The result was "A Perfect Midnight: Haunted Hong Kong", a supernatural sampling of six films that also included Ricky Lau Koon-wai's 1985 classic , Stanley Kwan Kam-pang's (1988), and both parts of (1962 and 1963), written by horror film master Ma Xu Weibang, who died in a car accident after finishing the script.

Co-presented by the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office, it worked to some extent as a self-contained event, with the offerings in this programme shown in the second half of the final week of the festival, which ran from July 31 to August 17. In addition, film writers and scholars assembled to dissect the genre and its effect on global cinema at a "Spook and the City: Hong Kong Supernatural" panel.

Established in 1952, the festival has long had an "Accent on Asia" section that this year comprised 22 films - headlined by Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai's - and "A Perfect Midnight" developed from that, Cossar said. "I was familiar with the tradition, but not to the degree that I became. It was a very fun and eye-opening process to really get into it," says the man who, together with artistic director Michelle Carey, programmed the 2014 MIFF's 244 feature-length works.

Spanning 10 venues across Melbourne's central business district, this year's festival included features from 53 countries.

Australian entries opened and closed this year's programme. Time-travel thriller , shot on location in Melbourne and directed by brothers Michael and Peter Speirig, got the event going while the closing film was Matthew Saville's , a noir thriller starring local heartthrob Joel Edgerton, which had almost simultaneous commercial release with Edgerton in town for marketing events.

As well as the international panorama featuring big-name directors' films from Cannes and other festivals, there were the regulars: documentaries, shorts, animation, the Backbeat music films. "Night Shift", an audience favourite and home to psychopaths, vampires, zombies and other kinds of weirdness, is also an annual event.

Additional sections included those on contemporary Indian films, Commedia all'italiana (comedy Italian style), a retrospective of works by French New Wave actor Jean-Pierre Leaud, and a programme featuring a dozen restored masterworks and films about cinema masters, including Eric Rohmer and Federico Fellini.

A trend noted by commentators was the number of long films. Cossar said that in this age of short attention spans, the festival wanted to show cinephiles had the stamina and would sit through a four- or five-hour film - even Jacques Rivette's almost 13-hour-long drama , albeit shown in four parts over a weekend. "This is against the ADHD style of film," the programmer says. "But people are into marathon viewing, they will buy a boxed set [of a television series] and view it in a sitting."

There were smaller, touching moments too, among them the Australian premiere of first-time New Zealand director Curtis Vowell's . Screening with Cannes alumni in the international panorama - a big deal for a New Zealand film - the 81-minute feature was shot in a working petrol station over 20 nights while it was closed, and its screenplay was written by Vowell' s wife, Sophie Henderson.

It tells the story of Tania (played by Henderson), a white girl who identifies as Maori in her mostly Maori South Auckland community. screened in the MIFF's smallest venue to a sell-out crowd, among them Vowell's parents, who flew in from Hong Kong for the occasion. The audience loved it.