Jafar Panahi takes top honours at record-breaking Sydney Film Festival with gaming stepping into the spotlight
The 72nd Sydney Film Festival wrapped on June 15 with record-breaking attendance, a sold-out run of over 150 sessions, and a main prize that went to one of cinema’s most quietly defiant figures.
Iranian director Jafar Panahi took home the $60,000 Sydney Film Prize for It Was Just an Accident – a reimagined Iranian thriller praised by the international jury for its “understated authority” and “deep soul.” Accepting the award in person, Panahi’s win also capped off a retrospective of his entire body of work, screened in full at the festival.
Elsewhere, Australian filmmaker Shalom Almond claimed the $20,000 Documentary Australia Award for Songs Inside, a moving portrait of music and resilience in a women’s prison, while Floodland, Jordan Giusti’s poetic take on climate grief in Lismore, earned the $40,000 Sustainable Future Award.
Canadian filmmaker Lisa Jackson won the $35,000 First Nations Award for Wilfred Buck, an imaginative doco about a Cree “star man” who melds Indigenous knowledge with cosmic science.
Short films were well represented in the Dendy Awards, with Faceless and Mates among the big winners, and the Big Bang Sound Design team (Wayne Pashley and Libby Villa) awarded the UNESCO Sydney City of Film prize for pushing the limits of Australian screen audio.
But 2025 also marked a turn towards new storytelling frontiers. In a packed State Theatre event, the festival hosted a world-exclusive in-conversation between gaming auteur Hideo Kojima and Mad Max director George Miller.
Their wide-ranging talk explored the cinematic DNA of Kojima’s upcoming release Death Stranding 2: On The Beach (out June 26), a moment that hinted at future collaborations – and at Sydney Film Festival’s embrace of the screen industry’s fast-growing interactive edge.
With over 150,000 attendees, a fresh look at emerging formats, and a fiercely global spread of winners, this year’s Sydney Film Festival confirmed what we already suspected: cinema’s borders are dissolving, and Sydney’s right there at the front.
