Screens — Journey Home, David Gulpilil; Resurrection; A Useful Ghost; and more (Special MIFF 2025 Edition)
By Adolfo Aranjuez
The Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) returns on 7–24 August with a whopping 275-film slate. To help you navigate what might otherwise be an intimidatingly large program, this edition of Screens will highlight some standout titles that you shouldn’t hesitate to add to your wishlists. Also, don’t miss MIFF’s special discount for the Liminal community—subscribe to Liminal Letters to avail of this exclusive perk!
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Journey Home, David Gulpilil
Maggie Miles & Trisha Morton-Thomas, 2025 // 88 mins
Following his appearance in 1971’s Walkabout (in which his surname was misspelled!), David Gulpilil fast became a familiar face on Australian screens. Over his fifty-year-long career, he ascended to prominence as one of the nation’s best actors—shining in films as diverse as Storm Boy, Mad Dog Morgan, Rabbit-Proof Fence, The Tracker and Charlie’s Country, not to mention the local blockbusters Crocodile Dundee and Australia—while also acting as spokesperson for Indigenous issues in documentaries such as Another Country and My Name Is Gulpilil.
After a four-year battle with lung cancer, he died in 2021, and his body was repatriated from his home in Sousth Australia to Yolngu Country in Arnhem Land, where he was ultimately laid to rest. Journey Home, David Gulpilil chronicles this continent-spanning trek, capturing both the difficulties of transportation and environmental conditions, and the fondness with which Gulpilil is remembered by his community. It’s a moving tribute to a cinematic champion and a powerful testament to the inextricable links between Country, culture and storytelling for First Nations people.
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Resurrection
Bi Gan, 2025 // 160 mins
From one film commemorating a cinematic great to a film attempting to encapsulate a century of cinema’s past … Chinese director Bi Gan’s Resurrection is a true cinephile’s film, tacking a sprawling sci-fi narrative onto an innovative and visually spectacular odyssey through both film and human history. Organised into five chapters, each foregrounding a different bodily sense, and taking inspiration from myriad silver-screen predecessors, the work moves and metamorphoses between eras and genres: from a 1920s silent film, to a World War II film noir, to a 1960s Buddhism-infused fable, to a 1980s-set crime thriller and, finally, to a mysterious chase just before the sun rises on the new millennium.
Using oneiric logic to anchor its central conflict—between a maverick ‘Fantasmer’ and the ‘Big Other’ hot on his trail—Bi’s follow-up to the sumptuous Long Day’s Journey into Night (which I’ve written on for Screens) is at once a critique of modernity, a study of memory and (if I may quote my own MIFF synopsis!) a portrait of ‘the dual function of dreams—as escapism, and as a way to envisage anew’.
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A Useful Ghost
Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke, 2025 // 130 mins
Thai cinema is perennially fascinated with the figure of the ghost. This is evident not just in the works of arguably the country’s pre-eminent director, Apichatpong Weerasethakul (whose film Uncle Boonmee has received the Screens treatment), but also in more populist fare like the comedic Oh My Ghosts! movie series (which features a cast of transgender pals dealing with hauntings of various types)—not to be confused with the Oh My Ghost television series (adapted from the Korean show of the same name).
A Useful Ghost seizes on this national fascination and gives it a breathtakingly fresh and absurdist spin: disappointed that her in-laws never really approved of her, and yearning to console her grief-stricken husband, a recently deceased woman decides to possess a … vacuum cleaner. Whereas, in other Thai films, the phantom is a purveyor of guidance and clarity, or else acts as the progenitor of a narrative turning point or plot complication, here it acts as the source of humorous havoc. And yet, comedy aside, this movie’s subtle commentary on domestic dissatisfaction as well as familial and class divides won’t be so easy to exorcise.
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First Light
James J. Robinson, 2025 // 118 mins
The feature debut from photographer-turned-director (and early Liminal interviewee) James J. Robertson evidences its maker’s visual talents with its postcard-perfect vistas of mountainous northern Luzon and deftly executed compositions. But these lush images contrast with the dark, desolate heart of First Light, which offers an unflinching depiction of how religion and criminality—the ostensible extremes of moral good and evil—both clash and are complicit in the lower-socioeconomic quarters of the Philippines. The film also implicates institutions like the government, the health system and the Church, exposing the ways in which individuals can easily fall through the cracks when a society views them as dispensable. Keep an eye out for the formidable star turns by Philippine cinema stalwarts Ruby Ruiz and Maricel Soriano!
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Put Your Soul on Your Hands and Walk
Sepideh Farsi, 2025 // 110 mins
An exemplar of documentary’s ability to both memorialise a fallen hero and mobilise viewers into action, Put Your Soul on Your Hands and Walk is largely built from video conversations between the late photojournalist Fatma Hassona—whose work opened the world’s eyes to the suffering in war-stricken Gaza—and director Sepideh Farsi. Over the course of their discussions, we come to understand the extent of the destruction around Hassona, which members of her family have been lost, and the everyday difficulties of having no access to food or water. Yet, despite living under the spectre of war and constant death, Hassona remains a font of optimism and hope, dreaming of a future where she can look back with pride on having survived Israel’s regime of devastation.
Along with nine members of her family, Hassona was killed by an Israeli airstrike on 16 April this year—a day after the film’s inclusion in the Cannes program was announced. In the lead-up to Cannes’s opening ceremony, an open letter denouncing Israel’s actions was signed by over 350 cinema luminaries, including Guillermo del Toro, Susan Sarandon, Mark Ruffalo, Javier Bardem, Pedro Almodóvar and even Israeli director Nadav Lapid. Put Your Soul on Your Hands and Walk received a standing ovation at its premiere and—with its urgent message of peace, its inspiring central figure and her passion for shedding light on the plight of her people—there can be no doubt as to why.
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Bonus recommendations: It Was Just an Accident, Iranian master Jafar Panahi’s Cannes Palme d’Or–winning latest; Homebound, whose Muslim and a Dalit protagonists subvert Indian cinema’s usual focus on more privileged castes; To Kill a Mongolian Horse, Ma – Cry of Silence and Kamay, which offer rare glimpses of life in Mongolia, Myanmar and Afghanistan, respectively; and Pasa Faho, a touching father–son tale co-produced by Kenyan-Filipino filmmaker (and Liminal interviewee) Mimo Mukii.