For the first time, the iconic Sydney Opera House will serve as one of the screening venues for the annual Sydney Film Festival (SFF). The 72nd edition will take place from June 4-15, 2025.

At last year’s festival, the biggest winners were Paola Cortellesi’s There’s Still Tomorrow for the Sydney Film Prize ($60,000 AUD), Alina Simone’s Black Snow for the Sustainable Future Award ($40,000 AUD), Awanui Simich-Pene’s First Horse for the inaugural First Nations Award ($35,000 AUD), and James Bradley’s Welcome to Babel for the Documentary Australia Award ($20,000 AUD).

This year, amazing new films will compete for the 17th Sydney Film Prize (awarded annually since 2008, except 2020) and other prestigious awards. Notably, the Sustainable Future Award remains the world’s largest cash prize for environmental film.

Here’s everything else you need to know to be ready for SFF 2025!

Honorary Retrospectives

As usual, major contributors to global cinema will be honored with career retrospectives. One screening series has been planned for American director Elaine May and another for Indian documentarian Nishtha Jain. But the main event is Cinema in Rebellion, including all 10 previously released features by one of Iran’s leading filmmakers, Jafar Panahi.

For over a decade, Panahi labored under travel and filmmaking bans from the Iranian government. After he served jail time in late 2022 and early 2023, Panahi was released following a two-day hunger strike and permitted to travel abroad. He did not serve on the Cannes Jury that year, despite speculation that he would.

The retrospective on Panahi begins with The White Balloon (1995), which won the Caméra d’Or at Cannes that year. It ends with No Bears, which won the Special Jury Prize at Venice in 2022. Among all Panahi’s award-winning works, his most well-known masterpiece to date is perhaps Taxi, a semi-autobiographical film about working as a taxi driver. It won the Berlin Golden Bear in 2015.

Panahi’s eleventh feature film, It Was Just an Accident, premiered in competition at Cannes this May.

The Jury

The Official Competition Jury chooses the winner of the Sydney Film Prize. Other independent juries select winners of the remaining awards.

The president of this year’s Official Competition Jury is Australian director Justin Kurzel. He is best known for his award-winning and historically-based feature debut, Snowtown (2011), in which an Australian teenager discovers that his mother’s boyfriend is a serial killer. Kurzel’s first television series, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, began airing in April 2025.

The other members of the Official Competition Jury are Māori actress Rachel House (Moana), Marrakech Film Festival Director Mélita Toscan du Plantier, Kamilaroi actor Thomas Weatherall (Heartbreak High), and Hong Kong film distributor Winnie Tsang (The Way We Dance).

The Films

The full program includes 201 films from 70 countries. We can’t cover them all, so we’ll use this opportunity to highlight features by new Australian directors.

For the festival opener, programmers have chosen Together, a feature directorial debut by Michael Shanks. In this horror film from Neon, Millie (Alison Brie) and Tim (Dave Franco) know they want to work on their relationship … but they hadn’t counted on a supernatural force threatening to fuse them into one being! Shanks’ fable of excessive interdependency gains in realism because its co-stars are married in real life. It has already premiered for a “screaming, laughing” audience at Sundance this year and is scheduled for a June 30 release.

Another real-life couple, Emma Hough Hobbs and Leela Varghese, closely collaborated on their feature directorial debut, Lesbian Space Princess. In the animated adventure from Paramount, Princess Saira (Shabana Azeez) undertakes a desperate quest to rescue her ex-girlfriend Kiki (Bernie Van Tiel) from horrible extraterrestrial incels, known as Maliens. While our inner film critic is whispering about queer rewritings of Barbarella (1968), we’re simply eager to enjoy some side-splitting laughter. Lesbian Space Princess is coming to Hobbs and Varghese’s home country after bowing at Berlin, where it won the TEDDY Award for Best Feature Film, generally recognized as the most prestigious prize for queer cinema.

In a more serious vein, Australian writer-director Amy Wang makes her feature directorial debut with Slanted. In the satire, which does not yet have a distributor, a Chinese American highschooler gets plastic surgery to appear white, hoping it will increase her chances of becoming prom queen. The film had an auspicious world premiere at SXSW, where it won the Grand Jury Award for a Narrative Feature. The jury praised it as “a haunting piece that lingers long after the credits roll.” We can’t wait to see it!

Enjoy the Festival!

We hope by now you share our enthusiasm for this year’s festival! If you think you can stand a little more excitement, then permit us to show you this trailer for a film featuring one of our favorite Aussies, actor Jacob Elordi (Euphoria, Saltburn):

With that, we’ll have to let the rest of the amazing films on the program speak for themselves. Please join us in thanking the organizers for another wonderful festival – and in wishing the best of luck to all the filmmakers at SFF 2025!