Sydney Film Festival 2026 opens with a question the programme cannot answer alone

The Sydney Film Festival programme dropped last Tuesday, and I have spent the days since reading it the way I read every SFF programme: pencil in hand, calendar open, attempting to construct a schedule that accommodates everything I want to see while accepting that the geometry of the State Theatre and the distances between venues will defeat me at least twice. This is a yearly ritual. The programme is always too full, the days are always too short, and the compromises you make about which sessions to skip always feel, in the moment, like small betrayals.

This year’s programme is strong. It is strong in the way that SFF programmes tend to be strong, which is to say it contains a handful of titles that will be talked about for months, a larger number that will be talked about for days, and a substantial middle ground of competent, well-intentioned films that will screen once or twice and then slip into the streaming queue where they will be discovered, or not, by an audience that was not in the room. This is not a criticism. It is a description of how film festivals work, and SFF is better at it than most.

What makes the 2026 programme worth paying particular attention to is the Australian section. The local titles are not merely present; they are positioned with a confidence that suggests the programmers believe they can hold their own against the international competition, and on the evidence of what I have seen and heard, they may be right.

The Australian titles

Warwick Thornton’s new feature, his first since The New Boy in 2023, is screening in a prime slot on the opening weekend, and the placement tells you what the festival thinks of it. Thornton has spent his career making films that refuse to separate the spiritual from the political, and the early descriptions suggest this one continues that project into territory that is both geographically remote and thematically immediate. I have not seen it yet. I want to see it in the State Theatre, with an audience that is paying attention, because Thornton’s films reward communal viewing in a way that most Australian cinema does not demand but that his films genuinely require.

Shannon Murphy’s follow-up to Babyteeth is also in the programme, and I am curious about this one in a different register. Babyteeth was a film that could have been unbearable in less controlled hands, a dying-teenager story that found comedy and tenderness without ever pretending that the dying was not the centre of gravity. Murphy has a facility with actors that is obvious and a sense of rhythm that is less discussed but equally important to how her films feel. The new film is reportedly set in Sydney’s western suburbs and deals with a family navigating a crisis that is economic rather than medical, which is a pivot that interests me. Whether she can bring the same tonal precision to material that is structurally less dramatic is an open question, and open questions are what festivals are for.

There are two debut features in the Australian section that I know less about but that the programme notes describe in terms that trigger my attention. One is a documentary about the demolition of a public housing estate in Melbourne, made by a filmmaker who grew up in one. The other is a fiction feature set in rural Queensland that has been described, carefully, as a film about masculinity and landscape, which could mean almost anything but which, in the context of a festival programme that tends toward precision in its language, probably means something specific and deliberate.

The international selections

The international programme draws from the usual sources: Cannes competition titles making their Australian premiere, a handful of Berlin and Venice selections, and a scattering of films from markets that SFF has historically been good at representing, including South Korea, Argentina and Senegal. The festival has always been more globally minded than MIFF in this respect, less focused on discovery and more focused on context, placing Australian films alongside international work and trusting the audience to draw its own connections.

I am particularly interested in a new film from South Korea that reportedly deals with the demolition of a neighbourhood in Seoul, which rhymes with the Melbourne documentary in ways that feel programmatic rather than coincidental. Good festival programming does this: it builds conversations between films that were not aware of each other, and the audience becomes the space where those conversations happen.

The question the programme cannot answer

Here is what I keep coming back to. The programme is strong. The Australian titles are strong. The international selections are thoughtfully curated. And none of this addresses the problem that SFF has been circling for several years, which is the problem of the audience.

Festival attendance in Sydney has been under pressure since the pandemic, and the pressure has not fully lifted. The State Theatre screenings still sell, but the smaller venues are less reliable, and the midweek sessions that used to fill with retirees and university students and freelancers who could rearrange their schedules have become harder to populate. This is not unique to SFF. Every film festival in the world is navigating the same contraction. But SFF sits in a city where the cost of living, the cost of transport and the cost of a ticket combine to create a barrier that the programme alone cannot lower.

The festival as a critical space

There is a version of SFF that functions purely as a screening programme, a delivery mechanism for films that will eventually be available through other channels. In this version, the festival’s value is measured in premieres and exclusives, and it competes with streaming platforms on access. This version is dying, and it should die, because it is a competition that festivals cannot win.

The version that matters, the version I keep coming back for, is SFF as a critical space: a place where films are encountered in conditions that demand attention, where the conversation that follows the screening is part of the experience, where the act of sitting in a dark room with strangers and watching something together creates a form of engagement that no algorithm can replicate. This is not nostalgia. It is a description of something that still happens when the conditions are right, and the question for SFF in 2026 is whether the conditions can be maintained.

I will be there. I will sit in the State Theatre for Thornton’s film and I will make the trek between venues for the smaller screenings and I will spend the evenings in conversations that start with “Did you see…” and end with disagreements that neither party will concede. This is what a film festival is for. The programme has done its work. Now it needs an audience willing to do theirs.