The big three fall film festivals at Venice, Telluride and Toronto have come and gone, but the Bay Area is just getting started. The 48th Mill Valley Film Festival, the Bay Area’s premier fall festival, is kicking off and its program is as rich as ever. With dozens of films from over 30 countries, ranging from big-name awards hopefuls to small independent films from across the globe, the Mill Valley Film Festival offers a swath of programming representing the whole spectrum of cinema in 2025.
The festival opens Oct. 2 with Chloé Zhao’s highly anticipated adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s acclaimed novel, “Hamnet,” the story of William and Agnes Shakespeare in the wake of the death of their son, Hamnet. Zhao’s newest film, starring Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, debuted at the Telluride Film Festival earlier this year to rave reviews and won the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival, setting it on a clear path to the Academy Awards. Buckley will be awarded the MVFF Award at a ceremony on Oct. 3 following a screening of the film.
Similarly, films that debuted to acclaim at previous festivals in 2025, like the Cannes Film Festival in May, will make their way to the Bay. The distribution and production company NEON is screening their Cannes’ Palme d’Or, Grand Prix and Jury Prize winners with Jafar Panahi’s “It Was Just an Accident,” Joachim Trier’s “Sentimental Value” and Oliver Laxe’s “Sirāt.” Another NEON film, “The Secret Agent,” which won Cannes’ FIPRESCI Prize, Best Director for Kleber Mendonça Filho, the AFCAE Art House Cinema Award and Best Actor for Wagner Moura, will play at MVFF.
Though studios’ recurring presence at festivals is usually unremarkable, NEON’s dominance this year is notable, especially as they will also screen Ugo Bienvenu’s “Arco,” which will include access to MVFF’s family-friendly HOOPLA! area, and Park Chan-wook’s “No Other Choice” at MVFF. NEON has won the Palme d’Or at Cannes for the last six years in a row, with last year’s winner “Anora” sweeping the Oscars last year, including Best Picture.
Panahi’s “It Was Just an Accident” is a scintillatingly funny and nail-biting drama about maintaining humanity in the face of an oppressive regime and well-worth seeking out. It follows his 20-year filmmaking ban from Iran and an imprisonment in 2022, from which he was released in 2023 following a hunger strike. Few films this year are as timely or engaging as Panahi’s newest. Similarly, “The Secret Agent” is a brilliant look into 1970s Brazil and its dictatorship, labelled the “Brazilian Miracle.” Moura is revelatory and Filho’s direction is breezy yet controlled making this a must-see.
While these bigger titles will be major draws, this festival also offers unique programming of smaller independent titles. Bri’anna Moore, MVFF’s U.S. indies programmer and programming associate, specializes in finding these smaller gems for the festival and really believes in this year’s indie programming under its various sections and initiatives like World Cinema and Mind the Gap.
“Someone might be drawn to the festival because their favorite actor is starring in a film, and because they’re coming here to see that, they decide to make a day of it and end up checking out an indie film that they’ve never heard of,” Moore said. “Now they have this new filmmaker or actor that they can become obsessed with.”
This breadth of programming makes MVFF stand out amongst the various fall film festivals. There aren’t many other places where one can see the latest “Knives Out” installment and also see “Happy Birthday,” a small film about a little girl in Cairo navigating class.
“We have Active Cinema, Mind the Gap and Viva El Cine. Viva El Cine is like our focus on Latino films. Active Cinema – they’re all documentaries that have a social justice lens to them, and so there’s like a call for action with each one,” Moore said. “The whole section is really good, especially “Arrest the Midwife,” which got an honorable mention for our Creation Prize. Mind the Gap is our gender equity initiative, highlighting films from women and non-binary filmmakers.”
There is also a bevy of Bay Area related films. “Brother Verses Brother” comes from Ari and Ethan Gold, sons of famed San Francisco novelist Herbert Gold, and revolves around two brothers auditioning between various San Francisco locales, all shot in one improvisational take. Francis Ford Coppola, famed Bay Area-adjacent filmmaker, is the executive producer. “Diamond Diplomacy” digs into the relationship between Japan and baseball, with some incisive looks into San Francisco Giants history.
MVFF has become a tried-and-true pit stop for Oscar surefires over the years for many major studios. Last year, “Conclave” and “Anora” screened at Mill Valley before racking up statues. This year, 20th Century Studios will showcase Scott Cooper’s biopic of The Boss, “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere,” and Focus Features will spotlight “Hamnet” alongside Yorgos Lanthimos’s fourth collaboration with Emma Stone, “Bugonia.”
Smaller scaled crowd pleasers will screen from the ever-reliable Sony Pictures Classics with Nicholas Hytner’s charming World War I-set musical drama, “The Choral,” Rebecca Zlotowski’s playfully off-kilter genre-bending Jodie Foster vehicle, “A Private Life” and “Blue Moon,” Richard Linklater’s witty and aptly theatrical reunion with Ethan Hawke set at a bar during Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma!” premiere.
How these titles are received at Mill Valley affects their general buzz going forward in awards season. Awards campaigning lasts all year round, but kicks into high gear during September. Bay Area journalist Erik Anderson, founder and editor-in-chief of AwardsWatch, is more than familiar with MVFF as both a hotspot of exciting lesser-seen cinema and high-profile titles with awards potential.
“It is sort of a cream of the crop of most of the potential awards contenders for the season, because Cannes and Venice and Telluride and Toronto have already happened,” Anderson said. “The buzz and everything from all of those kind of shapes the lineup of Mill Valley to a certain extent, not entirely, because it is such a massive festival and very long.”
While these buzzy titles can dominate a festival, the varied programming at MVFF helps give a festival its life and it represents the full scope of the year in cinema.
Whether a first-time festivalgoer or a seasoned vet, there’s something for everybody during this year’s Mill Valley Film Festival. It runs from Oct. 2-12 with films playing at the Sequoia Cinema, Smith Rafael Film Center, The Lark Theater, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.
