Five more films have been added to the AFF 2026 line-up. Meet the first four AFF Investment Fund films announced for this year’s Festival, including two World Premieres and an Australian Premiere direct from Venice. And there’s more to celebrate: the riotous French animation Jim Queen from the pulsing heart of Paris will be the Festival’s Saturday Night Party film, presented by Adelaide Film Festival in partnership with Feast Festival.
The Adelaide Film Festival Investment Fund (AFFIF) supports bold screen work and filmmaking talent in South Australia, helping new Australian stories make the journey from idea to screen.
The first four AFFIF-supported films announced for AFF 2026 span deeply personal filmmaking, major moments in South Australian history and stories reaching from Sarajevo to rural Serbia. Meet Agata The Writer, The Forbidden Aunt, KUMARANGK: Sacred Women’s Business and Aftermath.
AGATA THE WRITER
Direct from its World Premiere at the 2026 Venice Film Festival, Agata The Writer will make its Australian Premiere at AFF.
The debut feature from Polish-born visual artist and filmmaker Kuba Dorabialski is produced by Alex White (Babyteeth) and stars Mia Wasikowska (Leviticus, Club Zero) as a Polish-Australian satirical novelist who travels from Sydney to Sarajevo to write a war novel. When she becomes caught in a startling mystery, the boundaries between writing, observation and lived experience begin to shift, forcing her to question her own role as a storyteller.
THE FORBIDDEN AUNT
In The Forbidden Aunt, noted actress and filmmaker, Bojana Novakovic, travels from Australia to rural Serbia to explore the life of her eccentric and tormented aunt she never knew, unravelling the truth of how violence and trauma shaped the lives of four generations of women. Bojana Novakovic writes, produces and directs this intensely personal story.
KUMARANGK: SACRED WOMEN’S BUSINESS
Directed by Ngarrindjeri/Wotjobaluk woman Tracey Rigney, the major new documentary charts the Hindmarsh Island bridge affair. Combining extraordinary character interviews with richly textured archival footage from the 1980s and 1990s, KUMARANGK: Sacred Women's Business plunges back into the political frenzy that engulfed the state, as Ngarrindjeri women's sacred knowledge collided with powerful development interests, forcing the courts to rule on what they were never equipped to comprehend. Revealing Kumarangk as a living place where birth, burial and ceremony are inseparable, the film restores humanity to a conflict too often reduced to politics and headlines.
AFTERMATH
Co-directed by Jared Nicholson and Ben Lawrence (Hearts & Bones, Ithaka), Aftermath will have its World Premiere at AFF. The film follows massacre survivor Wendy Scurr’s decades-long pursuit of truth after being silenced by authority. What begins with filmmaker Jared Nicholson documenting her story becomes something increasingly personal as he too is drawn into a world of trauma, obsession and misinformation.
Saturday Night Party: JIM QUEEN
It’s time to party with JIM QUEEN, the riotous French animation from the pulsing heart of Paris.
Directed by Marco Nguyen and Nicolas Athané, JIM QUEEN was nominated for both the Queer Palm and the Caméra d’Or for best first feature at Cannes. Disembark in a very gay Paree, where the unofficial king of Paris’s gay club scene finds his life turned upside down by heterosis, a terrible plague transforming gay men into heterosexuals.
And the film is only the beginning. Presented by Adelaide Film Festival in partnership with Feast Festival, the AFF Saturday Night Party starts on screen before spilling into Cinema Place for drinks, canapés, tunes and plenty of dancing.
Dress code: Dress as your best queen self!
AFF CEO and Creative Director, Mat Kesting, said: “These five films, four of them supported by the Adelaide Film Festival Investment Fund, are all urgent, compelling stories brilliantly realised for the screen. At a time when the world that is fractured and fragmented, each deepens our understanding of what it means to be human. These stories diverse and rich in culture taking us from the traditions of women from Kumarangk and the joy of queer pride in Paris, to the traumas of war in eastern Europe and the aftermath of violence. I am incredibly proud to showcase all these films as part of AFF this October.”
These five films join the first ten AFF 2026 titles already on sale, with the full program still to come on 15 September.
Explore the films, choose your sessions and start building your AFF 2026. Adelaide Film Festival returns from 14–25 October 2026.
