Friday 6 March, 6.30pm | TRAILER

Dir: Javier Cutrona / Ecuador / 103 mins / VICTORIAN PREMIERE

Rated M (Mature Themes)

WINNER - BEST FILM, BEST ACTRESS, 2025 Sydney Science Fiction Film Festival

Played with a heartbreaking honesty by the remarkable Jessica Barahona, Camila suffers from amnesia. She recalls little of her childhood on the coast and in the sea, because of a traumatic event. To remain sane, she fills her pain and emptiness with an imaginary world where the perception of reality is unique and extraordinary; where details are brought to life; and, where a giant fish is her guardian.
OFFICIAL SELECTION - Tallin Black Nights Film Festival (Winner - Special Jury Prize); Cinefantasy Film Festival, Brazil.

Screens with IMPRINT
Dir: Rafael Martínez-García / Mexico / 15 mins / VICTORIAN PREMIERE.
Alicia uses "Imprint," a service that allows her to revisit three minutes of her past, to relive the last time she spoke with her missing daughter.

Friday 6 March, 9.00pm | TRAILER

Rated PG (Mature Themes)

Dir: Itandehui Jansen / Mexico / 75 mins

In the year 2084, Ángel, a climate migrant in an unspecified smart city under constant surveillance, makes a living by cultivating plants, preserving the fading wisdom of seeds. Within this desolate landscape he meets Sofia, another climate migrant who works at a recycling facility. Fueling Ángel's longing for human connection and a glimmer of hope, he reaches out to Sofia through the timeless medium of pen and paper, fostering an intimate, clandestine bond. As their secret correspondence unfolds, a friendship and shared desire for liberation from excessive control takes shape.

Screens with NUUYII
Dir: Itandehui Jansen / Mexico / 11 mins / AUSTRALIAN PREMIERE.
A young man, born and raised in the vastness of the galaxy, lands on an unknown planet. As he surveys the landscape, he recognises fragments from ancient stories. Driven by a quiet urgency, he contacts his ship’s command to retrieve archival recordings of the last humans to abandon earth. Slowly, it dawns on him that he has returned to his ancestral home.Description goes here

Saturday 7 March, 1.00m

We undertake a journey across the planet to explore what bold, new speculative visions are emerging (Session running time: 104 mins)

Rated M (Mature Themes; Impactful Fantasy Sequences)

MUSHROOM CUT Dir: Kuba Szutkowski / The Netherlands / 8 mins. A hairdresser is shocked when her client, a long-haired welder, turns into a girl.

SAYS PRISONER 8903 Dir: Heewon Lee / Korea/China / 11.35 mins. On death row, an inmate watches images from his past, but discovers that the memories aren’t his.

AN OLD FRIEND Dir: Nuk Suwanchote / U.S.A. / 14 mins. An imaginary friend’s sole purpose is to bring happiness to his child, even if his ‘child’ is a 90 year old man.

LUPE Q AND THE GALACTIC CORN CAKE Dir: Javier Badillo / Canada / 4.23 mins. Aliens. Punk Rock. Corn Cakes. In space, only Grandma's Latin cooking will save you.

THE LAST FOOL Dir: Cong Le / China / 17 mins. Society’s last below-average child fights to expose the cruel world that judges him.

ECHOES Dir: Sean Nam / France / 14.20 mins. A revolutionary company that predicts and secures the destinies of its clients becomes unravelled when romance forges a new path.

DISTANT BLUESHIFT Dir: Aloysius Ong / Singapore / 10.35 mins. An AI-generated father-son relationship takes unexpected turns.

EXIMO Dir: Mayed Al Qasimi / U.K. / 20 mins. Two lovers from different class structures must survive a moon landing and family ill-will.

Saturday 7 March, 3.30pm | TRAILER

Rated PG (Mature Themes)

Dir: Goce Cvetanovski / North Macedonia / 85 mins / VICTORIAN PREMIERE. When an IQ-challenged human gets abducted by a narcissistic robot to become a specimen in his intergalactic zoo, they will have to join forces to stop the most dangerous weapon in the galaxy from falling into the wrong hands.

Screens with:
THE ULTIMATE WEAPON Dir: Romain Revert / France / 1 min / VICTORIAN PREMIERE A kaiju meets its match.

BLU’S Dir: Rajesh PK / India / 10 mins / VICTORIAN PREMIERE Witnessing her environment being swallowed up by industrialisation, BLU decides to fight for the wildlife, meadows, rivers and trees before they disappear completely.

FORBIDDEN VALENTINE Dir: Owen Coughlan / Canada / 11.20 mins / VICTORIAN PREMIERE A short film about AI, toxic masculinity and unrequited love.

CHRYSALIS Dir: Rachel Macindoe Baker / New Zealand / 12.20 mins / VICTORIAN PREMIERE As her planet’s weather shifts unpredictably, a recluse finds herself caught between a need for stability and an inevitable confrontation with change.

Saturday 7 March, 6.30pm | TRAILER

Rated M (mature Themes; Impactful Fantasy Sequences)

WINNER - BEST ACTOR, 2025 Sydney Science Fiction Film Festival

Dir: Yerden Telemissov; Kazakhstan, 105 mins) / VICTORIAN PREMIERE
As the district administration prepares for the arrival of high-ranking officials, the local homeless alcoholic takes on problems of intergalactic proportions. This charming, hilarious and very moving riff on close encounter mythology is the festival’s crowdpleaser.
OFFICIAL SELECTION - Montreal Fantasia Film Festival 2025; Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival.

Screens with: INVASION ’53
Dir: Danielle Weinberg / USA / 10 mins / VICTORIAN PREMIERE A man-eating alien crashes a suburban cocktail party. Starring Jeffery Coombs, of RE-ANIMATOR fame.

WINNER - BEST ACTOR (SHORT FILM), 2025 Sydney Science Fiction Film Festival

Saturday 7 March, 9.00pm | TRAILER

A Special Presentation of a Rare Cinematic Vision

Rated G

Dir: Juan Francisco Salazar / Australia, Chile | 93 mins / VICTORIAN PREMIERE

The struggle for environmental justice against ongoing forms of extractivism and ecological ruin in the Atacama Desert is an allegory against ongoing plans to colonize the Moon and Mars. Prof. Salazar’s extraordinary hybrid film draws from modes of speculative fiction, observational and poetic documentary, activism, and Indigi-queer approaches. Māori astrobiologist Xuê Noon (played by Australian/Māori artist Victoria Hunt) finds solace in Mars in 2051 as a leader from the Aotearoa Space Agency on an international scientific mission, following the discovery of dormant microorganisms by the NASA Mars Sample Return Mission in 2039. Xuê wanders across this sentient planet and reflects on the newly found lifeforms as she grows plants in a glasshouse. Through the spirit of an ancient taniwha, she slipstreams in spacetime to the Atacama Desert and, eventually, to Aotearoa.

Saturday 8 March, 1.00pm | TRAILER

Rated G

Dir: Jeffery Morris / USA / 87 mins / VICTORIAN PREMIERE
A cinematic odyssey by filmmaker Jeffrey Morris, exploring how the Apollo program and visionary science fiction of the 1960s and ’70s inspired a generation of thinkers, dreamers, and creators. At the centre of the film is the Eagle Transporter—the fictional spacecraft from SPACE: 1999 that served as a symbol of bold, reasoned, humanistic futures.
OFFICIAL SELECTION - Toronto International Film Festival 2025

Screens with THE ART OF LOOKING
Dir: Andris Gauja / Estonia / 17 mins / VICTORIAN PREMIERE
Two seemingly different groups of people - astrophysicists and slime researchers - explore the nature of things and conclude that the main drive of humanity is our natural curiosity.

Sunday 8 October, 3.30pm

AUSTRALIAN SHORTS SHOWCASE: A thrilling collection of visionary films from our shores.

MEET ME AT THE MOON (Dir: Hannah Moon) A reflective comedy set in a moment when it's too late to save us- or our planet. Assembled entirely from the NASA archives.

THE ESCAPE (Dir: Sam Hvidberg) Three friends are in a club. Everyone suddenly vanishes except for them, and a mysterious voice tells them only one of them can leave.

ANOMALY (Dir: Andy Webb) An artist obsessed with UFO theories spends his nights searching the skies. Isolated after a breakup, he retreats further until one night, a blinding light floods his room…

MARALINGA (Dir: Alexander Langsam) An author searching for a missing hitchhiker enters the forbidden zone of Maralinga.

DREAM MACHINE (Dir: Dan Egan) A mechanic watches as flying cars strip away his livelihood, challenging his belief in the American Dream.

PARALLAX OF THE LIMINAL VOID (Dir: Odin Jurray) Two infatuated lovers, imprisoned in a beetle-infested nightmare and wallowing in sorrow, attempt to maintain a grip on reality.

Sunday 8 October, 6.00pm | TRAILER

IN MEMORY OF VAL KILMER: THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU

Rated MA (Horror Elements; Mature Themes)

Dir: John Frankenheimer / Australia, U.S. / 100 mins / UNRATED DIRECTOR’S CUT

In honour of the late Val Kilmer, we are proud to present a rare big-screen showing of one of the most insanely inspired films ever to come out of Hollywood – the 1996 production of H.G. Wells’ sci-fi/horror classic, THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU. Shot in the rainforests of northern Queensland, the film is infamous for its troubled shoot, on-set acrimony and wildly out-of-control creativity, the likes of which we may never see again. Featuring Marlon Brando as the unhinged Moreau, David Thewlis in one of the great “What the hell is going on?!” performances and Kilmer as…well, Kilmer, THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU is a grand film folly of the highest order, and a must-see cinema experience.