Sydney Film Festival today announced the first four films that have been selected for the SFF Official Competition and revealed a glimpse of the 2009 program, inviting audiences to start creating their own personal festival experience. The full line-up will be announced on Wednesday 13 May 2009. Sydney Film Festival runs from Wednesday 3 to Sunday 14 June 2009.

The four Official Competition films revealed today, all screening in Australia for the very first time, are strong indicators of the calibre and diversity of this year s line-up:
-Coraline (Henry Selick, USA) The director of The Nightmare Before Christmas creates an extraordinary gothic fairytale world in the first stop-motion feature shot in stereoscopic 3D, based on Neil Gamain s beloved novel and featuring the voices of Dakota Fanning, Teri Hatcher, Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French;
-Disgrace (Steve Jacobs, Australia) This haunting adaptation of the bestselling novel by Nobel Prize-winning author JM Coetzee features a masterful performance from John Malkovich and is set in South Africa s Eastern Cape;
-Louise-Michel (Gustave de Kervern and Benoît Delpine, France) From the creators of cult hit Aaltra (2004) comes a pitch black comedy about job-loss, vengeance and inept assassins set against the economic downtown in Europe;
-The Maid (Sebastian Silva, Chile) fresh from its award-winning success at the Sundance Film Festival comes this intricate comedy/drama about a long serving (and suffering) household maid who becomes vengeful towards the wealthy family for whom she works.