The Melbourne International Film Festival makes its return this week and – thanks to COVID-19 – it’s the event’s first full live season in three years.

It also happens to be its landmark 70th edition, which explains why this year’s festival program is so packed: 257 feature films, 102 shorts, and 12 XR pieces make up MIFF 2022, and that foreboding amount also includes 18 world premieres in its number.

Having such a packed program also means that it’s tremendously difficult to narrow the films down, but we’ve given it a go anyway. Below are The Brag‘s top films to check out at MIFF 2022, including an intriguing work produced by the Safdie brothers and a coming-of-age drama starring a certain popular Normal People star.

The 2022 Melbourne International Film Festival takes place from Thursday, August 4th until Saturday, August 21st. You can find the full program and ticketing information at the official website.

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Funny Pages 

Produced by the Safdie brothers, this black comedy follows a teenage cartoonist, Robert, who wishes to flee his banal suburban life in search of artistic glory. After a traumatic event, Robert decides to drop out of school in order to live in a terribly small apartment, where he meets Wallace, a person who might help him achieve his dreams.

Funny Pages received a short standing ovation at Cannes earlier this year, and there’s interesting talent behind the camera: the film is written and directed by Owen Kline, who had a memorable role in one of Noah Baumbach’s standout early films, The Squid and the Whale (he also happens to be the son of Hollywood stars Kevin Kline and Phoebe Cates); it was shot on Super 16mm by Sean Price Williams, who’s handled the cinematography for arthouse filmmakers like Alex Ross Perry (Listen Up Philip, Her Smell).

Aftersun

Starring Paul Mescal, Normal People actor, Phoebe Bridgers’ partner, and an obsessive figure for a small slice the interminably online, this film also happens to have received almost unanimously positive reviews.

The Irish actor plays a young father, Calum, who goes on a summer holiday to Turkey with his eleven-year-old daughter Sophie. It’s only when she’s a lot older – and with the aid of MiniDV footage – that she realises the person she thought her father was isn’t the man she knew.

Sick of Myself

After last year’s romantic drama The Worst Person in the World, Norwegian cinema is having a bit of a moment. Made by up-and-coming filmmaker Kristoffer Borgli, Sick of Myself is aiming to capitalise on the zeitgeist in 2022.

The blacker-than-black satire details the extremely unhealthy competitive relationship between a young couple, Signe and Thomas. After the latter finally gains his breakthrough as an artist, Signe does whatever she can to put the focus back on her, including devouring dangerous pills. As The Hollywood Reporter review put it, Sick of Myself is “horribly, shamefully, hilariously relatable… A vicious little treat to enjoy.”

Meet Me in the Bathroom

Ah, Y2K: depending on who you ask, it was either a wonderful or terrible time for fashion, but it was also a seminal period for the indie and garage rock renaissance.

Centred around New York City’s Lower East Side, bands like The Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Interpol helped to resurrect the city’s cultural scene post-9/11.

Directors Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace take viewers back to that time of seriously skinny jeans and greasy hair in this detailed documentary. Featuring previously unseen footage and interviews with names like Karen O and Albert Hammond Jr., this one’s for the millennial music fan in your life.

Death in Brunswick

For his breakout year in 1993 with The Piano and Jurassic Park, Sam Neill starred in this Melbourne-set film, based on a comic novel of the same name. For MIFF 2022, it’s been given a brand-new restoration, a deserved honour for a classic of Australian cinema.

Set in – you guessed it – Brunswick, Neill plays Carl, a down-on-his-luck man lacking direction in life. He takes a job as a chef in a downtrodden pub to make ends meet, where he soon falls madly in love with the barmaid Sophie. When he finds himself implicated in the death of a kitchen hand though, he incites trouble between the local Greek and Turkish communities.

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