Another cold August in Melbourne, another lineup of film-related treats to warm the cockles of a cinephile’s heart. The program for the 2015 Melbourne international film festival is a beefy one, with some 370 titles procured from 69 countries.

This year’s festival is about “emotionally connecting audiences with film. Happiness. Fear. Anger. Surprise. Sadness. Disgust – the full range of human emotion.” Which sounds weirdly like a synopsis of Pixar’s latest movie Inside Out.

Here are our top 10 things designed to bring on those feels.

1. Emotion Simulator Chair

Do you have emotions? Do you like sitting on chairs? Festival organisers are hedging their bets you answered “yes” to both questions – therefore making you the perfect participant for the Emotion Simulator Chair, which looks like something designed to administer electroshock therapy. Faces of participants will be “electro-stimulated” to display the aforementioned emotions. Curiously, the Miff website more or less declares this a beard-free zone.

2. Head

Director Bob Rafelson’s candy-coloured 1968 sensory overload, reportedly written or “structured” by Jack Nicholson while on LSD, is a rare cinematic beast: too weird to forget and too insanely random to properly remember.

Made after the Monkees’ TV show was cancelled and starring the manufactured pop group, the film is essentially a string of (often nonsensical) vignettes sending up their fame and celebrity status. This rare opportunity to see it on the big screen is guaranteed to make you feel as though you’ve binged on powerful hallucinogenic drugs.

3. Vertical cinema

Bucking the trend of conversations involving widescreen this and widescreen that, vertical cinema looks to be exactly as it sounds: a large vertically hung screen draped in Federation Square. Projected on to it will be 10 on-rotation 35mm short films made by experimental film-makers. The Miff program guide neglects to mention that vertical cinema includes optional widescreen: just tilt your head 90 degrees to the left or right.

4. Raiders!

After the release of Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981, three young Americans made the mother of all homages: a shot-by-shot remake filmed over seven years on a shoestring budget. Friends Eric Zala, Chris Strompolos and Jayson Lamb were 11 years old when they started and 19 when they finished, although one scene proved too elaborate for their cash-strapped DIY style. New documentary Raiders!, from directors Jeremy Coon and Tim Skousen, captures the trio finally finishing their elaborate fan film after raising money on Kickstarter in 2014.

5. Arabian Nights

Winner of the Sydney film festival’s top gong, the Sydney film prize, director Miguel Gomes’ allegorical study of the grim state of Portugal’s modern-day economy is nothing if not long. Told over three parts, the cumulative running time of Arabian Nights – a patchwork of funny, dramatic and absurd stories – is a butt-flattening 338 minutes. So if you have a time-strapped friend or family member you’d like to passively aggressively exact revenge upon, buy them a ticket.

6. David Gulpilil retrospective

National treasure David Gulpilil is the subject of a retrospective program showcasing a selection of his best work including The Last Wave, Walkabout, Storm Boy, Mad Dog Morgan and Dark Ages. A print of the latter – director Arch Nicholson’s weirdly spiritual creature feature about a giant killer crocodile – was borrowed from Quentin Tarantino’s personal collection.

7. Racing Extinction

Louie Psihoyos’s follow-up to The Cove, his thrilling 2009 film about dolphin hunting, has certainly upped the stakes. Racing Extinction is about what some scientists predict will be the sixth major extinction event in the Earth’s history – the last being the demise of the dinosaurs. This would ordinarily be rather exciting were it not for the distressing fact that Racing Extinction is a documentary.

8. Mistress America

The last time Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig wrote a screenplay, they came up with the gorgeously hipstery slice-of-life dramedy Frances Ha. Baumbach directs again and Gerwig is again one of the stars; she plays the self-confident Manhattanite stepsister of college freshman Tracy (Lola Kirke). Baumbach’s films (which include The Squid and the Whale and Margotat the Wedding) are always worth a watch, and the Gerwig/Baumbach collaboration is a particularly appealing double act.

9. Thank You for Playing

There have been some cracker documentaries about video games including The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, Indie Game: The Movie and Atari: Game Over. Thank You for Playing, from directors David Osit and Malika Zouhali-Worrall, sounds like a veritable tearjerker as it follows a programmer who develops a game about his young son’s battle with cancer.

10. The Lobster

Who would have thought a film from one of the leaders of the so-called Greek weird wave movement would sound so … weird? In his first English language film, Dogtooth director Yorgos Lanthimos takes us to a not-too-distant future world where people who don’t find romantic partners in 45 days are turned into animals and hunted. The cast includes Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz and John C Reilly. The buzz about The Lobster is strong, with Lanthimos bagging a number of accolades including the jury prize at this year’s Cannes film festival.

• Melbourne international film festival runs from 30 July to 16 August at venues citywide