Australian music will take a prominent place in the Melbourne International Film Festival’s first reveal for 2026, with the world premiere of Jebediah: Are We OK? and the Australian screening of The Best Summer emerging as two of the standout music titles in the festival’s opening announcement. The films revisit pivotal moments in alternative music culture, one through the story of a Perth band that survived three decades together, the other through newly discovered footage from one of Australia’s most significant music festivals of the 1990s.
by Paul Cashmere
Running from 6 to 23 August across Melbourne and regional Victoria, with MIFF Online continuing nationally until 30 August, the 74th Melbourne International Film Festival has unveiled the first 25 titles from a program that will eventually expand to more than 300 films and events.
Among the early highlights are two documentaries that examine Australian music from distinctly different perspectives.
Arlo Dean Cook’s Jebediah: Are We OK? follows the thirty-year journey of Perth alternative rock band Jebediah, from suburban beginnings and Triple J success through the realities of maintaining a career long after the initial spotlight fades. Drawing on three decades of archival footage and home movies, the film explores not only the band’s achievements but also the personal costs of longevity in the music industry.
The documentary features contributions from key figures in Australian music including Tim Rogers, Phil Jamieson and Janet English. Rather than serving as a conventional career retrospective, the film examines the friendships, ambitions and challenges that have kept the band together across multiple generations of Australian music.
Jebediah’s story mirrors the broader trajectory of the country’s alternative rock movement. Emerging during the late 1990s boom, the group became one of Western Australia’s most successful exports while navigating an industry that has changed dramatically since their earliest recordings.
Equally significant is The Best Summer, a documentary built from footage that was never originally intended to become a film.
Director Tamra Davis travelled to Australia in December 1995 with her husband Mike D of Beastie Boys and filmed the Summersault Festival using a Sony Hi8 camcorder. The footage was later packed away and forgotten until it was rediscovered in a shoebox during the evacuation of Davis’s home during the recent Los Angeles Palisades wildfire.
Three decades later, the material has become an extraordinary time capsule of alternative music at a turning point. The film captures Beastie Boys, Pavement, Sonic Youth, Foo Fighters, The Amps and Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna during an era when alternative rock was shifting from underground culture to global commercial force.
For Australian audiences, the documentary also revisits Summersault, a festival that arrived as a challenger to the dominant Big Day Out and briefly represented a different vision for the country’s live music landscape. The footage offers a rare behind-the-scenes perspective on artists who would soon become defining figures of modern rock music.
Together, the two documentaries create an unexpected dialogue between different generations of Australian music culture. One looks at a band that endured, while the other captures a moment when alternative music was still defining its future.
Elsewhere in the first MIFF announcement are six MIFF Premiere Fund productions, including Mad Rush, Hard As Puck and Sweet Milk Lake. The festival will also host the world premiere of SBS drama The Airport Chaplain starring Hugo Weaving and Shabana Azeez, while special events include John Cameron Mitchell appearing in person for a live commentary screening of Hedwig And The Angry Inch and the latest Hear My Eyes presentation of Christopher Nolan’s Memento.
MIFF Artistic Director Al Cossar described the first announcement as an early glimpse of a much larger program still to come.
The complete MIFF 2026 program will be unveiled on 9 July, but for music fans the first announcement has already delivered two compelling reasons to attend. Whether revisiting the rise of one of Australia’s most beloved alternative bands or rediscovering a lost document of the country’s festival culture, Jebediah: Are We OK? and The Best Summer promise to preserve important chapters of Australian music history on screen.
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