What makes cinema dangerous? Inside the Festival of Dangerous Ideas’ new film program

From Salò to Shortbus, FODI’s new program explores how film can challenge our ideas about sex, violence, power and morality.
Linday Beamish as Severin in Shortbus (2006). Image: ThinkFilm.

What makes a film dangerous? Is it the subject matter, its depictions of violence and intimacy, the ideas it puts into the world, or the possibility that those ideas might change the way we see it?

It’s not all throwbacks, the festival will also screen Alex Gibney’s urgent 2026 documentary, Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie

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Alannah Sue is a journalist, writer and theatre critic with a passion for arts and culture and all that glitters. She relocated to Melbourne in 2025 after spending over a decade embedded in the Sydney arts landscape and finishing up her tenure as Arts & Culture Editor at Time Out. In addition to contributing to ArtsHub and ScreenHub, her freelance portfolio also expands to editorial and copywriting for lifestyle and arts publications such as Limelight and Urban List, cultural institutions like the Sydney Opera House, and marketing and publicity services for independent artists. She is always keen to take a chance on weird performance art, theatre of all kinds, out-of-the-box exhibitions, queer venues, and cheap Prosecco. Give her half a chance, and she will get on a soapbox when it comes to topics like the magic of musical theatre, the importance of rigorous arts criticism, and the global cultural implications of the RuPaul’s Drag Race franchise. Connect with Alannah on Instagram: @alannurgh.