We Preview The Melbourne International Film Festival

The 62nd annual Melbourne International Film Festival has unveiled its full program for 2013 and we've decided to break down a bunch of the flicks for you - trailer style!

MIFF will open on Thursday July 25 with Pedro Almodóvar's I'm So Excited; and the closing night film has now been revealed as J.C. Chandor's Robert Redford-starring, castaway drama All Is Lost, which is one of dozens of films to be coming from Melbourne fresh off screening at Cannes.

Screening at the event will be all the big indie festival films of the year - Blancanieves, Camille Claudel 1915, Downloaded, The East, Frances Ha, Ginger & Rosa, A Hijacking, Mood Indigo, the Paradise trilogy, The Past, Prince Avalanche, The Spirit of '45, Stoker, Upstream Color, Vic + Flo Saw A Bear, What Maisie Knew. Basically all the same highlights from the Sydney Film Festival program but scores more!

As well as MIFF's regular strains of - Australian, Asian, and European sections; International Features and Documentaries, Masters & Restorations; Backbeat, The Sporting Life, Next Gen, Nightshift - festival director Michelle Carey has assembled a range of smaller, more focused programs, including:

- States Of Play: American Independents
- Defying The Times: Activism On Film
- A League Of Their Own: New Arabic Cinema
- Shining Violence: Italian Giallo
- Juche Days: North Korea On Film

Now, here's a bunch of our picks!

OPENING NIGHT

I'm So Excited (Spain, director: Pedro Almodóvar)

If a film festival Opening Night begs for some kind of crowdpleaser, where better to turn that the latest slice of wild melodrama and hyper-queer comedy from Almodóvar, that man who can make rape, incest, murder, and varying acts of sexual depravity into crowdpleasery.

CLOSING NIGHT

All Is Lost (USA, J.C. Chandor)

At the opposite end of the spectrum is Chandor's minimalist, man-adrift-at-sea movie, which earnt praise at Cannes for its unexpected austerity. With Robert Redford almost always at the centre of the frame, All Is Lost is an almost wordless drama from Chandor, the tonal opposite of this ultra-talky debut, Margin Call.

INTERNATIONAL PANORAMA

Ain't Them Bodies Saints (USA, David Lowery)

David Lowery's debut earnt plenty of praise at Sundance for its Terrence Malick-aping style and its fierce lead performances from Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck.

Bastards (France, Claire Denis)

Coming direct from Cannes, Bastards has been called 'minor Denis', hewing closer to the realm of the commercial thriller than the glorious art-film abstractions of The Intruder or White Material. But even lesser Denis is greater than most else on in cinemas.

The Capsule/Viola (Greece/Argentina; Athina Rachel Tsangari/Matias Piñeiro)

Whilst they're a natural fit for television, most cinemas - and even festivals - won't no part of screening a 'mid-length feature', but here MIFF puts two together in a program of two budding young auteurs: Tsangari following her meta-absurdist Attenberg and Piñeiro his vicious, conversational They All Lie with a pair of already-acclaimed pictures that just happen to be 35 and 65 minutes long.

The Dance Of Reality (Chile, Alejandro Jodorowsky)

The crowned prince of stoned cinematic psychedelia returns after a quarter-century in the cinematic wilderness. His latest film is a magic-realist memoir of his Chilean childhood, and after the rapturous reception Holy Mountain and El Topo received with their retrospective screenings at MIFF 2007, the new Jodorowsky is bound to be one of the festival's most-anticipated screenings.

Final Cut - Ladies And Gentlemen (Hungary, György Pálfi)

Already one of cinema's strangest stylists - the guy behind such singular visions as Hukkle and Taxidermia - Pálfi raids the entire history of cinema, cutting up 450 films over a three-year editing binge, fashioning an ad-hoc narrative - and an alternative history of the 20th century - out of a host of famous films.

Fruitvale Station (USA, Ryan Coogler)

Much-acclaimed American indie drama arrives at MIFF before its eventual cinematic release, and possible place on the 2014 Oscars slate.

Jimmy P. (France, Arnaud Desplechin)

Unexpectedly making his English-language debut, Desplechin has headed to America - with old pal Mathieu Amalric - to make a dramatic adaptation of a 1940s psychological text, Psychotherapy Of A Plains Indian, with Benicio Del Toro.

Passion (USA, Brian De Palma)

Once one of American cinema's most Awards-Show-feted 'masters,' De Palma has moved into a strange late-career stage, making delirious, off-the-wall thrillers whose most vocal proponents are either egghead cinephiles or genre-trawlers. His latest is a corporate thriller in which Rachel McAdams and Noomi Rapace make out for the male gaze.

Tip Top (France, Serge Bozon)

France's wackiest auteur returns with an absurdist take on cop-movie clichés, with Isabelle Huppert and Sandrine Kiberlain as a pair of Internal Affairs officers who settle in a corrupt small-town after the death of an Algerian snitch. Comes straight from Cannes.

TELESCOPE: VISIONS FROM THE EU

In The Name Of... (Poland, Malgorzata Szumowska)

Szumowska's follow-up to her provocative piece of cinematic feminism, Elles, caused huge controversy back in her ultra-Catholic homeland after premiering at Berlin; the film chronicling an affair between a gay priest and a rural youth.

Soldate Jeannette (Austria, Daniel Hoesl)

Bonkers art-movie hijinks that will delight those not so concerned by the traditional tropes of plot, and will piss off everyone else.

AUSTRALIAN SHOWCASE

In Bob We Trust (Australia, Lynn-Maree Milburn)

After her previous portrait of an iconic Melburnian, Autoluminescent: Rowland S. Howard, Milburn turns her camera to one of local media's least-likely breakout stars, 'renegade priest' Father Bob Maguire.

Tim Winton's The Turning (Australia, Warwick Thornton, Jub Clerc, Robert Connolly, Anthony Lucas, Rhys Graham, Ashlee Page, Tony Ayres, Claire McCarthy, Stephen Page, Shaun Gladwell, Mia Wasikowska, Simon Stone, David Wenham, Jonathan auf der Heide, Justin Kurzel, Yaron Lifschitz, Ian Meadows, Marieka Walsh)

In which the 17 short stories of the titular novel are adapted by 17 directors. It could be, in such, either debacle or triumph, but with Thornton amongst the filmmakers, at least one 'story' will be worth awaiting.

ACCENT ON ASIA

Like Father Like Son (Japan, Hirokazu Kore-eda)

The latest film from the great Japanese filmmaker (After Life, Distance, Nobody Knows, Air Doll, etc) comes en route from Cannes, where it won the Jury Prize.

A Touch Of Sin (China, Jia Zhang-ke)

Jia is the pre-eminent profiler of 21st century China, of its changing landscapes and mounting social conflicts. After so often turning to underplayed minimalism to portray such, previously, with A Touch Of Sin he takes a different tack: ultra-violence. At Cannes, it was given the award for Best Screenplay.

DOCUMENTARIES

Leviathan (France/USA, Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Véréna Paravel)

Castaing-Taylor's follow-up to his profound Sweetgrass is another piece of environmentalist/anthropological minimalism, chronicler not sheep-farmers, but commercial fisherman, its experimental aesthetic presenting a 'fish eye' view of the fishing industry.

Teenage (USA, Matt Wolf)

Wolf, the guy behind the sublime Arthur Russell doc, Wild Combination, attempts to adapt Jon Savage's non-fiction history of the American 'invention' of the teenager via a filmic collage, scattering countless pieces of pop-cultural fluff and personal memento across a freeform portrait that comes with help from actorly oddballs Jena Malone, Ben Wishaw, and Julia Hummer, and a score from Deerhunter/Atlas Sound provocateur Bradford Cox.

NEXT GEN

Foxfire: Confessions Of A Girl Gang (Canada, Laurence Cantet)

In a cinematic development you could easily categorise as 'weird', Cantet - one of 21st century cinema's most respected socio-realists - has made his English-language debut with an adapation of Joyce Carol Oates' naughty-1950s-girls novel. Which was embarrassingly adapted to screen in a 1996 film starring a young Angelina Jolie and even younger Jenny Lewis. Cantet's version is a vastly superior, but will likely play better to an adolescent audience than for cinephiles who freaked over Time Out.

Valentine Road (USA, Marta Cunningham)

Harrowing documentary chronicle of the in-cold-blood murder of a 15-year-old gay kid by his 14-year-old classmate in a seaside California town. Cunningham's feature excels as it pulls back from the personal tragedy, looking at the toxic society - filled with drug use, child abuse, horrendous schools, and religious pardoning of hate-crimes— that birthed the tragedy.

BACKBEAT

A Band Called Death (USA, Mark Christopher Covino, Jeff Howlett)

Chronicles of 'fringe' musicians and those bands lost to time, then later rediscovered, come loaded with natural drama, and this portrait of ultra-cult '70s proto-punks Death comes with the added layers of family dynamic.

Cosmic Psychos: Blokes You Can Trust (Australia, Matt Weston)

The bogan Godfathers of Grunge are portrayed, years on, as a kind of absurdist fairy-tale: farmers from the bush who somehow ended up touring the world, opening stadiums for Pearl Jam, etc.

Filmage: The Story Of The Descendents/All (USA, Matt Riggle)

Old punks never die, they just get documentaries made about them.

The Punk Singer (USA, Sini Anderson)

With the recent arrival of her brand new band, The Julie Ruin, iconic punk vocalist and feminist icon Kathleen Hanna is chronicled in The Punk Singer, which looks at her time in Bikini Kill and Le Tigre, and her unexpected, previously-unexplained stay in the musical wilderness.

NIGHT SHIFT

A Field In England (UK, Ben Wheatley)

In The Kill List and Sightseers, Wheatley explored the idea that anywhere you walk in Britain is soaked in a long history of bloodshed. Here, he literalises that idea, recruiting some big-guns of English comedy - Julian Barratt, Reece Shearsmith - for a story of 17-century Civil War deserters.

Magic Magic (Chile, Sebastian Silva)

In a curious move, Silva —the oddball, domestic-drollery filmmaker behind The Maid and Old Cats - has invited a host of hot-young-things (Juno Temple, Emily Browning, Catalina Sandino Moreno) to the South of Chile, for a seemingly-silly psychological thriller in which the villain is... Michael Cera!

DEFYING THE TIMES: ACTIVISM ON FILM

99%: The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film (Aaron Aites, Audrey Ewell)

Aites and Ewell - the documentarians behind the fine black-metal chronicle Until The Light Takes Us - have assembled a film chronicle of the first year in the Occupy movement, cutting up their largely-crowdsourced material into a moving shrine to noble resistance and people-power.

Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer (Russia/UK, Mike Lerner, Maxim Pozdorovkin)

Standing in defiance of modern Russia, punk 'actionists' Pussy Riot became 2012's great indie-rock cause célèbre after being jailed for the treason of critiquing the state in sloganeering song.

STATES OF PLAY: AMERICAN INDEPENDENTS

Computer Chess (USA, Andrew Bujalski)

One of 2013's greatest cinematic delights, the mumblecore OG returns with a portrait of early-'80s computer programmers that's shot in of-the-era VHS 'technology', and has the same shaggy, strange, ad-hoc philosophical qualities of the early, talky films of Richard Linklater.

Starlet (USA, Sean Baker)

It sounds horrid in premise: an idle, sometime-adult-actress girl and a cantankerous old lady become unlikely allies, with a chihuahua thrown in the mix. But Baker's film is a curious, individualist portrait of changing cultural values, set against a porn industry that just feels like another McJob for directionless youth.

A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN: NEW ARABIC CINEMA

Coming Forth By Day (Egypt, Hala Lofty)

Sublime piece of domestic, daily life looks at modern Egypt - its changing political climate and still-regressive social realities - through lots of long, aching takes (for those who long to watch someone wash dishes for two minutes straight, this is your film). Its first half shot entirely in the one house, but Lofty's parable steps out onto the streets in the second half, and invites as many questions as answers.

Omar (Palestine, Hany Abu-Assad)

Fresh off a Jury Prize win at Cannes, this portrait of queer love on the West Bank - by Abu-Assad, the guy who made the great suicide-bomber drama Paradise Now in 2005 - is loaded with politics personal, social, and geographical.