Festivals

IRFF26 Almost With You

Irish singer-songwriter BRENDAN (Declan O’Rourke) arrives in the coastal town of Albany, Western Australia, for the final leg of his Australian solo tour. Haunted by his brother’s recent death, Brendan is a man adrift, touring half-heartedly and emotionally retreating. With 5 days off before his next show, Brendan finds himself at a precipice of unravelling further until he meets SARAH (Chloe Hurst). She is a quietly resilient, elusively charming and grounded local woman with her own painful history. Their connection is immediate, and unfolds over songs, quiet conversations, and moments of shared loss. And wine. Set against the raw beauty of regional Western Australia, and underscored by a crucial series of original songs by Declan O’Rourke, ALMOST WITH YOU is a portrait of two people tentatively opening up to the possibility of loving again.

IRFF26 Chasing Millions

CHASING MILLIONS is a comedy drama heist film inspired by the £26 million pound robbery of the Northern Bank in Belfast, the biggest bank robbery in British history.  DIANA (Madeleine Madden), an Australian police detective who is on family business in Belfast at the same time, seizes the opportunity to investigate the biggest crime of her career.  Diana is teamed with CRAYFORD (Christopher Ecclestone), a cynical, veteran Northern Irish police detective who does not want her help.  Set in 2004, Northern Ireland has been at peace for six years, but old enmities, and mistrust remain. Diana is increasingly frustrated as the case takes one more bizarre turn after another. As Diana and Detective Crayford become increasingly isolated in this seemingly impossible investigation, they learn to grudgingly respect each other.  When all seems lost, Diana comes up with an ingenious plan which could save the day.

IRFF26 Girls & Boys

A tender, funny, and quietly radical romantic comedy. GIRLS & BOYS tells the story of rugby player Jace meeting aspiring filmmaker Charlie at a college party. Both attend Trinity, but their worlds couldn’t be more different—Charlie is trans, her circle full of queer artists and creatives, while Jace sticks with the more straight-laced camaraderie of his rugby teammates. When the party is suddenly shut down by the police, the two find themselves alone in the streets of nighttime Dublin. As they wander the city, sharing secrets, dreams, and fears about life after college, a surprising revelation from their shared past threatens to upend their fragile connection. Jace must confront not only his past, but the social identity he’s long taken for granted. GIRLS & BOYS features breakout performances from newcomers Liath Hannon and Adam Lunnon-Collery.

IRFF26 Horseshoe

Four estranged siblings return to their crumbling family home in the West of Ireland after the death of their father where they attempt to navigate inheritance, grief and long-buried grudges. But their time together unearths far more than expected – including secrets that just might shatter what little bond remains between them. Blending razor-sharp dialogue with raw emotional depth, the comedy drama is anchored by powerful performances from Carolyn Bracken (Oddity, The Gone, You are Not my Mother), Lalor Roddy (That They May Face the Rising Sun), John Connors (Cardboard Gangsters, Love/Hate) and Mary Murray (Love/Hate), with an original score by acclaimed Irish composer Anna Mullarkey and music from John Francis Flynn.

IRFF26 Hush-A-Bye Baby

A coming-of-age film set in Derry against the backdrop of The Troubles and an all powerful Catholic Church. Impressionable Irish teen Goretti Friel (Emer McCourt) begins a romance with an older boy, Ciarán (Michael Liebman). In love but naïve about such practical concerns as birth control, the devoutly Roman Catholic Goretti ends up with an unwanted pregnancy. When Ciarán is jailed by the British army, and shows little desire from prison to uphold his parental responsibilities, the pressures of unanticipated motherhood begin to unravel the 15-year-old teen's emotional stability. Features the acting debut of a very youthful Sinéad O’Connor who also wrote the music. The print of HUSH-A-BYE BABY was restored by the Irish Film Institute in 2025 for a retrospective of Margo Harkin’s work.

IRFF26 Irish-Australian Short Film Program

The Irish Film Festival will present a dedicated session of Irish-Australian short films as part of the festival’s inaugural Short Film Competition in Sydney and Melbourne. This collection showcases stories shaped by the interweaving of Irish and Australian culture, through their producers, directors, actors, or themes. From Ireland, we have black comedy in Room for More, where tenants fight over possession of a rented house, music video from Sydney-based rapper, Aedan, a gentle queer love story in Flirt and an intergenerational getting of wisdom in Castlines, and four more short films. It has long been a focus of the Irish Film Festival to nurture Irish creativity especially in Australia and among the global diaspora. Spanning comedy, LGBTQ, documentary, Irish-language and music, the program highlights a new generation of Irish-Australian filmmakers expressing their heritage in cinematic terms. The winners will be announced at the Sydney screening.

IRFF26 Listen To The Land Speak

The late Manchán Magan reveals the profound knowledge and wisdom contained in the Irish landscape and myths and reveals how it shapes our view on the world. Filmed over four seasons, the film unfolds from Winter Solstice to Bealtaine through Reek Sunday to Samhain – exploring how the stories and myths associated with the rivers, mountains and lands around us are crucial to unlocking aspects of how we need to rebuild our relationship with nature today. Along his visually breathtaking journey, he meets respected archaeologists, mythologists, writers and shamans that offer different perspectives on how our ancestors related to the land and landscape around them.   He reflects on how this wisdom can help us rebuild our relationship with nature today. But it also becomes an unexpectedly personal story as Manchán realises that there is a serious illness within himself that makes him see this these ancient sites and beliefs in a whole new light.

IRFF26 Roots/Fréwaka

Haunted by a personal tragedy, home care worker, SHOO (Clare Monnelly, Small Things Like These), is sent to a remote village to care for the old and deeply troubled PEIG (Bríd Ní Neachtain) who fears that the house is infested with the Sídhe – sinister fairies who, she believes, abducted her decades before. As the two women develop a strangely deep connection, Shoo is consumed by the old woman’s paranoia, rituals, and superstitions, eventually confronting the horrors from her own past. An unnerving and spine tingling folk horror tale from Ireland.

IRFF26 Testimony

TESTIMONY is a feature documentary that tells a story of an extraordinary group of women, supported by the activist organisation Justice for Magdalenes, whose battle to hold the Irish government accountable for the abuses of the Magdalene Laundries, Mother and Baby Home institutions and forced family separation, takes them all the way to the United Nations. The Magdalene Laundries, operated by religious orders with state complicity, imprisoned and dehumanised women under the guise of moral rehabilitation. Survivors endured forced labour, physical and emotional abuse, and the lifelong stigma of being labelled "fallen." The cruelty extended into Mother and Baby Homes, where unwed mothers were coerced into surrendering their children for adoption—many of these separations executed in secrecy and without consent. These homes also subjected residents to horrifying practices, including vaccine trials and human trafficking. Amidst this struggle, TESTIMONY finds hope and resilience, providing survivors with long-overdue recognition, offering a moment of healing as they share their stories and reclaim their narratives.

IRFF26 The Drowned/Báite

PEGGY (Eleanor O’Brien) has been running the family pub in Connemara since the death of her parents. She is fighting her sister and her brothers who want to sell the pub and move out. Just as things are coming to a head, a body is found under the receding waters of the nearby lake. It is generally assumed to be a forgotten grave from the old cemetery, part of the ghost village located at the bottom of the lake and Detective FRANK RYAN (Moe Dunford) is sent from Dublin to investigate. During this hot, dry weekend in the summer of 1975, Detective Ryan's investigation will not only reveal the terrible truth behind the dead woman's story, but will also reveal the deepest secrets of the Casey family.

IRFF26 Trad

From their home in the Donegal Gaeltacht, gifted fiddle player Shóna McAnally (Megan Nic Fhionnghaile) and her talented little brother Mickey take to the road with a troupe of wandering musicians, on a cross-country journey of adventure, romance and musical exploration on Ireland’s Wild Atlantic Coast. Living in Donegal, Shona has had a gutful of her mum and the straitjacketed Irish traditional music scene she grew up in. When a mysterious svengali, (Aidan Gillen) arrives on the scene with a vanful of musical teenage rebels, Shóna joins the merry pranksters for a magical mystery tour along the Wild Atlantic Way. As the little gang of raving troubadours make their merry way around Ireland, Shóna seeks to find romance and make her peace with her real (and her musical) family.

IRFF26 The Lightkeeper

Ireland, 1924. Seamus Og MacGrianna (Dominic Cooper) is a lighthouse keeper whose elaborate rituals keep him rooted in the past – tending the garden of the house where he used to live and rowing out to sea every morning, hoping to hear the call of the fabled Each-Uisce (a shape shifting water-horse known for drowning men). But Seamus’ carefully constructed world is blown wide open by three people who change the course of his life forever: Edith (Sarah Gadon), the mysterious American war widow, whose quest for closure ignites something in him; Father MacGabhann (Aidan Quinn), the hard-line priest who makes it his mission to start a battle of wills with a man who has nothing to lose; and Maire (Sarah Bolger), the housekeeper whose unconditional love can no longer protect him from himself.

IRFF26 Whitetail

In the isolated beauty of Cork and Kerry, JEN (Natasha O’Keeffe) works as a conservation ranger in the same woods where, years ago, her younger sister lost her life in a tragic accident. The sudden return of OSCAR (Aaron McCusker), a boyfriend from her distant past, stirs memories long buried, forcing her to confront their shared history. As a poacher begins leaving violent traces across the land she protects, the line between past and present starts to blur and Jen has to face what's been haunting her all along. WHITETAIL is a nail-biting psychological thriller directed by Dutch filmmaker Nanouk Leopold.