MUBI AUSTRALIA HIGHLIGHTS:JUNE & JULY 2026
Publicity Content Posted 27 May,2026
JUNE HIGHLIGHTS
SIRÂT
Oliver Laxe | Spain, France | 2025 | June 12
Oliver Laxe’s Sirât presents a hypnotic and immersive narrative set in the deserts of North Africa, chronicling a father and son’s search for their missing daughter following her disappearance at an underground rave in Morocco. As the protagonists move from one remote gathering to the next, their quest evolves into an exploration of spiritual, existential, and ultimately unknowable dimensions.
Situated within the dynamic context of desert rave culture, the film integrates electronic music, expansive landscapes, and minimalist storytelling to create an experience that exists between the physical and the metaphysical. Referencing the concept of “Sirât,” the bridge between worlds in Islamic eschatology, Laxe develops a cinematic language of movement, rhythm, and transcendence, allowing emotional truths to surface through gesture, sound, and atmosphere rather than explicit exposition.
Employing non-professional performers and a soundscape that blurs the distinction between music and environment, Sirât extends Laxe’s distinctive examination of faith, loss, and human vulnerability. Its premiere at Cannes further establishes Laxe as one of contemporary cinema’s most uncompromising auteurs.
STREAMING JUNE 12
GOD IS SHY
Jocelyn Charles | France | 2025 | June 19
Jocelyn Charles’ poised and formally inventive debut short film, God Is Shy, opens with an apparently innocent game in which two young passengers sketch their fears during a train journey. However, the dynamic shifts when a mysterious woman intervenes, transforming the encounter into increasingly unsettling, ambiguous territory.
By blending animation with psychological horror, the film transitions seamlessly between ordinary reality and the uncanny. It employs distorted perspectives, shifting textures, and expressive sound design to externalise emotional unease. Both humorous and unsettling, God Is Shy exhibits a notable mastery of tone and atmosphere within its concise runtime.
Premiering at Cannes Critics’ Week, the film establishes Jocelyn Charles as a significant emerging voice in innovative short-form cinema.
STREAMING JUNE 19
ADDITIONAL ARRIVALS
CAROL (2015) – Todd Haynes’ luminous adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt remains one of modern queer cinema’s defining love stories, tracing a tender and emotionally charged relationship in 1950s New York through extraordinary performances from Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara. Streaming June 1
BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR (2013) – Winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes, Abdellatif Kechiche’s expansive and emotionally raw coming-of-age story explores identity, passion, heartbreak, and self-discovery with uncommon intimacy and intensity. Streaming June 5
FISH TANK (2009) – Andrea Arnold’s breakthrough feature follows a volatile teenager navigating isolation, desire, and fractured family life on a British housing estate. Restless, compassionate, and anchored by Katie Jarvis’ remarkable debut performance. Streaming June 5
GLORIA (2013) – Sebastián Lelio’s bittersweet character study follows a divorced woman embracing romance, freedom, and reinvention within Santiago’s nightlife scene, elevated by Paulina García’s radiant, award-winning performance. Streaming June 5
CRIMES OF THE FUTURE (2022) – David Cronenberg’s provocative return to body horror imagines a near future where surgery, performance art, and human evolution merge into disturbing new forms of expression. Starring Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux, and Kristen Stewart. Streaming June 19
SPECIAL COLLECTIONS
WE’VE ALWAYS BEEN HERE!: QUEER CINEMA LOOKS BACK
Spotlight: June 1
Celebrating Pride Month, this global collection journeys through queer histories, identities, and acts of remembrance across generations of cinema. From lush period romances to radical experiments in gender and performance, these films reclaim the past through a contemporary queer lens.
Includes: Carol, Orlando, Freak Orlando, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Summer of 85.
JACQUES TATI SPOTLIGHT
Spotlight: June 5
A celebration of Jacques Tati’s timeless comic genius, where modern life becomes a choreography of visual gags, architectural absurdities, and quietly anarchic observation. Through meticulous staging and gentle satire, Tati transformed everyday behaviour into one of cinema’s great comic languages.
Includes: Playtime, Mon Oncle, M. Hulot’s Holiday, Trafic, Parade.
HOT TO THE TOUCH: FEMALE DESIRE ON SCREEN
Spotlight: June 12
This collection foregrounds women reclaiming desire, intimacy, and agency on screen—challenging decades of objectifying cinematic conventions. From tender romances to boundary-pushing dramas, these films explore sexuality through female subjectivity, emotional complexity, and unapologetic passion.
Includes: Carol, Blue Is the Warmest Color, Fish Tank, Gloria, The Handmaiden, Portrait of a Lady on Fire.
DAVID CRONENBERG SPOTLIGHT
Spotlight: June 19
A descent into the unsettling cinematic universe of David Cronenberg, where flesh, technology, and psychology collide in visions of transformation and bodily unease. Across horror, satire, and speculative fiction, Cronenberg’s work persistently interrogates the unstable boundaries of the human body and mind.
Includes: Crimes of the Future, Crash, The Shrouds, Four Unloved Women, Adrift on a Purposeless Sea, Experience the Ecstasy of Dissection.
THEATER OF THE WORLD: ULRIKE OTTINGER’S “BERLIN” TRILOGY
Spotlight: June 26
Queer, feminist, and defiantly avant-garde, Ulrike Ottinger’s “Berlin” trilogy transforms Cold War-era West Berlin into a dazzling landscape of theatricality, excess, and radical imagination. Blurring fantasy, satire, and political provocation, Ottinger’s cinema revels in collisions between the grotesque and the beautiful.
Includes: Ticket of No Return, Freak Orlando, Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press.
JULY HIGHLIGHTS
IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT
Jafar Panahi | Iran, France, Luxembourg | 2025 | July 17
An auto mechanic, suspecting that a man he encounters may have been his former torturer in prison, kidnaps him in pursuit of vengeance. With the only clue to the suspect’s identity being the squeak of a prosthetic leg, Vahid seeks confirmation from other recently released victims. As the investigation unfolds, the situation becomes increasingly perilous.
This morally charged drama transforms an apparently routine roadside encounter into a tense exploration of guilt, suspicion, and state violence. It Was Just an Accident extends Panahi’s tradition of deceptively simple yet politically resonant storytelling. Utilising confined settings, real-time tension, and meticulously observed daily interactions, the film eschews melodrama in favour of subtle psychological intensity, offering a controlled study of power and fear in contemporary Iran.
Recipient of the Palme d’Or at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival.
AMORES PERROS
Alejandro González Iñárritu | Mexico | 2000 | July 10
Alejandro González Iñárritu’s first film, Amores Perros, is a powerful story that weaves together three lives connected by a violent car crash in Mexico City. One story follows a teenager who risks everything to run away with his brother’s wife. Another centers on a model who loses everything after moving in with her lover. The third follows a homeless man who confronts memories from his past. As these stories develop, we see chaos, cruelty, and tenderness, showing that the characters are more connected than they first appear.
The film uses a fractured timeline, fast-paced editing, and overlapping stories shaped by desire, betrayal, and survival. It also marks Gael García Bernal’s striking first appearance in a feature film. Rodrigo Prieto’s raw cinematography and Gustavo Santaolalla’s intense, rhythmic score give the movie a strong sense of chaos and emotion that stands out in Latin American cinema today.
Winner of the Critics’ Week Grand Prize at Cannes Film Festival 2000. Also screened at AFI and Tokyo.
STREAMING JULY 10
A USEFUL GHOST
Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke | Thailand | 2025 | July 24
Something unusual is happening at a family-run appliance factory: spirits have started to possess the products. March, the factory owner’s son, is grieving after his pregnant wife dies from dust poisoning. His world changes when he is reunited with her, now in the form of a vacuum cleaner.
A Useful Ghost is surreal, funny, and politically charged, using absurdist storytelling to explore love, grief, and collective memory. The film features ghosts from Thailand’s past, whose return, as one character says, is “an act of protest in itself.” With vibrant colors, playful cinematography, and surreal scenes, Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke stands out as a unique new voice in world cinema.
This film is a global exclusive on MUBI. It is the first Thai film to compete in La Semaine de la Critique at Cannes 2025, where it won the Grand Prize. It was also shown at IFFR and TIFF.
STREAMING JULY 24
PHANTOMS OF JULY
Julian Radlmaier | Germany | 2025 | July 3
Julian Radlmaier’s fourth film is a bittersweet and whimsical story that spans centuries in the German town of Sangerhausen. Ursula, a heartbroken waitress from East Germany, and Neda, a lonely Iranian YouTuber recovering from a broken arm, meet by chance and mistaken identity. Their encounter leads to an unexpected ghost hunt in the mountains, where the ghosts of history have a playful conversation with the dissatisfied people of modern Germany.
Radlmaier mixes absurd comedy with political commentary and a poetic, melancholic mood. He explores class struggle and ideological conflict using anachronism and irony, blending history and fantasy. The film weaves together four stories that move through time, with surreal moments like a herd of camels or a pair of naked hikers, all captured in the glowing Super 16mm cinematography of Feraz Fesharaki (What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?).
Phantoms of July is a Global Exclusive on MUBI. The film premiered at Locarno and was also shown at Viennale, São Paulo, BAFICI, and Busan.
STREAMING JULY 3
ADDITIONAL ARRIVALS
THE DEER HUNTER (1978) – Michael Cimino’s monumental Vietnam epic follows three steelworkers from a Pennsylvania town whose lives are shattered by war. Anchored by extraordinary performances from Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, and Meryl Streep, and winner of five Academy Awards including Best Picture.
Streaming July 1
THE THIRD MAN (1949) – Carol Reed’s masterwork of postwar noir, written by Graham Greene, follows a pulp novelist who arrives in shadowy, occupied Vienna to find his friend has been killed under mysterious circumstances. Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles at their most magnetic.
Streaming July 1
GOODBYE BERLIN (2016) – Fatih Akin’s tender coming-of-age road movie, adapted from the beloved German novel, follows two misfit teenagers on an unlikely adventure across the German countryside — funny, warm, and quietly moving.
Streaming July 1
NOT A PRETTY PICTURE (1976) – Martha Coolidge’s courageous and formally ingenious debut feature, in which the director recreates the circumstances of her own high school sexual assault through dramatic reenactment — blending fiction and documentary in a pioneering examination of date rape and its aftermath. Restored in 4K by the Academy Archive and The Film Foundation. Céline Sciamma’s pick for Berlinale 2023.
Streaming July 1
THE NON-ACTOR (2025) – A curious, charming short from musician and novelist Eliza Barry Callahan (adapting her debut novel The Hearing Test), starring Victoria Pedretti and Maya Hawke. While attending a medical trial for sudden hearing loss, a woman stays with her ex’s new girlfriend — and an unexpected connection sparks.
Streaming July 10
SPECIAL COLLECTIONS
MARXISM AT PLAY: THREE BY JULIAN RADLMAIER
Spotlight: July 3
To mark the release of Phantoms of July, this collection highlights the German director’s two earlier films, showing off his unique style. He blends Marxist ideas and political allegory with humor and a light touch. In Self-Criticism of a Bourgeois Dog, Bloodsuckers, and Phantoms of July, Radlmaier explores class struggle and ideology using irony and anachronism, mixing history and fantasy in creative ways.
Includes: Phantoms of July, Self-Criticism of a Bourgeois Dog, Bloodsuckers.
PERFORMERS WE LOVE: LÉA SEYDOUX
Spotlight: July 3
A spotlight on one of contemporary cinema’s most compelling and chameleonic presences, Léa Seydoux, tracing her work across three films that showcase her remarkable range.
Includes: Blue Is the Warmest Color, Crimes of the Future, The Beast.
LET ME REINTRODUCE MYSELF: SOPHOMORE FEATURES
Spotlight: July 10
If making a debut is akin to scaling a mountain, full of treacherous crags and vertiginous drops, then embarking on a second feature is all about staying at the top. The talented directors in this collection prove that lightning can indeed strike twice.
Includes: The Deer Hunter, Magic Farm, This Closeness, Titane.
HUMOR AND MELANCHOLY: THE CINEMA OF MARTÍN REJTMAN
Spotlight: July 10
The films of Argentinian auteur Martín Rejtman have the beauty of feeling familiar while surprising us at every turn. Luminous and delightfully off-kilter, these are comedies of sheer originality, mordant, often tender, and always unpredictable.
Includes: Rapado, Silvia Prieto, Shakti, The Magic Gloves.
STEPHANIE ROTHMAN’S FEMINIST EXPLOITATIONS
Spotlight: July 17
Celebrating three standout films by 1970s exploitation director Stephanie Rothman, known for politically and socially astute films with badass female leads. Her counter-culture films fought back against the male gaze of 1970s New Hollywood.
Includes: Group Marriage, Terminal Island, The Working Girls.
CINEMA BY ANY MEANS: A JAFAR PANAHI RETROSPECTIVE
Spotlight: July 17
A retrospective celebrating the work of Jafar Panahi — whose defiant, inventive cinema has persisted through imprisonment, house arrest, and travel bans, always finding a way to document the humanity of contemporary Iran.
Includes: It Was Just an Accident, No Bears, Closed Curtain, Crimson Gold, The White Balloon, Offside, The Circle, The Mirror.
LYNCH(3): INLAND EMPIRE TRIO
Spotlight: July 24
An intimate look into the creative process of David Lynch, pairing his masterful Inland Empire with two behind-the-scenes documentaries capturing the making of the film.
Includes: Inland Empire, Lynch (One), Lynch 2.
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For any further information, please contact:
Tracey Mair | traceym@tmpublicity.com
Rachel De Mestre I racheldemestre@tmpublicity.
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