ANTENNA DOCUMENTARY FILM FESTIVAL 2024
Antenna, Australia’s leading international non-fiction film festival, today unveils its full program for 2024. Featuring 52 of the most creative, thought-provoking documentaries from around the globe, over the course of 11 days, Antenna is set to turn Sydney into a doc-lovers paradise from 9–19 February 2024.
“I am very proud of this lineup as a whole,” said Festival Director Dudi Rokach.“Each documentary is imaginative, cinematic and provocative and I believe together they demonstrate the endless potential of documentary cinema in the hands of a great filmmaker”.
Opening the festival is the Australian Premiere of Tribeca Film Festival winner The Gullspång Miracle. The consistently surprising and funny film follows two pious sisters who buy an apartment after having witnessed a divine sign – only to realise that the seller looks identical to their other sister, who committed suicide some thirty years before. What starts as a story of family reunification, turns into a stranger-than-fiction mystery-drama.
In a new exciting partnership with the Sydney Opera House, Antenna will close the festival with the Australian Premiere of the highly anticipated Ryuichi Sakamoto | Optus, a concert film that captures Sakamoto's last performance. A celebration of an artist's life in the purest sense, this is the definitive swan song of the beloved maestro.
Fresh from TIFF and IDFA, Antenna will hold the Australian Premiere of The World is Family by the acclaimed documentary filmmaker Anand Patwardhan, who will attend the festival as a special guest. Anand’s explorations of social and political life have earned him both festival awards and government bans. In The World is Family, his most personal film yet, he paints a portrait of his parents, whose families were intertwined with Gandhi and India’s independence
movement.
Other Australian Premieres of new films by celebrated directors, including Wang Bing’s Youth (Spring), Werner Herzog’s Theatre of Thought, Claire Simon’s Our Body and Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney’s new film In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon.
In a world shaped increasingly by urgent and complex conflicts, Antenna's film selection offers audiences an opportunity to delve beyond the headlines into the raw, personal narratives that define our times. Bye Bye Tiberias takes us on an intimate journey through Palestine, where actress Hiam Abbass (Succession) after a 30-year absence, navigates the fragmented memories of generations of resilient Palestinian women. In contrast, the Oscar-frontrunner 20 Days in Mariupol presents a harrowing, firsthand account of the siege in Ukraine, capturing the unyielding spirit of those caught in the crossfire. Complementing these narratives, The Invisible Nation offers unprecedented access to Taiwan’s sitting head of state; director Vanessa Hope investigates the election and tenure of Tsai Ing-wen, the first female president of Taiwan.
