MASIFF: Yesterday Island (2025)

Director: Sam Voutas | Year: 2025 | Rating: Unclassified 15+ | Runtime: 90 mins | Country: Australia | Genre: Comedy | Language: English, Spanish

In this award-winning Australian indie comedy, an unsuccessful writer, stuck living the same day on repeat on a subantarctic island, must find another unwitting victim to take his place.

Amos, a failed novelist with a failed marriage, arrives on a remote southern island in full midlife-crisis mode. But his escape soon becomes a prison: he discovers he’s trapped infinitely reliving the same day, complete with the same dead birds, weird board games, tinned spaghetti and unexplained murders.

The only way to get off this hamster wheel is to trick someone else into replacing you, and Amos’s estranged ex-wife, Gemma, seems like the perfect candidate – but her arrival complicates things, and Amos is forced to confront his past.

Winner of Audience Award at Austin, Critics’ Prize at Brussels and Best Feature at Cleveland

“A very dark moral comedy … [a] sly, wry existential allegory of life’s disposable relationships.” – SciFiNow

Accompanying Short: RETURN TO CAMP CONCERN

Director: Caddie Brain | Year: 2026 | Rating: Unclassified 15+ | Runtime: 17 mins | Country: Australia | Genre: Documentary | Language: English

Legendary Top End activist and bush philosopher Strider embarks on one final pilgrimage into Kakadu, revisiting old battles and a lifetime of resistance. An intimate, funny and moving portrait of an unforgettable Darwin character.

Writer/director Caddie Brain is a Northern Territory-based curator, creative producer and journalist who has lived and worked in Mpartnwe/Alice Springs.