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Entertainment

​Win Tickets to Our Favourite Movies at This Year's MIFF

The Melbourne International Film Festival is back for eighteen days of glorious, mind expanding cinema. We've narrowed down the program to a list of must-sees, and we're giving away tickets.

Still from 'The Love Witch', screening at this year's MIFF

The Melbourne International Film Festival is back at the end of this month for eighteen glorious days of mind expanding cinema. This year's program promises to showcase the iconic festival's most diverse array of local and international flicks yet—and given it has been running since 1952, that's really saying something.

Planning out your MIFF moves is always tricky, so to make things easier we've narrowed down the program to a list of must-sees. We're giving away tickets, too—scroll down and enter below.

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Starless Dreams

Acclaimed Iranian documentarian Mehrdad Oskoue fought for seven years to obtain permission to film within a rehabilitation centre for Iran's female juvenile delinquents. He got there in the end, and the candidly heartbreaking interviews with his subjects within the facility expose a sad contradiction: young girls who are desperate to escape life on the inside, but are nonetheless just as afraid of what awaits them on the harsh streets of Tehran.

Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World

Admit it—you have no idea how the internet works. We're all a bit confused by it all, and while your favourite weirdo German documentarian Werner Herzog might not necessarily clarify things in this typically bizarre documentary, you'll have to admit that he makes for a near-perfect world wide web spirit guide.

Bleak Street

A surreal and sometimes terrifying romp through the the Mexican underground, Bleak Street is based on the true story of identical twin brothers Little Death and Little AK, short statured wrestling mascots who wear costumes mimicking those of two much taller professional Mexican wrestlers. We never see their faces—the brothers never take off their masks, not even to eat or have sex, and this adds to the eeriness of this intensely dark film.

Fire at Sea

Europe's refugee crisis gets put under the microscope in this Italian documentary about the tiny Sicilian island of Lampedusa—which has has found itself in the unenviable position of being the first port of call for tens of thousands of desperate migrants arriving via the Mediterranean sea. Swap Italy for Australia, and the moral dilemmas are the same.

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Audrie & Daisy

By now, we're all horribly aware that the aftermath of being sexually assaulted in a small American town will almost inevitably be just as horrific as the event itself. Audrie Pott and Daisy Coleman, two teenage girls who were assaulted at separate house parties in 2012, know it all too well. Focusing on the bizarre similarities of their two unrelated experiences, this documentary explores the tangled web of victim blaming and legal grey areas that is woven in the wake of a high school rape case.

The Love Witch

Shot on super-saturated 35mm, The Love Witch is a camp supernatural horror movie about a narcissistic witch obsessed with making men fall in love with her. A kitsch technicolor tribute to 1960s and 1970s exploitation films with an Ennio Morricone soundtrack? You can't really go wrong.