A still from Mystery Road (Image: Sydney Film Festival)

The 60th Sydney Film Festival is to open tonight with the world premiere of Hugo Weaving’s latest offering, Mystery Road.

Directed by Ivan Sen (Beneath Clouds, Dreamland, Toomelah), Mystery Road is a crime-suspense film set in a town in outback Australia. Weaving’s performance in it has already been hailed as “something special” by the festival director, Nashen Moodley, in an interview to AAP.

Weaving will also head the jury at this year’s festival’s competition. Of 190 films to screen at the festival, only thirty are Australian; fifty five countries in total are represented.

Of Australia’s submissions, standouts include The Unlikely Pilgrims, a documentary about recovering addicts and a drug counsellor on the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage trail in northern Spain; Nerve, the story of a broken man determined to hunt down his late wife’s former lover; and The Rocket, a “coming-of-age tale set entirely in Laos” which won major prizes at the Berlinale and Tribeca film festivals.

An image from Tau Seru (Image: Sydney Film Festival)

Among the five Indian films to be selected are the arthouse Char… The No Man’s Island, Ship of Thesis, and the spectacular Tau Seru, selected for the Cannes film festival. No Pakistani film is to be shown at this year’s Sydney Film Festival, however Love City Jalalabad is an Afghan production set in the Pashto-speaking areas of that country.

The Sydney Film Festival opens tonight and runs until the 16th June. For more information and ticket sales visit the Sydney Film Festival website.