In more extreme career jumps into documentary making, physicist Mark Levinson focused on the teams working at the Large Hadron Collider for the documentary Particle Fever and magician Teller (from Penn & Teller) has made Tim’s Vermeer, about an experiment to find if the Dutch painter Vermeer used optical apparatus to create his realistic images. Guy Pearce and Robert Pattinson in The Rover. Credit:Matt Nettheim ‘‘We’re seeing lots of different filmmakers who emerge from completely different careers making really great films,’’ says festival director Nashen Moodley. While there are new films from such celebrated directors as France’s Michel Gondry (the Noam Chomsky documentary Is The Man Who Is Tall Happy?), the prolific Alex Gibney (the Afro-beat documentary Finding Fela!) and American master Robert Altman (a retrospective that includes M*A*S*H and Nashville), it will be a festival dominated by emerging filmmakers from around the world. One with a head start in the film business is Gia Coppola, grand-daughter of Francis Ford and niece of Sofia, with an adaptation of James Franco’s book Palo Alto.

The $60,000 competition for ‘‘courageous, audacious and cutting edge’’ filmmaking includes three Australian films for the first time. What We Do in the Shadows. The highest profile is David Michod’s much-anticipated follow-up to Animal Kingdom, the Guy Pearce-Robert Pattinson thriller The Rover, which will have its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival soon. Also from Australia is Fell from first-time feature director Kasimir Burgess, which is described as an enigmatic drama about a man who wants revenge on the driver of a logging truck who killed his daughter in a hit-and-run accident, and Ruin, an atmospheric romance that Amiel Courtin Wilson and Michael Cody shot in Cambodia. Next Goal Wins, a documentary about the American Samoa soccer team's bid to redeem itself after losing to Australia in a World Cup qualifier by a record 31-0.

The 12-film competition also includes a number of bold cinematic experiments, including the festival's opening night film, 20,000 Days On Earth, a documentary about a fictional day in Nick Cave's life. Director Richard Linklater shot Boyhood, about two siblings growing up, over 12 years; Iranian director Shahram Mokri’s Fish & Cat tells a quirky story in one long continous shot; and British director Steven Knight has Tom Hardy as a man taking life-changing phone calls while driving home to London in Locke, which takes place in real time. Other Australian films in the festival include include Rachel Perkins’ documentary Black Panther Woman, about a Brisbane woman who was a member of the Black Panthers in the 1970s, Darlene Johnson's The Redfern Story, about the National Black Theatre, Eddie Martin's All This Mayhem, about the troubled life of pro skateboarder Tas Pappas, and Christopher Houghton's Touch, a thriller with Leeanna Walsmann as a woman on the run with her daughter. The festival will again showcase new television shows with the pilot for Danny Boyle’s series Babylon and the first two episodes of Devil’s Playground, the film adaptation that debuts on the small screen later this year. With football’s World Cup looming, the festival includes four very different takes on the beautiful game.

Next Goal Wins is a documentary about Western Samoa dealing with a 31-0 loss to the Socceroos in a 2001 World Cup qualifier; the Referee is a black-and-white comedy about rivalry in the lower Italian leagues; Second Game centres on a Romanian match played in the snow in 1988; and France’s Goal of the Dead has a star player taking a performance-enhancing drug that turns him into a homicidal zombie. After watching 400 to 500 films to compile the program, Moodley says blackly funny stories are a popular trend in international filmmaking. ‘‘There’s a sense of humour – sometimes a dark sense of humour – running through lots of the films,’’ he says. Examples include The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq, with the controversial French author playing himself in a story about his disappearance in 2011; Frank, which has Michael Fassbender playing a enigmatic musician who always wears a giant fake head; and Wish I Was Here, with actor-director Zach Braff playing an actor who home schools his children. ‘‘They’re films that will make you laugh but also make you think,’’ says Moodley.

The festival also features new Chinese films, a program of such restored classics as Rebel Without A Cause and Hiroshima, Mon Amour, a salute to the Japanese animation house Studio Ghibli and Cate Blanchett introducing a screening of How To Train Your Dragon 2. It will screen at the State Theatre, Event George Street, Dendy Opera Quays, Art Gallery of NSW, Cremorne Orpheum and, for a Friday the 13th screening of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the Skyline Drive-in at Blacktown.