from this week’s launch.
This year’s Adelaide Film Festival announced its lineup on Tuesday night at Goodwood’s Capri Theatre, with a slate of 122 films across 52 countries.
Alongside international talent, the AFF will feature 17 Australian feature films, 10 of which are South Australian-made productions.
The festival is kicking off on October 14 with the Australian premiere of Wild Horse Nine, the new film from acclaimed writer and director Martin McDonagh, and will run until October 25.
From films that have already been met with praise at Venice and Cannes, to Olivia Coleman falling in love with a wicker man, here are some of this year’s most anticipated films at the Adelaide Film Festival.
Fatherland
A film hot off the Cannes’s screen and taking home a top prize is Fatherland, the new film by Polish director Paweł Pawlikowski (My Summer of Love, Cold War). Set in Germany in 1949, the biographical film stars recent Oscar favourite Sandra Hüller, and Hanns Zischler as anti-Nazi activists and writers Erika and Thomas Mann.
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The film centres on their father/daughter road trip across the country in ruins, and Thomas Mann’s emotional struggles with returning to Germany and his family after 16 years of exile in the US. For the film, Pawlikowski won the Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival, with the film receiving accolades of praise from critics.
It’s All Going Very Well….
Adelaide’s own Tilda Cobham-Hervey is making her feature film directorial debut. Cobham-Hervey also wrote and stars in the film as a 30-year-old woman facing a collapsing personal life, who teaches art at an aged care home.
She forms a bond with an 83-year-old man at the home, played by British legend Jonathan Pryce, where she finds comfort and meaning through the friendship. Film fans will have to wait a bit longer for this one; while technically part of the film festival, it isn’t actually making its world premiere until March 2027 in partnership with the Adelaide Festival.
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Paper Tiger
In 2022, James Gray made his most personal film, Armageddon Time, which was loosely based on his upbringing in Queens, New York, in 1980. His new film, Paper Tiger, set in New York in the late ‘80s, Gray again decided to take inspiration from his own life, but repackages it into a crime thriller where the pursuit of the American Dream is disrupted by the Russian Mob.
In the tense family drama, Adam Driver and Miles Teller play brothers who fall into a threatening world of corruption and violence. The film, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May, received considerable praise for its performances, in particular Scarlett Johansson, who plays the wife of one of the brothers.
The Siege of Paradise
Among the many documentaries at the festival is The Siege of Paradise, set along the five picturesque cliff-side towns that make up northwestern Italy’s Cinque Terre. The five towns are home to 4000 locals, whose peace is abruptly disrupted every summer as some 4.5 million tourists flood the beaches and cobblestoned streets.
Director Gar O’Rourke shoots the cruise ships of tourists arriving as if they are battleships approaching to attack the coast, as the locals brace for the waves of influencers and selfie sticks. The film highlights the financial influx of the tourism industry in the area, but asks “at what cost?” as it looks on from the locals’ perspectives.
Wicker
A standout among the slew of films is Wicker, co-directed and written by Adelaide filmmaker Eleanor Wilson, and American filmmaker Alex Huston Fischer. The offbeat rom-com, set in a medieval village, stars Olivia Coleman as a spinster fisherwoman who enlists the local weaver (Peter Dinklage) to make her a man made of wicker (played by Alexander Skarsgård).
A passionate relationship ensues between the two which sets off chaos and jealousy among the townspeople, including Australian actress Elizabeth Debicki. The film blends absurdity with a sincerely romantic love story for a striking movie-going experience.
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