Today, the Melbourne International Film Festival released its 2024 program and it includes a host of intriguing music features. Featuring more than 250 films from over 62 countries. MIFF will deliver the hottest picks from the worldwide festival circuit, new Aussie films, future award contenders and films showing for the first time in Victoria. To get access to the exclusive pre-sale, become a MIFF Member now. Otherwise, set your alarms for 9am on Tuesday 16 July, when general-public tickets will go on sale. Remember: the best way to see more for less is with a Multipass!
Front and centre on the rock ’n’ roll red carpet at the Music on Film Gala (presented by Triple R) will be the world premiere of Justin Kurzel’s Ellis Park, which follows legendary musician Warren Ellis.
In Justin Kurzel’s Ellis Park, respected Australian musician Warren Ellis takes us on a guided tour through his world and one very special animal sanctuary. A key member of iconic Australian bands The Dirty Three and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds as well as a prolific film score composer (The Proposition; Hell or High Water, MIFF 2016), multi-instrumentalist Ellis has cut a brilliant and unorthodox figure in Australian music for over three decades. Far from the international concert halls in which he has plied his craft, however, lies a very different passion project: a wildlife sanctuary in the forests of Sumatra. Co-founded by Ellis and spearheaded by the indomitable Femke den Haas, whose dedicated team of conservationists rescues trafficked and mistreated animals and then devotes years to nursing them back to health, Ellis Park is a beacon of kindness in a world that sometimes has precious little of it to spare.
Supported by the MIFF Premiere Fund, Ellis Park follows its subject from his childhood home in Ballarat – where he encounters formative sites and spends a tender afternoon in the company of his elderly parents – to his first, long-awaited visit to the park that bears his name. Along the way, it delves into Ellis’s expansive love of music and artistic history, illuminating the parallel evolutions in his multifaceted creative practice and commitment to the conservation cause. Directed by acclaimed Australian filmmaker Justin Kurzel (Nitram, MIFF 2021; Snowtown), this fly-on-the-wall documentary offers both a deeply personal insight into one artist’s life and an inspiring reminder of how much humans can achieve while working together.
Other music relate films we suggest you look out for at MIFF include:
Community to Commercial – Restored Australian Music Videos
Take a trip down memory lane with a newly restored 1987 documentary about community radio stations in Melbourne followed by a mix of independent film clips from bands championed by those stations and others with a more commercial edge. Lovingly restored by Ray Argall at Piccolo Films from his personal archive (Argall shot many of the originals), this collection will have you tapping your feet and perhaps gasping at familiar – if somewhat fresher – faces! The screening will be followed by a discussion reflecting on the musical landscape of then vs now, and on radio’s position within.
DEVO
This effusive documentary explodes onto the screen as it chronicles the remarkable rise and staying power of the 80s new-wave band behind ‘Whip It’. Artpop-punk electronic adventurers DEVO – iconic for their upturned flowerpot hats and kooky space-age smocks – formed in the late 70s as a response to an America that seemed to be spiralling out of control. The pushback against the Vietnam War had led to the infamous Kent State University massacre by the National Guard, shaking up then-students Gerald Casale, Bob Lewis and Mark Mothersbaugh. The performance-art pep of their ‘de-evolution’ music was their response to these helter-skelter days, eventually drawing in Mothersbaugh’s brothers Bob and Jim to an out-there band with a revolving-door line-up. Beloved by Brian Eno and David Bowie, DEVO burned bright and fast. Director Chris Smith (Fyre; Collapse, MIFF 2009) captures DEVO’s eccentric joie de vivre – kitschy images, exuberant music and frank, unbridled commentary abound, all wrapped up in a package at once Dada-esque and with deadpan humour. A crowd favourite at Sundance, this energetic portrait will appeal to DEVO fans and the musically curious alike.
Dig! XX
A classic tale of fame and destruction is revisited in this reconstructed rock doc about The Dandy Warhols and The Brian Jonestown Massacre. In 2004, Dig! won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize for Documentary and became a definitive examination of the 90s indie rock scene; the Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl has even described it as “the greatest rock ’n’ roll documentary of all time”. Charting the mainstream success of The Dandy Warhols and the spiralling implosion of The Brian Jonestown Massacre (especially volatile frontman Anton Newcombe), the film was like nothing before it. Twenty years later, Dig! XX adds over 40 minutes of new material and brings fans up to date on the bands’ tug-of-war between art and commerce.
Director Ondi Timoner (Amanda F—ng Palmer on the Rocks, MIFF 2014; We Live in Public, MIFF 2009) returns to mythologise the bands and big identities at the centre of her breakout documentary. Expanded using the original 2500 hours of footage she had collected, Dig! XX rebukes the easy nostalgia for a bygone era and instead looks at the heady excess of that time through older and wiser eyes, along with offering further context for the creative fruits and fallouts between the players. What hasn’t changed is that it’s still got one hell of a soundtrack and an insider story you won’t want to miss.
“Timoner’s incredible film is just as bonkers and brilliant as ever … Still as jarring, hilarious, and deeply strange as it ever was, and these new additions only make this shocking story even more astonishing.” – Collider
Mogwai: If the Stars Had a Sound
A voyage through the singular career of Scottish post-rock legends Mogwai, from their beginnings in the 90s to the creation of their latest studio album. Since their formation in 1995, Scottish musicians Mogwai have amassed a devoted following with their distinctive brand of soaring, dynamic post-rock. In early 2020, director and long-time Mogwai collaborator Antony Crook set out to make a short film about the recording of the band’s 2021 album As the Love Continues, but the pandemic struck – forcing a retreat to their hometown of Glasgow. There, Crook and the band poured themselves into this feature-length journey through Mogwai’s storied trajectory, tracing their humble origins and their current place as enduring musical icons.
Mogwai: If the Stars Had a Sound features extensive interviews with the band and their peers, including artist Douglas Gordon and writer Ian Rankin, alongside moving testimonials from fans and lovingly excavated archival footage from across Mogwai’s 30-year career. Warmly received at its SXSW premiere, this is a thrilling portrait of a one-of-a-kind band not just as they record, tour and come to define the millennium’s post-rock landscape, but also as they inspire and sustain a diverse community of music lovers transformed by their songs.
Omar and Cedric: If This Ever Gets Weird
The untold 40-year story of the crowning moments, creative turmoils and deep friendship of the pair behind At the Drive-In and The Mars Volta. Before Omar Rodríguez-López ever picked up a guitar, he had a video camera. As a teenager in El Paso, he dreamed of becoming a director after he was done fooling around in hardcore bands. But after meeting Cedric Bixler-Zavala, the vocalist was always in Omar’s viewfinder. It was Cedric who lured Omar back to Texas to form a soon-to-be-iconic act: At the Drive-In. Together, they’ve lived and created, fought and filmed through drug addictions, the deaths of friends, the implosion of At the Drive-In and the birth of prog-rockers The Mars Volta, and even Cedric’s fraught stint in the Church of Scientology.
British director Nicolas Jack Davies has profiled Gorillaz, Mumford & Sons and legendary UK label Trojan Records. Now, he has crafted another compelling music documentary, one built almost entirely around four decades’ worth of Omar’s self-shot footage. The fact that Omar and Cedric are rock stars together twice over feels almost incidental; this intimate and immersive film, which features lively, almost duelling voiceovers from both men, is for anyone who cherishes someone else. The pair promised each other that if music ever came between them, they’d stop – and that’s why they still play.
Teaches of Peaches
Class is in session! Celebrate the world of gender-punk icon Peaches in this audacious Teddy Award–winning documentary. Shooting during one of the wildest tours of the decade, directors Philipp Fussenegger and Judy Landkammer turn their camera on the inimitable icon with the songwriting skills of an expletive-laden poet and the raucous showmanship of a true queer punk legend. In this explosive documentary, audiences get front-row access as Peaches marks 20 years of her album of the same name, accompanied by her genderqueer coterie of dancers and roadies.
Placing contemporary concert footage alongside that of her in-your-face breakthrough in the early 2000s, Teaches of Peaches takes viewers to the heart of why the singer’s raunchy, feminist flamboyance has endured and influenced culture. On hand for interviews are Feist, Chilly Gonzales (a former collaborator, and the subject of Shut Up and Play the Piano, MIFF 2018), Shirley Manson, Black Cracker and more, as is Peaches herself with her uniquely descriptive ways of recounting her career. Full of naked bodies and anarchic sexual energy, this film is a visual and political tour de force.
This Is a Film About The Black Keys
Ohio-born bluesy rockers The Black Keys get candid and introspective in this warts-and-all documentary direct from SXSW. It’s surprisingly prescient that Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney titled The Black Keys’ commercial breakthrough record Brothers – as this documentary reveals, the two are more like siblings than many blood relatives. Traversing the bickering, a distinctly brotherly inability to communicate, the Justin Bieber incident (if you know you know) and so much more, Jeff Dupre’s film takes viewers on an all-access tour of the band’s trajectory, from their humble beginnings in Akron, Ohio, to the Grammy-winning rockstars who have remained independent in spirit and beloved by masses. Fans and newcomers alike will enjoy front-row seats to the ups and downs – both professional and personal – of the iconic duo, who have just released their 12th studio album, Ohio Players. Built around extensive archival concert and studio footage, lively re-enactments, and revealing interviews (including with Gen X icon Beck), this film will scratch the musical itch for enthusiasts of rock docs like Mistaken for Strangers (MIFF 2013) and Meet Me in the Bathroom (MIFF 2022).
Check out more music features showing and the entire MIFF 2024 program HERE