The Adelaide Film Festival unveiled its 2026 program on Tuesday night: 122 films from 52 countries, including 10 world premieres and 27 Australian premieres, running 14–25 October. Among the headline acts, InReview reports, is Olivia Colman — the Oscar-winning star of The Crown and The Favourite — in Wicker, the new film from Adelaide-born director Eleanor Wilson.

"I said the Adelaide Film Festival would be quite happy to sponsor her if she wanted to move to Adelaide," festival CEO and Creative Director Mat Kesting told InReview — Colman appeared in two local productions last year, travelling to Adelaide to shoot Jimpa with director Sophie Hyde and voicing the titular animal in Dario Russo's The Fox. In Wicker, which Kesting calls a "raunchy romp in the woods", she plays a lonely fisherwoman who commissions the village weaver (Peter Dinklage) to make her the perfect husband (Alexander Skarsgård). "She's an incredible performer," Kesting said. "Her facial acting – she can relay so much with her face."

Opening night goes international: Wild Horse Nine, a darkly comic spy thriller from Martin McDonagh (The Banshees of Inisherin, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri) starring John Malkovich, Sam Rockwell and Steve Buscemi, set in the lead-up to the 1973 Chilean coup. "The third act is next level," Kesting said. "Most films you can sort of anticipate where they're going to go. This one it just keeps you guessing right to the end." InReview notes the pick of an international opener over the usual local choice reflects the festival's international focus this year; the wider slate takes in Pedro Almodóvar's Bitter Christmas, French queer cartoon Jim Queen and Rami Malek in The Man I Love.

The festival's own Investment Fund features range from Agata the Writer — Mia Wasikowska as a novelist who travels to Sarajevo to research a book set during the Bosnian War — to the closing-night documentary Hell Has No Fire Escape, about a pastor, Ina Dry, who inherits a rehab clinic in outback South Africa and is drawn into a social media scam by a fake Jason Momoa. "It really proves that documentary can be stranger than fiction," Kesting said. Also on the documentary slate is Aftermath, in which filmmaker Jared Nicholson explores the world of Port Arthur conspiracy theories — "both a reflection on that incredibly tragic part of Australian history," Kesting said, "but it's also quite contemporary in how misinformation can be so problematic."

The local thread runs deep. Adelaide director Anthony Maras (Hotel Mumbai) returns with Pressure, a war-and-meteorology drama starring Andrew Scott and Brendan Fraser. Lucrum — the third film developed through the festival's Film Lab: New Voices program, after Monolith and Lesbian Space Princess — is a low-budget horror film from first-time director Johanis Lyons-Reid and producer Lilla Berry, shot entirely in the Adelaide Hills. And there is a 30th anniversary tribute to Scott Hicks' international breakthrough Shine.

One local story took a twist: Tilda Cobham-Hervey's locally-shot directorial debut, It's All Going Very Well…, opposite Jonathan Pryce — arriving sixteen years after she made her screen debut at the festival as the teenage star of Sophie Hyde's 52 Tuesdays — won't screen in October. Scheduling changes mean it will instead premiere next March as part of the 2027 Adelaide Festival, a separate event. She will still serve on this year's festival jury. "I think she is one of the standout talents of her generation," Kesting said.

Among the world premieres is KUMARANGK: Secret Women's Business, directed by Tracey Rigney, which revisits the controversies of the 1990s Hindmarsh Island bridge affair while putting the Ngarrindjeri women who lived through it front and centre. "I think it's an incredibly important story for South Australia to reckon with," Kesting said, "and this time it's told from the perspective of the women [who] were oftentimes really misrepresented through all of the litigation that occurred... Adelaide Film Festival is super proud to be premiering KUMARANGK."

The full program is at adelaidefilmfestival.org. The festival runs 14–25 October.