Your Guide to the Week 1 of the Festival: 5 to 9 June

Wednesday 5 June

Feeling the need to start your Festival with some international arthouse gems? Try Angelo (pictured above) by longtime Michael Haneke collaborator Markus Schleinzer, about an African boy kept as a trophy by European aristocracy; or the latest film by Canadian maverick Denis Côté (Vic + Flo Saw a Bear, SFF 2013), Ghost Town Anthology.

After thrills and chills? Try modern Frankenstein story Depraved; or for a dose of weirdness see very-meta-documentary The Amazing Johnathan Documentary, about a meth-addled magician who may or may not be about to die.

THURSDAY 6 JUNE

Love fashion docos? We have you covered with Halston, about the giddy rise and dizzying crash of the 70s New York designer. Love the idea of a mythical, pansexual post-punk nightclub in Mexico City? Go see This Is Not Berlin.

Loved Christian Marclay’s video art installation The Clock? Then go see Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream, another masterpiece crafted from snippets of cinema, this time an ode to lost love.

Friday 7 June

If you’ve got seven hours to spare, you’ll do no worse than to spend those hours immersed in the black-and-white glory of Béla Tarr’s cinematic icon Sátántangó. In the mood of a Friday night less for arthouse allegories and more for young love? Go see Only You, set in the permanently romantic autumnal half-glow of Glasgow.

Need a laugh? We’ve got you – Jillian Bell (Workaholics, Rough Night) is hysterical in Brittany Runs a Marathon (presented by Flicks.com.au).

Saturday 8 June

It’s the long weekend! Celebrate with an all-night binge on the stickiest, sugariest and most stomach-upsetting trash and oddball cinema at the All Night Cine-Love In at Dendy Newtown.

Or get yourself some knowledge with docs Sea of Shadows, about the Sea Shepherd’s fight to save an endangered tiny whale off the Mexican coast, which has become collateral damage in traffickers’ hunt for the “cocaine of the sea”; or Alpha, the Right to Kill, a feature from the Philippines about President Rodrigo Duterte’s brutal campaign to extrajudicially execute drug users.

Sunday 9 June

Settle in for a session at the State with Marighella, the directorial debut of Narcosactor Wagner Moura (followed by a Q&A with the director), or the palate-cleansing Indian romance Photograph, the latest by the director of Australia’s biggest-ever Indian film The Lunchbox.

Got kids to entertain? There’s a full day of movies you won’t find elsewhere at HOYTS Entertainment Quarter (with plenty of parking), from the return of ABC iView hit Minuscule to nature epic The Elephant Queen and homegrown drama Emu Runner.