Playlist
The 53rd International Film Festival Rotterdam, is the 2024 edition of the International Film Festival Rotterdam, which will take place from 25 January 2024 to 4 February 2024. The festival will open with Head South a New Zealand film by Jonathan Ogilvie. The complete line-up of films competing in the festival was revealed on 18 December 2023.
<p>Two Interpol agents are assigned to investigate a coral smuggler’s mysterious death in Mexico, in this dreamy, saturated riff on 1990s sexy crime drama television. Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn’s surreal murder mystery comedy is their most ambitious and gorgeous film yet.</p>
<p>A deep-fake remake of a classic spy thriller. Whodunnit? Depends how you look at it!</p>
<p>A young songwriter flees the city to join a farming commune, falling in love and falling in with a cult-like eco-group, with disastrous consequences. With a background in musical theatre, the director infuses her feature debut with a melodious spirit.</p>
<p>In conversation with notable poets, Hong Kong cinema legend Ann Hui weaves together her two great loves: poetry and the city. Fusing recollections of the past with contemporary thought to create a deeply moving portrait of the many lives and layers of Hong Kong.</p>
<p>This deeply enchanting fusion of puppet theatre and cinema tells the story of frivolous and lecherous emperor Qianlong's search for a morally upstanding person. A splendid piece of glove puppet cinema history.</p>
<p>Made during a period in-between, the Chilean condition of exile is described in pan-Latin American terms. </p>
<p>Artist duo Lolo and Sosaku create a strange and inexplicable world through mesmerising sound sculptures and contraptions. Their live performance The End, serves as the climax to Sergio Caballero's film, 'Lolo & Sosaku' The Western Archive. A surreal Western odyssey awaits.</p>
<p>Instead of getting rid of his wife, a professional killer teaches this husband a lesson.</p>
<p>An earthquake causes a huge fissure at the bottom of the ocean, potentially destabilising the Earth’s already precarious environment, but also forcing a young scientist to decide whether to pursue his career or continue a relationship. Over time, he ruminates on the decision he made.</p>
<p>Deep in the forest of the small rural village Harasawa, single parent Takumi lives with his young daughter, Hana, and takes care of odd jobs for locals, chopping wood and hauling pristine well water. The overpowering serenity of this untouched land of mountains and lakes, where deer peacefully roam free, is about to be disrupted by the imminent arrival of the Tokyo company Playmode, which is ready to start construction on a glamping site for city tourists—a plan, which Takumi and his neighbors discover, that will have dire consequences for the ecological health and cleanliness of their community. The potent and foreboding new film from Oscar-winning director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi (<em>Drive My Car </em>and <em>Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy,</em> both NYFF59) is a haunting, entirely unexpected cinematic experience that reconstitutes the boundaries of the ecopolitical thriller. Intensified by a rapturous, ominous score by Eiko Ishibashi, this mesmeric journey diverges from country-vs-city themes to straddle the line between the earthy and the metaphysical.</p>
<p>A teenager flunks an oral school exam, following a seemingly benign question asked by his teacher. Questions over why the boy was failed ignite a nationalistic debate, in Hungarian director Gábor Reisz's powerful, multi-perspective, state-of-the nation drama.</p>
<p>A documentary about Chilean exile life in Sweden following one woman and those she meets.</p>
<p>Multimedia artist Mika Taanila expunges optimistic sentiment from this moody procession of thermal images, music and on-screen text. A thin filigree of narrative – rituals of domestic life, an individual seeking their identity in the crowd – gives way to abstract impressions exuding an apocalyptic ambience.</p>
<p>A quest for all things cute turns dark when power, sex, children and fame intermingle.</p>
<p>A woman of right-wing convictions spends her days at home with her maid. Outside, a putsch is in the making. An extremely sharp vision of the bourgeoisie's hostility to the Unidad Popular, as well as a scathing vision of women unthinkingly acting out their roles as prescribed by the patriarchal mindset. No men around. They do it on their own.</p>
<p>Dogs, sheep, goats, humans and many other animals go about their daily affairs on a farm in the Czech countryside. Tenderly capturing their reciprocal dynamics, a Few mornings, an Evening invites us to observe and reflect on our relationship with animals in human agriculture.</p>
<p>Funny, moving and cinematic, capturing the healing power of art with graceful fantasy.</p>
<p>When his personal film project fails to see the light of day, Karthi, a disgruntled assistant on commercial productions in Malaysia, risks descending irrevocably into self-destruction. Part satire, part drama, Fire on Water speaks to the frustrated aspirations of creative minds across the globe.</p>
<p>A Japanese tea ceremony becomes an intense sensorial inward journey.</p>
<p>Vibrant, colourful, hand-drawn animation in which a group of manta rays rise up against humankind.</p>
<p>Through his spirited blend of documentary and fiction, Jaydon Martin’s compelling directorial debut offers a refreshing and rarely seen perspective on a working-class community in a small Australian city, as seen through the eyes of septuagenarian Cass, a stranger to neither joy nor hardship.</p>
<p>Beautiful and slightly disturbing hand-drawn animation, in which multiple generations of women face different expectations.</p>
<p>Some people embark on a dangerous journey to leave a country full of sunshine.</p>
<p>A visual poem about changing states, we move along from liquid to ice, to gas.</p>
<p>The Tunisian mother Olfa Hamrouni gained prominence in 2016 when two of her four daughters ran away to join the Islamic State in Libya. She grew outspoken in the hope of preventing other mothers from suffering her loss. Now filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania takes a novel approach to telling this story by casting two actors to portray the missing daughters alongside Hamrouni and her other daughters. “Four Daughters is an enthralling narrative about memory.” (<em>Variety)</em></p>
<p>The diary of a trip – interrupted – by the director to Chile, made during the social explosion of the eighties: Expelled from the country, after her semi-clandestine entry was discovered by the intelligence services, it was completed from a distance. It is one of the first returns from exile and a fundamental antecedent of first-person documentary in Chile.</p>
<p>Sardonic reflections on the state of the world occasioned by a frozen news broadcast.</p>
<p>A pawn tries to get rid of a traitorous minister, Qin Hui, when he leads an army to the border for talks with a Jurchen mission.</p>
<p>The third and final part of Vincent Boy Kars’ ‘millennial trilogy’ proves to be a rich, multi-layered and playful construction. Kars (Drama Girl, 2020) takes centre stage as himself and as a character, to explore who he is and how he wants to develop.</p>
<p>Two queer people in Curaçao find a message in a bottle. How should they reply?</p>
<p>Jakub is the sole person on a barren island in newly Soviet Estonia, until the mute Maecenas arrives to keep him company. They wrestle with their visions and dreams of the past. An extraordinarily physical, even sensual piece of deeply contemplative cinema.</p>
<p>Clean home, clean skin, clean body: it all sounds great, just don’t scrub too hard!</p>
<p>Céline Dion sings praise of God’s implacable wrath in this mischievous media remix.</p>
<p>A stop-motion odyssey, following a character who travels through imaginary geographies. This mixture of animation and collages navigates between documentary and fiction. Meticulously tracing unseen imprints, it provocatively explores the complexities of representation.</p>
<p> </p> <p>This film serves as a lively and comprehensive tribute to a prominent figure in Swedish cinema, exploring reincarnations of well-known characters.</p>
<p>When a young man wakes up in a hospital in the coastal town of Sihanoukville, he tries to piece together the reason for his visit. Overwhelmed by his dreams, memories and the rapidly urbanising landscape of his birthplace, a conversation with a local nurse helps him to begin navigating this pivotal moment in his life.</p>
<p>Three seniors celebrate the birthday of their goldfish El Tigre, for the first time since the death of a beloved resident.</p>
<p>An emotive portrait of a multispecies matriarchal family composed using found footage from communist Poland.</p>
<p>A 1966 Japanese film that explores the realm of university politics and the competition for leadership within the medical department.</p>
<p>A Syrian family leaves the violence of their country behind, hoping to cross from Belarus into Poland and then onto the safe haven of Sweden. But, like so many lost souls, they end up caught in a political maelstrom, demonized by the Polish government and press and used as pawns in an inhumane, deadly border game. This harrowing, urgent drama from the veteran Polish director Agnieszka Holland (<em>Europa Europa; Spoor</em>, NYFF55) constructs an intricate account of the contemporary global humanitarian crisis, expanding out to encompass the interconnected lives of security patrol officers, activist lawyers, and civilians who put themselves on the line for strangers. With the sobering and sometimes shocking <em>Green Border,</em> Holland reaffirms both her unyielding commitment to political filmmaking and the ability of immersive storytelling to illuminate the darkest corners of the world.</p>
<p>An art student moves between Portugal and Brazil to find her true identity in a plot full of entanglement, fabulation and forgery. A film of loves lost and found, with high-speed dialogue and endless deceits, Greice gives a proud nod to Hollywood’s classic screwball comedies.</p>
<p>In an adaptation of a celebrated war novel, a grey zone of uneasy and uncertain calm becomes the setting. Within this space, caught between opposing fronts, two elderly individuals navigate their lives—one a beekeeper and the other his neighbor.</p>
<p>Who is the traitor in the kingdom of Mabunos? Would a royal subject dare poison the king? This gripping quest to the Sacred Cave in search of an antidote is a rare and joyful work of animation from Cameroon, featuring vibrant colours and exhilarating twists.</p>
<p> </p> <p>Touchingly blending the epic and the intimate, the film reveals the remarkable evolution of a guerrilla organization engaged in a decades-long struggle for land rights against the Colombian state. The narrative unfolds from a history of persecution and demonization to a transformative phase of disarmament and the acquisition of constitutional power.</p>
<p>In this witty sci-fi comedy, hideous bodysnatcher aliens attack a suburb of southern Rome. But the block is certainly not ready to give up. Funny and subtly political, La guerra del Tiburtino III avoids classic tropes to tell the timely story of a resilient community.</p>
<p>A playful, consciously simple animation about a sensitive subject: hair.</p>
<p>While Secretary General of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjöld made extraordinary progress in defusing global conflicts and combating colonialism – winning him many enemies.</p>
<p>After his fiancée Hicran leaves town, breaking off their arranged engagement without explanation, Riza becomes increasingly despondent and decides to travel to Istanbul to look for her, a woman he barely knows but whose image consumes his entire being.</p>
<p>A private schoolboy becomes desperately enamoured with all things post-punk in this spirited coming-of-age comedy with a sting in its tail. In this small town, try too hard to find your edge and you might get more than you bargained for.</p>
<p>Facing a prolonged winter of lockdown and struggling with writer's block, a filmmaker named Eric agrees to adopt a dog with his girlfriend Allie. As a modern, vegan, ethical, and neurotic couple, their thorough research leads them to Milly, a rescue from the Dominican Republic.</p>
<p>This outrageous comedy stages an epic soap opera. Corrupt real-estate baron Pepe Sánchez-Campo comes into conflict with local guerrillas, facing trial for Mexico's violent history. For once, bribes might not save Pepe – a character more grotesque than the telenovela unfolding around him.</p>
<p>Set in the homesteads of Granada, Historia de pastores finds a perfect mixture between the old and the new. A moving, humble and humorous film where a sincerely felt homage to rural tradition goes hand in hand with a taste for the supernatural and the fantastique.</p>
<p>Blackouts across Cuba set the stage for this eerie plunge into darkness.</p>
<p>A look back at the mid-aughts via one of the stars that defined the era.</p>
<p>Appropriating the aesthetics of 1990s legal thrillers and NC-17 potboilers, Jordan Strafer’s film serves up a dark, parafictional take on the courtroom drama, in which semi-fictionalized proceedings surrounding an actual sexual assault case mutate into a Grand Guignol of Americanness and white privilege. With its mise-en-scène of beige interiors and desaturated fashions, <em>LOOPHOLE </em>braids the theatrical with the procedural amid a hazy atmosphere of systemic corruption, media voyeurism, and entrenched power.</p>
<p>Does the luxury home of a celebrity artist couple hide a shocking truth? And can two working-class teenagers uncover this truth without getting killed? IFFR regular Amat Escalante changes his signature style in this gripping tale of power, politics and persuasion in contemporary Mexican society.</p>
<p>A heartrending portrait of a consciousness losing its connections to the past and the world.</p>
<p>Inspired by six real-life court cases in Hong Kong, Love Actually… Sucks! is a unique existential romance about love that has gone sour. A film whose candour and uncanny eye for singular imagery crackles with unexpected humour.</p>
<p>In a version of the world to come, Judith is pregnant for the sixth time, but her previous children were never born. Determined to protect this unborn child she goes against state protocol and escapes to a nameless city by the sea with her husband.</p>
<p>Old film reels from 1970s Rome become a wistful reimagining.</p>
<p>The social order of a small Malaysian village, governed by the severe religious authority of an Islamic scholar, is threatened when Hanie, a modern entrepreneur from the city, opens an upscale lingerie store. The eternal battle between tradition and modernity gets a sexy twist in La Luna.</p>
<p>Can anyone escape their past? Almaz has learned the hard way how to survive in a harsh contemporary world: from her time in servitude in the Eritrean army, she has made her way, as seemingly just one refugee among hundreds, to a centre in Calabria, Italy. But, in between, she was Madame Luna, a powerful, illegal operator who held the lives of many people in her hands. As she moves from isolation and solipsism to a new position of benevolent influence in a multicultural community, she discovers how difficult it is to erase the tragedy that haunts her nightmares – and how easy it is to slip into insidious, seductive networks of local criminality. Can Almaz manage to save others, yet alone herself?<br /> <br /> Driven by the extraordinary central performance of Meninet Abraha Teferi, <strong>Madame Luna</strong> marks the return of Swedish-Chilean director Daniel Espinosa to a type of social issue cinema reminiscent of the Dardenne brothers, after a decade of star-studded work in America. The narrative proceeds without flashbacks, gradually unfolding the complicated past. The filmic style emphasises immediacy, immersion, sensory overload – especially when we arrive at the decadent villas of those who oversee the generalised corruption of labour conditions and welfare services.</p> <p><em>– Adrian Martin</em></p>
<p>Mockumentary directed and written by Lilia Filina exploring the subject of magical rituals in the post-Soviet cultural space. The film method is based on the use of information from web resources, investigative journalism and Internet publications. Alchemy, occultism and magical rites become the object of the author's research, forming a semantic contradiction with the everyday image of casual life.</p>
<p>A girl at a beach develops a special relationship with the sea that gives her a magical stone. From now on, all her wishes will be granted – even the most valuable ones.</p>
<p>The Aromanians (Rrãmãnji) are an ethnic group found mainly in today’s Albania, Greece, Bulgaria and Romania. For filmmaker Alexandra Gulea, this question of heritage is connected to the name she shares with her grandmother, who was born into a traditional Aromanian life, and is fluent only in an Aromanian language. The older Alexandra's father suffered a violent death in an uprising for his people's rights, which forced the family out of Greece and into a politically treacherous Balkan landscape deep in the throes of nationalist upheavals, until finally, they found a home in Romania.</p> <p>Through early documentaries from the period, ethnographic objects and importantly, through her own imagination, Alexandra begins her journey back into her grandmother's world. <strong>Maia – Portrait with Hands</strong> delights with a mix of techniques which include proto-animation (the drawing of sheep on a meadow tacked against the side window of a car), puppetry (the play with the floating velvet dress) and simple reenactments, all lending her journey a desire for a lost simplicity, an earthiness. </p>
<p>“Double, double, toil and trouble,” indeed! Shakespeare’s punchiest tragedy gets a makeover in a way that only the prodigious Filipino multi-hyphenate Khavn De La Cruz could deliver. Unfolding in the Municipality of Marcos, Ilocos Norte and Khavn’s own Burroughsian Interzone of Mondomanila – also the title of the director’s crazed horror-comedy-crime drama, which premiered at IFFR 2012 – this mash-up of styles, genres, moods and atmospheres features a cast of over 100 performers and defies any easy description, even with so familiar a text. But as Khavn says of his source material, "Usually, word is king. Here, text is just one of the many cogs. It’s a column, a roof shingle, an ornament."<br /> <br /> This is a <em>Macbeth</em> for our chaotic, fragmented, attention-deficit times. Khavn’s thorough understanding of Shakespeare’s text is beyond question; it would be impossible to create a work of such irrepressible, fiery originality without it. But this is unlike any other adaptation; <strong>Makbetamaximus </strong>is both a striking work in its own right, and a continuation and expansion of its creator’s artistic statement, which to date includes over 50 features and 200 shorts, eight books of poetry, two short story collections, a novel and 40 albums.</p>
<p>Dreadful and gory killings create panic in the queer community: a semen thirsty killer is on the loose and nobody is safe. In this humorous and provocative gem, Ion de Sosa creates an alternative present in which the surreal takes the lead to narrate yet another threat that the LGBTQIA+ community needs to face. Savvily playing with genres from noir through to sci-fi, <strong>Mamántula</strong> explores cinematic queerness at its most compelling. </p> <p><em>– Rebecca De Pas</em></p>
<p>Pushing at the limits of non-fiction cinema, <strong>A Man Imagined</strong> is a bracingly intimate and hallucinatory portrait of a man with schizophrenia surviving amidst urban detritus and decay. Made in close collaboration with 67-year-old Lloyd, this immersive documentary fable follows the jagged path of a decades-long street survivor, across harsh winters and blistering summers, as he sells discarded items to motorists, sleeps in junkyards and lapses into near-psychedelic reveries.</p>
<p>As one of the most striking examples of human-caused climate catastrophe, the Sea of Aral is gradually running dry. Various hand-processing techniques overlay a time-lapse of this slow demise as the erosion and cracking of the emulsion mirrors that of the landscape. The soundtrack is inspired by the original score composed by John D. H. Greenwood for<strong> Man of Aran</strong> (Robert J. Flaherty, 1934).</p>
<p>Are even the best and brightest revolutionary movements doomed to inevitable compromise, betrayal and failure? That question haunts this documentary, a biography of Angolan-born Mário Pinto de Andrade (1928–1990), a key figure in African revolutionary and anti-colonial struggles.<br /> <br /> Told in a direct, informative style, combining present-day interviews, still photography and archival footage, <strong>Mário</strong> eschews excessive dramatisation and sentimentality. Legendary American filmmaker Billy Woodberry, a key figure in the L.A. Rebellion film movement of the 1970s and 1980s, brings a pan-African sensibility to the subject, matching de Andrade’s own. <strong>Mário</strong> returns us to a time when revolution was imagined internationally, not held hostage to nationalist ideologies.</p> <p>Beyond the rich history it recounts, <strong>Mário</strong> is notable as an interwoven portrait of other central players of the time, including Agostinho Neto, Amílcar Cabral and Mário’s brother, Joaquim, a Catholic priest. There are also interludes with fabled, politically committed filmmakers, like Andrade’s wife Sarah Maldoror (<strong><a href="https://iffr.com/en/expanded/2022/films/sambizanga" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Sambizanga</a></strong>, 1972, IFFR 2022) and Chris Marker. Don’t miss the final moment when Andrade, asked about the fate of revolutions, brilliantly proposes his theory, and flashes a smile so radiant it’s telling.</p>
<p>Forget <strong>Terminator</strong>’s T-1000. In this hard-boiled sci-fi anime, the robots aren't the real villains. Or are they?<br /> <br /> It's 2200, and private detective Aline is hired to track down a hacker, together with partner Carlos Rivera: an android ‘backup’ for her friend who died five years ago. Their investigation spans Earth and Mars, firefights and heists. At every turn the case peels back a new layer of intrigue, corruption and the human race's uneasy relationship with their robot co-habitants.<br /> <br /> This first feature from Jérémie Périn stands confidently among the heavyweights of science fiction, drawing equally from Philip K. Dick and anime classics. But while treading familiar ground from the canon, <strong>Mars Express</strong> is still full of surprises, twists and unforgettable quirks. It asks questions familiar to the genre, but with a freshness that suggests new answers. And those grand enquiries and its lightest touches are handled with equal elegance – thanks to rich, tactile worldbuilding that inspires both wonder and humour, charm and horror: from a mid-surgery software update to a shop display of spare, blinking eyeballs. It might take a second to tell 'augmented' humans from 'organic' robots, 'brain farmers' from 'jailbreakers', but who cares when it's this much fun?</p>
<p><strong>Martyrs of the Anthropocene </strong>by artist Timaeus (Tim van Hooft) questions the relationships between people and the natural world in the Anthropocene. A digitally rendered nature and the narrator regale a myth with novel heroes: lichen and trees. These protagonists are the non-human martyrs of our age, adorned as they are with minerals and crystals that are exploited as resources in a world dominated by humans.</p>
<p>A silent city symphony, projected from gorgeous black and white 16mm film. <strong>Materia vibrante</strong> lets the resonating frequencies of the urban environment create the inaudible hum that keeps the engines of society running, absent of the inhabitants running around like little ants toiling away.</p>
<p>Alicia Vikander is sublime as the last wife of King Henry VIII (Jude Law), risking a gruesome fate at the hands of her ailing husband, when she pursues her belief for a future England free of tyranny.</p>
<p>Lolo & Sosaku are two sound artists, from Argentina and Japan, who have been collaborating in Barcelona since 2004. With a combination of self-made instruments and cheeky contraptions, they create sound sculptures: machines and installations whose mechanical, repetitive noises can madden or enchant. They take the 'automatism' of art to new extremes.<br /> <br /> Director Sergio Caballero (whose debut feature, <strong><a href="https://iffr.com/en/iffr/2011/films/finisterrae" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Finisterrae</a></strong>, won the 2011 Tiger Award) turns the two artists into the atypical heroes of a surreal Western filled with gorgeous landscapes and absurdist humour. Attired in cowboy hats, the duo roams the desert in search of objects and tools – executing compulsive actions with them or arranging them in strange combinations. </p> <p><strong>'Lolo & Sosaku' The Western Archive</strong> offers a curious reinterpretation of the Western genre by mixing it with slow cinema and art documentary. From time to time, the action is interrupted, the landscape changes and we are presented with snippets of a sound installation in its usual exhibition spaces. This flow between the fiction and the artistic object invites us to see the film as a portrait of the artists’ mental landscape, or even as an allegory of their creative process.</p> <p><em>– Cristina Álvarez López</em></p> <p><em>Lolo and Sosaku will be at IFFR for their live performance <a href="https://iffr.com/en/iffr/2024/films/the-end" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><strong>The End</strong></a>, which serves as the climactic conclusion to the film.</em></p>
<p>In September 2020, the Indian government passed three acts, known colloquially as farm laws, that sought to reform the way farmers sold their produce to the market. This triggered a series of non-violent protests across the country, with farmers chiefly from Punjab and Haryana marching towards New Delhi demanding a repeal of the laws. Prevented from entering the capital, they set up camps along highways, forming a veritable community that sustained the protests for over a year.</p> <p>IFFR regular Gurvinder Singh returns to the festival with his first documentary feature <strong>"</strong><strong>Trolley Times"</strong>, an unvarnished grassroots record of the protests that borrows its title from the newspaper printed and distributed at the camping site. The farmers recount their grievances directly to the camera, their words conveying a truth absent from state-aligned mainstream media, their timeworn, dignified faces familiar from Singh’s fictional work.</p> <p>The film, however, accompanies the farmers even after the protests, observing family reunions, the resumption of agricultural work and peacetime domestic life with an unusual candour. Relentless and uncompromising, <strong>"</strong><strong>Trolley Times"</strong> demonstrates its courage not only in cataloguing the protestors’ ardent testimonies, but also in breaking free from established notions of what political documentaries should look like.</p> <p><em>– Srikanth Srinivasan</em></p>
<p>In 1972, the arrival of migrant workers led to riots in the Rotterdam neighbourhood of Afrikaanderwijk. An explosion of violence ensued, accompanied by a hailstorm of stones and Molotov cocktails.</p> <p>As the current generation recount testimonials, the events are reconstructed and imbued with present-day significance. This effect is amplified through the use of a split screen showing past and present at the same time. In (<strong>Re)membering the riots in Afrikaanderwijk in 1972</strong> <strong>or</strong> <strong>guest, host, ghos-ti</strong>, visual artist Cihad Caner explores the things we remember and the things we forget and how memories and perspectives are bound to time and place – different for each individual.</p> <p><em>– Christiaan Boesenach</em></p>
<p>The 1920s, Tianjin. Master Shen has passed on, bequeathing his martial arts academy to star apprentice Qi, instead of his own son An. Consigned to a dull if respectable bank job, An itches for a new duel with Qi to stake his claim. When Qi upsets the academy with his dubious plans for expansion, An sees an opportunity to recover lost territory. </p> <p>Directed by brothers Xu Haofeng and Xu Junfeng, <strong>100 Yards</strong> is a stylishly kinetic wushu film that vividly recreates the situation of martial artists at a particular historical juncture in Tianjin. Popular but not yet reputable, these men and women find themselves at the threshold of legitimacy, wedged between lawless street gangs and the French colonial society that administers the district. The film sharply dramatises their dilemma: expand or lay low?</p> <p>By turns an opulent period picture and a gripping gangster saga, the film is never short on pure martial-arts spectacle. Hand-to-hand combat, interspersed with passages of repose and romance, are elegantly choreographed in long shots, with clear lines of action, the gliding camera expanding and contracting the visual field at will.<strong> 100 Yards</strong> infuses classic action filmmaking with a contemporary verve.</p> <p><em>– Srikanth Srinivasan</em></p>
<p>Between the flicker of expired film and the fabric of her garments, slowly but surely, an image of Herman emerges. Photos from various stages of her life help to reconstruct her rich existence. She died at home in the summer of 2022, self-determined, surrounded by what made her happy. Artist Deborah S. Philips delivers a touching homage to her deceased mother that reflects on the inevitability of loss.</p> <p><em>– Loes van Keulen</em></p>
<p>Daily life unfolds in a gated community of Manila amidst birdsong, effigies of the Holy Family, lush greenery and the intricacies of class. Rafael Manuel, alongside co-director Tatjana Fanny, casts an intimate gaze on his own childhood home which oscillates between personal and political, offering a tender yet piercing view into social and familial structures in the Philippines.<br /> <br /> <em>– Leonie Woodfin</em></p>
<p>In 1980, Antoinetta Angelidi filmed the birth of her son Petros, as her daughter Rea looked on, cuddling up to her massive belly. It would then take some twenty-eight years for this quarter of an hour of footage to find its final shape and see the light.</p> <p><em>– Olaf Möller</em></p>
<p>Spurred by a video ransom note from a militant anti-bank outfit (“send 100 Bitcoins or see the city of Jakarta blown up”), the Indonesian bureau of counter-terrorism picks up Oscar and William, nerdy co-founders of the country’s largest cryptocurrency exchange. The two men are forced into cooperating with the bureau to trace the militants, but they soon find themselves caught up in an intricate cat-and-mouse game with a tech-savvy enemy.</p> <p>Loosely inspired by the biggest financial fraud in Indonesian history, Angga Dwimas Sasongko’s smart, taut action thriller <strong>13 Bombs </strong>revolves around the promises and treacheries of digital currencies. The narrative weaves together three points of view: those of the entrepreneurs, the bureau and the militants themselves, who come across not as dramatic abstractions, but full-fledged characters with rational, even humanist motivations.</p> <p>The film balances tense passages of cybernetic sleuthing with high-octane action sequences set in streets, factories and high-rise apartments, illustrating the interplay between intelligence and brute force in any security operation. Powered by an affable dynamic between Oscar, William and his girlfriend Agnes, <strong>13 Bombs </strong>offers a slick actioner that is entirely of its time.</p> <p><em>– Srikanth Srinivasan</em></p>
<p>A nuclear power plant worker obsessed with counting has set a maximum limit on how much electricity he wants to consume until the end of his life. In this grim but masterful 35mm film-poem with strong mathematical undercurrents, Marie-Magdalena Kochová presents to us a story of a man whose life is moving towards transformation. A loving acceptance of the fact that we are not just our bodies, but energy too.</p> <p><em>– Ivan Ramljak</em></p>
<p><strong>6000 mensonges</strong> comes to the spectator as lightning in a clear sky. What starts as a recollection of prenatal images we are used to seeing suddenly becomes a dive into an unknown territory, in which the border between reality and fiction is no longer relevant. The result is a striking, haunting and powerful testimony of a devastating experience that is lived by many in silence, told in the most contemporary possible way.<br /> <br /> <em>– Rebecca De Pas</em></p>
<p>After their father is conscripted during the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia, three sisters begin a Hi8 video diary in their countryside home. They film each other putting on make-up, picking cherries, playing party games, getting into fights and helping their mother cook. This fragile, intimate world is perhaps their only shelter from the reality of bombings, sirens and war.</p> <p>In her debut feature <strong>78 Days</strong>, Emilija Gašić fashions a touching coming-of-age tale throbbing with life. Set in the first half of 1999, when the NATO started attacking Serbia during the Kosovo war, Gašić’s film zeroes in on a particular time and place to chart the limits of the children’s carefree existence. The narrative adeptly interweaves the perspectives of the three sisters, each one at a different point on the road to adulthood, producing a composite picture of growing up during wartime.</p> <p>Not only does <strong>78 Days</strong> recreate the look, texture and poetics of home movies from the nineties with documentary accuracy, it is also attentive to the way cameras mediate the relationships between people. In observing the social dynamics of a domestic space with one shared camera, <strong>78 Days</strong> functions equally as an insightful work of technological ethnography. </p> <p><em>– Srikanth Srinivasan</em></p>
<p>Of the eight billion humans populating Earth, how can we conceive of ourselves as unique while simultaneously belonging to the grand and kaleidoscopic primordial soup? Meandering scenes, ranging from playful and natural to industrial and menacing, coalesce with a sound design by the legendary Spinvis to create this poetic and hypnotic virtual reality exploration of our place in the world.</p> <p><em>– Leonie Woodfin</em></p>
<p>Two girls are gazing at the shimmering Estonian lake that bears mysteries and perhaps even possesses a supernatural power to take or to save human lives. Soon those waters will bring a devastating disaster to their village. A calamity which will be followed by a chain of tragedies and adventures, all revolving around desire and love. </p> <p>Using the language of a poetic fairy tale, <strong>8 Views of Lake Biwa</strong> offers a free flowing, meditative journey through borders and cultural differences – an almost therapeutic experience of reverie and relief. Inspired by the traditions of Japanese episodic storytelling and its iconic imagery, Marko Raat combines them with the sensibility of Baltic cultures. Though reserved, his mystical film is centred on passions and eroticism of an extremely high voltage.</p> <p>In Raat's magical universe, you can cross a lake on the Russian-Estonian border and find yourself in faraway Japan. You can time travel and cross the lines between reality and fantasy without even noticing it. When everything is taken as part of the real, everything becomes one: life and death, men and nature, East and West. Distances disappear, while time meanders, bringing together the past, the present and the unknown. </p> <p><em>– Evgeny Gusyatinskiy</em></p>
<p>Three freshly restored avantgarde shorts by a director too little known. Three more by a director better known for other works. And three analogue treats by a director who never showed his films publicly. A cornucopia of wonders!</p>
<p>One of the few Chilean exile films made in the US, <strong>A los pueblos del mundo</strong> became one of the more widely distributed and seen shorts of this context. A record of the Pinochet dictatorship's mass crimes, with the murdered president's sister, Laura Allende Gossens and MIR activist – and future filmmaker – Carmen Castillo, as witnesses.</p> <p><em>– Olaf Möller</em></p>
<p>Miguel Littin looks back at the bloody beginnings of Chile's labour movement in the 1920s.</p> <p>The Marusia Massacre of 1925 was when president Arturo Alessandri ordered the army to slaughter hundreds of workers, ending the saltpetre miners strike. Littin turned this into a drama of groups: it's a film about miners, soldiers and capitalists acting in the interest of big business.</p> <p>The lone individual to stand out is Gregorio, a labour activist played by Gian Maria Volonté. This casting was an obvious point of reference for Littin, Volonté was a communist and the most famous face of Italy's popular political cinema. Another iconic name found among the crew is Mikis Theodorakis who wrote the music for the film – it evokes the Mexican Revolution-sound of Italian Westerns. </p> <p><strong>Actas de Marusia</strong> is a film made in the spirit of international solidarity for a world audience. It's a film about Chile then and now, and about all the other countries where the workers were and are, denied even the most basic rights. So be aware, dear cinephiles: this part of history is of the utmost importance for all of you – nitrate is made out of saltpetre.</p> <p><em>– Olaf Möller</em></p>
<p>Rome today: the Eternal City is surrounded by wildfires. In the centre, ravaged by corruption and violence, three old gangsters unite their last energies to save a boy that has failed the wrong person.<br /> <br /> Directed by the virtuoso hands of Stefano Sollima (<strong>Sicario: Day of the Soldado</strong>, 2018; <strong>Suburra</strong>, 2015 ), in a dry and merciless style, <strong>Adagio</strong> is a cinematic dive in the criminal heart of Italy. It portrays the end of one mafia era and the rise of a new, implacable one. Our protagonists are what is left of La Banda della Magliana, a historical (and real) criminal organisation that held Rome in its grasp for decades. The last survivors of the gang are close to an inglorious end. But they will not resist the call of the past, and slowly but surely they will revive their raging force. <br /> <br /> With an all-star cast, featuring Pierfrancesco Savino, Toni Servillo, Valerio Mastrandrea and a young and talented Adriano Giannini, <strong>Adagio </strong>narrates clashes between different generations of criminals. But foremostly <strong>Adagio</strong> is a snapshot of a hellish Rome, burning for its endless sins. A theatre of a human tragedy that seems doomed to repeat itself.</p> <p><em>– Rebecca De Pas</em></p>
<p>In 2002 Nagaland, eight-year-old Ade lives with his troubled, alcoholic father, a constable, and his mother, a rice beer seller. Ade and his friend, Abu, ditch Sunday school for a swim but are chased off. This detour unexpectedly introduces them to the complexities of adulthood. Shot on 16mm film. ADE(On A Sunday) will have it's World Premiere at the presitigious International Film Festival of Rotterdam(IFFR) in January 2024.</p>
<p>An audio tour from an exhibition about the Americas is put in contrast with digital interpretations of the Mars rover. The mythic vision of adventure and conquest enabled Europeans to regard the native inhabitants of the Americas as alien and inhuman and to treat their 'discovery' as a vast empty space for occupation and exploitation. Final frontiers: both new and old.</p> <p><em>– Cristina Kolozsváry-Kiss</em></p>
<p><strong>After the Long Rains</strong> is an exquisite coming-of-age story about Aisha (Electricer Kache Hamisi), a ten year-old girl who dreams of becoming an actress.</p> <p>In Watamu, a beautiful coastal town in Kenya, children are expected to follow in the footsteps of their parents, but Aisha wants something different for herself and dreams of moving to Europe to become an actress. Through her imaginative spirit and charm she convinces Hassan, a local fisherman, to teach her how to navigate the waters so she can one day, sail away to fulfil her dreams. Then a homework assignment sets her off on an adventure of self-discovery. In this intimate and formally freehand portrayal, we are introduced to the colourful and saturated world of Aisha, her beautiful family and a tight-knit community where neighbours, teachers and the local fisherman function as extended family members.<br /> <br /> <strong>After the Long Rains</strong> is the third feature film from Swiss-Kenyan director Damien Hauser, a cinematic Renaissance man and piano player who not only wrote and directed, but produced, edited and created the film’s sound design.<br /> <br /> <em>– Lyse Ishimwe Nsengiyumva</em></p>
<p>A Mondo Movie-minded film crew hired by West German TV is stalking some Cali slums. When they offer a homeless man some money for filming him, he gets angry, grabs the notes and wipes his butt with them. Could that really have happened? A poignant comment on poverty porn and scripted documentary.</p> <p><em>– Olaf Möller</em></p>
<p>In Guita Schyfter’s <strong>El águila y el gusano</strong>, an intricate plot serves to intersect the destinies of several characters: the owner of a beauty salon in love with “all things Chinese”, a politician with a taste for oration who couldn’t care less about the problems of his country, a political adviser whose counsel is never considered and a shady investigator with a name that nobody seems to recall. The script by Schyfter and Hugo Hiriart, her longtime collaborator and author of the 2013 novel on which the film is based, bristles with finely-crafted, hilarious dialogue.<br /> <br /> Several intrigues converge in<strong> El águila y el gusano</strong>: the whereabouts of a corpse, a secret hidden in the salon’s walls, the characters’ dubious pasts, art historical research and the purpose of modern art, several murders and disappearances… This eccentric satire – whose incidents are constantly refracted by radio and TV news – is never short on twists and grotesque revelations. With great performances and vigorous direction, <strong>El águila y el gusano</strong> turns the tragedy of our times into a source of diabolic entertainment and dark humour – offering us a surreal fresco of the miseries and ills of Mexican society. <br /> <br /> <em>– Cristina Álvarez López</em></p>
<p>In a world devastated by chemical warfare, with a dwindling human population that beckons the spectre of its extinction, a lone scientist plans to ensure a future. In seeking an antidote to the sterility that has blighted the last vestiges of the male human population, conservation biologist Tania, in tandem with Vida, an artificial intelligence system, has found a symbiotic relationship. The arrival of Azarias, a mysterious and troubled traveller, disrupts the solitary environment Tania has built. But as the two become more relaxed in each other’s presence, Vida feels her own relationship with Tania – and by turn her sense of belonging – is threatened.</p> <p>Writer, director and producer Leticia Tonos Paniagua’s strikingly beautiful fifth feature eschews effects-laden cinema in favour of a more intimate probe into the nature of human existence. The interplay between the three characters, ably performed by Sophie Gaëlle, Jalsen Santana and Paz Vega, as the voice of Vida, becomes a study of loneliness – particularly in our technology-driven, post-lockdown world where industrialised society has driven nature towards the precipice. The sci-fi genre has been considered rare in Caribbean cinema, making Paniagua’s intelligent film all the more precious.</p> <p><em>– Vanja Kaludjercic</em></p>
<p>A sensitive and insightful documentary on the art of sculptor Alberto Giacometti, realised by famous Swiss photographer Ernst Scheidegger and Peter Munger. The first version of the film, running at a length of an hour, was finished in 1965. The version here is an augmented re-edit made for Swiss public television some two decades later.</p> <p><em>– Olaf Möller</em></p>
<p><strong>Alguén me chamou Serpe Negra</strong> explores the tortuous path that memories and dreams take in our mind. Thanks to the texture of analogue hand-painted animation, the film is an invitation to an oneiric universe made of loose connections and revised spatial dimensions. Filmmaker Borja Santomé Rodríguez takes us with him on a journey made of images that play with love and adventure, childhood curiosities and adult desires, and in which the ultimate reward is to get lost.</p> <p><em>– Rebecca De Pas</em></p>
<p>Gladys Lou hurls home-made images of herself against a swift torrent of loading files, digital code and the general barrage of representational media imagery saturating daily life online. The features of faces and bodies merge and split apart, ceaselessly. Human identity is caught and fixed in normative binary categories, but the ‘glitch’ strategies of artists can struggle against the system, creating new notions of rhizomatic selfhood.</p> <p><em>– Adrian Martin</em></p>
<p>While dying from AIDS, Amos Guttman took the knowledge from the perspective one gains when life won't develop as expected, to think about what human existence really means. The beauty can be found in the everyday – unexpected twists and turns included. </p> <p><strong>Amazing Grace</strong> is the tale of two gay Israeli men and their families against the backdrop of the AIDS crisis. Jonathan is once again alone after leaving his older lover who enjoys playing around a bit too much. Thomas, the son of his neighbours, a loner, has returned from New York where he was trying to 'make it' as a musician, but instead picked up an all consuming addiction.</p> <p>Jonathan falls for Thomas and around them their families play out their separate but connected trials of ordinary life: Jonathan's family wonders what future awaits the young lad and Thomas' grandmother hates growing old. </p> <p>Thanks to Guttman's fabulous sense of colours and light, the ordinary, which can so easily turn drab and dour is, again and again, revealed as a sphere of wonder and forgiveness</p> <p><em>– Olaf Möller</em></p>
<p>The mission of the Manetti Bros. has always been to reinvent the Italian cinema genre. Among the few directors of their generation who are unashamed of making popular cinema, their way of understanding it is unique, not least because the strength of their cinema lies precisely in the mixing of genres.<br /> <br /> <strong>Ammore e malavita</strong> is probably the ultimate example of these poetics. A musical full of original and reinvented songs, yet retaining all the pace and rhythm of a crime thriller with the irony and sentiment of a romantic comedy. <strong>Ammore e malavit</strong><strong>a</strong> has it all. <br /> <br /> Ciro, a Neapolitan underworld gun for hire, is assigned to kill Fatima, a girl who "knew too much, by being at the wrong place at the wrong time." When the two come face to face, their adolescent love comes flashing back, one that never subsided, and from that point on, it’s them against the world. <br /> <br /> With <strong>Ammore e malavita</strong>, the Manetti Bros. return to the scene of the crime: the Naples that served as the backdrop for <strong>Song'e Napule</strong>. And with the same light-hearted spirit, they manage to make an extremely fresh, mature and surprising work.<br /> <br /> <em>– Manlio Gomarasca</em></p>
<p>Kafka is a fitness trainer, martial artist and delivery boy working multiple jobs to take care of his mother. His life has never been one where everything neatly falls into place: his father died by suicide when Kafka was young, and most recently, he broke up with his girlfriend. But perhaps meeting the charming young executive Daniel will be the lucky charm that turns the tables.<br /> <br /> Once more employing a cast of absurdly beautiful men in cleanly elegant spaces with a fierce, camp attitude, in <strong>Amphetamine</strong> Hong Kong artist provocateur Scud explores the possibilities of love between people who desperately need it, crave it, believe in it, but actually may not really be capable of it. Kafka and Daniel throw themselves into each other, in the hope of manifesting a love that will heal their wounds from lonesome pasts and free their doubtful minds. Instead, they risk becoming another more dangerous drug to one another. </p> <p>One of Scud's most affecting films, <strong>Amphetamine</strong> is inspired by a close friend who nearly lost his life, and is dedicated to people who find no reason to live other than the love they might find in others. But is this love a true love?</p> <p><em>– kijA</em></p>
<p>A group of animals are playing hide and seek on the savannah. Suddenly, Gerda's neck starts to grow like that of a giraffe. Everyone’s in shock as Gerda tries to adjust to her new body. There's no hiding for her now! And with her head in the clouds, she can’t see her friends any longer. It's the start of a new version of hide and seek.</p>
<p>The list of fantastic, mythical animals compiled by Carl Linnaeus in his seminal 18th century work <em>Systema Naturae</em> could well be the seed of Niles Atallah’s <strong>Animalia Paradoxa</strong> – an eccentric tale set in a post-apocalyptic world that follows a strange creature struggling to survive. Dressed in rags and a gas mask, moving like an alien dancer, Animalia roams through an abandoned building – crawling and stretching across concrete, plastic, waste. She laboriously carries and fills up an array of empty bottles to enjoy a modest bath. The camera eye lingers on her with compassion and explores the architectures of trash at an agonising pace. We know in our hearts that Animalia is a human-amphibian longing for the sea…<br /> <br /> After <strong><a href="https://iffr.com/en/iffr/2011/films/luc%C3%ADa" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Lucía</a> </strong>(2010) and <strong><a href="https://iffr.com/en/iffr/2017/films/rey" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Rey</a></strong> (Tiger Special Jury Award, 2017), Atallah returns to Rotterdam with a poignant fable that mixes the observational with the surreal. Amid Animalia’s daily ritual, vivid black-and-white images of seascapes and fish twinkle on the screen, as if coming from the films of Jean Painlevé or Jean Epstein… In <strong>Animalia Paradoxa</strong> the body becomes a site of experimentation: a meeting point for the avant-garde, animation and performance art.</p> <p><em>– Cristina Álvarez López</em></p>
<p>Ans Hoornweg died in 2022 at the age of 80. Hers was an extraordinary story. Extraordinary for others, that is, as contact with extraterrestrials was nothing special for Ans: she appeared on TV several times as a medium who could communicate with aliens.</p> <p>In <strong>Ans en het universum</strong>, for one last time, she recalls her out-of-body experiences and her visits to other planets. Ans also discusses her media appearances and how people would call her crazy, but still, Ans did not have one shred of doubt: aliens are everywhere and we’re slowly transitioning to an era where current gender norms are no longer applicable.<br /> <br /> Filmmakers Noëlle Ingeveldt and Juriaan van Berkel work together as Berkveldt to produce a sincere testimonial of a woman with a remarkable life story, filmed amongst the many dolls Ans made in the same likeness of her alien friends.</p> <p><em>– Christiaan Boesenach</em></p>
<p>The mythical cowherdess Radha and poet-saint Meera vie for the attention of their blue-skinned paramour-god Krishna. Singled out by the poet Jayadeva as Lord Krishna’s favourite inamorata in his twelfth century epic love poem <em>Gita Govinda</em>, Radha is often characterised by feelings of jealousy and heartbreak at Krishna’s eternal fickleness. Meera, on the other hand, was a sixteenth century poet-saint whose relationship to Krishna was one of constant devotion and unfulfilled yearning, sentiments immortalised in her poems that continue to be sung today as musical compositions.</p> <p>Anirban Dutta’s highly stylised musical performance piece <strong>Anubhuti</strong> sets these mythical and historical figures together in a love triangle with Krishna, charting Meera’s mental states and fluctuating sentimental fortunes: from a pining, distant admirer who can only access her beloved vicariously through Radha, to an amorous equal who shares Krishna’s affections with simplicity.</p> <p>An abstract <em>Gesamtkunstwerk</em>, Dutta’s film weaves together classical dance, eighteenth century miniature paintings based on the <em>Gita Govinda</em> and Meera’s poems rendered in a host of ragas, each exploring a certain mood of our lovestruck heroine. Instead of a linear narrative, <strong>Anubhuti</strong> unfurls as a series of theatrical tableaux featuring actors involved in studied gestural work, whose meaning may sometimes elude us, but whose sensual, singular quality is never in doubt.</p> <p><em>– Srikanth Srinivasan</em></p>
<p>Once again drawing from a very personal place, Scud’s eighth film <strong>Apostles</strong> does away with a certain kind of nostalgia. As in <a href="https://iffr.com/en/iffr/2024/films/voyage" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><strong>Voyage</strong></a><strong> </strong>(2012), <a href="https://iffr.com/en/iffr/2024/films/utopians" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><strong>Utopians</strong></a> (2016) and <a href="https://iffr.com/en/iffr/2024/films/thirty-years-of-adonis" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><strong>Thirty Years of Adonis</strong></a><strong> </strong>(2017), <strong>Apostles </strong>reaches into the deep and dark crevices of the human mind to reflect on the meaning and value of life by exploring death and what comes after. Claiming to be an apostle of Socrates and Plato, a scholar forms a cult-like circuit of twelve beautiful young men in a secluded estate to pursue this quandary.</p> <p>With a narrative organised more like a stream of fragmentary visual statements and thoughts, shuffling past, present and future, <strong>Apostles</strong> gnaws on religions, the concept of karma, ghosts and the afterlife – all of which also enter the game. Naked young men wander the estate, climb mountains, lose themselves in the woods, talk and participate in various rituals and mythic re-enactments that constitute a physical, emotional and sexual journey. In the end, the group must decide which apostle will get to experience death in the form of sacrifice. Herein the film steers true to its alternative title: ‘Platonic Death’, and to Scud's appetite for subversive, disturbing and still serenely beautiful films.</p> <p><em>– kijA</em></p>
<p>When Michael Radford's <strong>Il postino</strong> (1994) became a surprise world-wide hit, nobody seemed to remember that the story of Pablo Neruda and his postman had already been filmed merely a decade earlier. Nobody, other than Antonio Skármeta, <strong>Ardiente paciencia</strong> had been his fiction feature debut which he had then adapted into a novel.</p> <p><strong>Ardiente paciencia </strong>has a simpler, rougher look than Radford's polished and glitzy take on the story; also, it features no major stars, just actors who are perfect for their part. But maybe most importantly: Skármeta's story is set in '60s and '70s Chile while Radford moved it to Italy and back into the '50s. Obviously, this changes a lot: here, the nation's problems under Frei Montalva are a central part of the narrative, as important as postman Mario's love story. Now that the hype around <strong>Il postino</strong> is dust in the winds of film history, it feels like a high time to return to the source and to finally fully embrace this gem.</p> <p><em>– Olaf Möller</em></p>
<p>A free form film poem. Moving through inside and outside spaces Luisa Cividin unties a knot made with two curtains. Followed by Roberto Taroni smoking until he starts to turn around his axis, first in front of the window with the now re-tied curtains and then in slow motion seemingly in front of some stairs. A 70s enigma.</p> <p><em>– Olaf Möller</em></p>
<p>An alien lands on Earth but only speaks Chinese because, up there, they are convinced that since Chinese is the most widely spoken language on our planet, it must be the dominant culture. As Wang lands in Italy, the comical language mishap leads to him being held prisoner by secret services who are unable to communicate with him and who, for the occasion, hire a young interpreter who will find herself alone in deciphering the intentions of this extraterrestrial.<br /> <br /> Presented at the 2011 Venice Film Festival, where it was greeted with warm and unexpected success, <strong>L'arrivo di Wang</strong> represents for the Manetti Bros. the confirmation of their filmmaking philosophy: it's possible to make low-budget genre films if the idea is brilliant.<br /> <br /> Rooted in more than one brilliant intention, <strong>L'arrivo di Wang </strong>plays out in a continuous reversal of points of view. In the agitated confrontation between the newcomer and the translator, increasingly unexpected truths are uncovered, everything and everyone is doubted, along with a fear for the alien’s safety and the future of humanity. There is a lot of passion and love for the genre in <strong>L'arrivo di Wang</strong>,<strong> </strong> the film that made the Manetti Bros. popular on the fantasy festival circuit.</p> <p><em>– Manlio Gomarasca</em></p>
<p>Welcome to the gentle, colourful world of vocal sound. In this multiplayer VR experience, together with other participants you convert the concepts of communication and togetherness to timeless sounds, rhythms, vibrations and melodies. By each touching the floating forms and parts around you with your hands, you create a meaningful whole as an ensemble. In this journey of attentive listening, communication and creativity, you forge a connection together, without the need for language.</p> <p><em>– Loes van Keulen</em></p>
<p>Blending artificial intelligence with environmental exploration, <strong>Asunder</strong> is a three-channel video projection brought to life by artists Tega Brain, Julian Oliver and Bengt Sjölén.<br /> <br /> As contemporary discourse positions artificial intelligence as a potential universal problem-solving tool, <strong>Asunder</strong> takes up this challenge by responding to the surge in AI applications for pressing environmental issues. It morphs from a conceptual proposition into a tangible, fictional 'environmental manager', driven by cutting-edge climate and environmental simulation technology, a 144 CPU supercomputer and innovative machine learning image-making techniques.<br /> <br /> This AI entity generates ever-evolving environmental management plans. However, instead of placing humans at the centre, it shifts focus to a much broader balance encompassing natural resources, social justice, sustainable production and wildlife preservation. The result of weighing both human and non-human agendas often leads to absurd outcomes. As it relocates cities, merges nations, straightens coastlines and shifts rivers, the work oscillates between humour and preposterousness. <strong>Asunder</strong> playfully challenges neutral calculations, prompting a reevaluation of our technology-centric approach to global challenges.<br /> <br /> The work, connected to the internet throughout its exhibition, unveils an evolving triptych spanning diverse case studies – from the Arctic to the Brazilian rainforest, Silicon Valley, Dubai and Rotterdam. <strong>Asunder</strong> invites viewers on a thought-provoking journey, exploring the intersection of AI and environmental stewardship.</p> <p><strong>Asunder</strong> is curated in collaboration with V2_.</p> <p><em>– Vanja Kaludjercic</em></p>
<p>Antonio Skármeta's first directorial effort is about himself as an exile in Berlin living among exiles from other countries. At one point, we hear an excerpt from Pablo Neruda's poem <em>Exilio</em>: El destierro es redondo: / un círculo, un anillo: / le dan vuelta tus pies, cruzas la tierra, / no es tu tierra.</p> <p>– <em>Olaf Möller</em></p>
<p>One fascinating facet of late capitalism is that it can take in almost anything and sell it back to us for profit. Particularly in Europe and North America, this has seen the absorption of drag culture and its commodification as mildly irreverent, high-ratings entertainment. Its significant value in normalising gender fluidity notwithstanding, that version of drag loses its inherent radicality, as a repudiation of the very foundations of oppressive social structures.<br /> <br /> <strong>Avant-Drag! </strong>paints portraits of ten drag artists of varying gender expressions and sexualities who take to the streets of Athens to query, problematise and (yes, please!) undermine social strictures. Employing wildly imagined personas – like riot housewives and Albanian turbo-folk girls – who perform acts as revolutionary as praising abortion and as charming as drawing childish pictures, these artists call for social justice by taking aim at conservatism, patriarchy, patriotism, racism and sexism.</p> <p>A line from the film’s exquisite punk-poetic narration describes this impulse perfectly: it’s “a demand to change the world that comes from the past, looking straight into the future.” And, lest you be concerned, have no fear that there is no shortage of gloriously outlandish outfits and towering high-heeled boots. This <em>is</em> drag, after all.<br /> <br /> <em>– Nicholas Davies</em></p>
<p>In <strong>Avant il n'y avait rien</strong>, Yvann Yagchi finds a possible, poetically fitting way to address the longstanding conflict between Israel and Palestine. Made before the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war, the film concentrates on a close friendship forged in childhood. The Palestinian filmmaker and his Israeli counterpart grew up together in Switzerland and each eventually explored their respective national and cultural pasts and identities. The best friend embraced Zionism and moved to the West Bank to live in a Palestinian Occupied Territory. Yagchi, troubled but curious, decided to make a documentary with his friend there – an opportunity to discuss, compare and argue, but in a hopefully peaceable way.<br /> <br /> But the friend soon called a halt to the project, withdrawing his collaboration. He exists in the film now only as a trace, with his face erased. Yagchi refashioned his film as an impassioned, sometimes furious letter to this absent interlocutor. In cinematic terms, the letter takes the form of a peripatetic essay, including an investigation of his own family legacy – in particular, the existence of a magnificent collection of books now falsely catalogued as "Abandoned Property" in the National Library of Israel.</p> <p>Blending live footage, animation and voice-over, the film offers a moving testament to friendship.<br /> <br /> <em>– Adrian Martin</em></p>
<p>The white teenager Roy regularly shows up at the doorstep of Pandora, a middle-aged Black transgender woman, in an attempt to convince her of how much he’s in love with her. She wants to stay out of trouble, and is reluctant because of past experiences with men that weren’t willing to commit. An interaction that transcends itself in a subtle yet poignant way, in which thoughts not uttered live in the smallest gesture or the exchange of a glance.</p> <p><em>– Loes van Keulen</em></p>
<p>A writer, teacher, feminist activist, pioneer of Afro-Surrealism and key member of the Négritude movement, Martinique-born Suzanne Césaire was a trailblazer who deserves greater attention and credit than she has ever received. Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s fascination with her subject is seen in the research that went into the making of this film – including hours of audio interviews with Césaire’s living children and family. But this is no mere biopic. Instead, Césaire’s life is presented through an investigation by a group of filmmakers keen to grapple with the writer’s life and legacy. Shifting between present and past, blurring the lines between the imagined and the biographical, the film homes in on Zita Hanrot's character, an actress and new mother haunted by voices as she prepares to play Césaire.</p> <p>Hunt-Ehrlich, an artist and filmmaker renowned for delving into the inner worlds of Black women, delivers an absorbing exploration of a figure side-lined, if not completely erased, by history. <strong>The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire</strong> profits from Hunt-Ehrlich’s fragmentary approach, acknowledging that the complexity of her character demands more than conventional hagiography. Noting how her husband Aimé’s success in the political sphere eclipsed her achievements, the film aims to reassert her place as a radical voice and visionary.</p> <p><em>– Vanja Kaludjercic</em></p>
<p>Ramata-Toulaye Sy’s debut feature <strong>Banel & Adama</strong> showcases the mythic love between the eponymous couple in a remote Senegalese village, but it is the conjunction in the title that is at the heart of this scorching romantic drama. “Without Adama, you’re nothing”, quips Banel’s twin brother, upset at his sister’s fanatic attachment to her new husband.</p> <p>Adama, for his part, has turned down his hereditary right to be the village chief, content instead to live in marital bliss with Banel. Together, they work at unearthing a house buried in sand outside the village, hoping to carve out a private niche away from this community where everything unfolds in public spaces. However this spirit of independence won’t be easily tolerated, and the village is soon visited upon by a deadly drought, severely straining the bond between the lovers.</p> <p>As Banel, Khady Mane traverses the terrains of infatuation, determination, obsession and guilt with conviction and an almost evangelical fervour. Her emotional capacities grow as the film itself expands from a gentle ode to teenage romance to an operatic saga of divine tribulations. Through her persistence, <strong>Banel & Adama </strong>unveils a star-crossed love story of Biblical proportions.</p> <p><em>– Srikanth Srinivasan</em></p>
<p>2024 is the tenth anniversary of the police shooting of student protesters in Iguala, Mexico. Aldo Gutiérrez Solano, then just nineteen years old, was shot in his temple by an officer and has remained in a coma ever since. <strong>Batalla</strong> is a tribute to bodies in resistance to power and corruption.</p> <p><em>– Cristina Kolozsváry-Kiss</em></p>
<p>Part 1 of a documentary trilogy on the events in Chile between 1972 and September 1973. One of the last black-and-white documentaries made in Chile, it chronicles the violent counter revolution against the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende.</p> <p>An excerpt from a letter from Chilean director Patricio Guzmán to Chris Marker (<strong><a href="https://iffr.com/en/iffr/2019/films/stopover-in-dubai" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Stopover in Dubai</a></strong>, IFFR 2019) explaining the film that would become <strong>The Battle Of Chile (Part 1): The Insurrection of the Bourgeoisie</strong>:</p> <p>“Our political situation is confusing; the country feels as if it was headed for a civil war situation, which makes us all nervous and tense… The class struggle is evident everywhere... We have to make a movie of all this!... A cinematic mural composed of many chapters whose protagonists are, on the one hand, the people and their leaders, and on the other hand, the oligarchy, its leaders and their connections to the Washington government. An analytical film. A film for the masses and for individuals. A fast-paced film made from daily events, whose final duration is unpredictable... A free-form film, using reportage, essay, still photography, the dramatic structure of fiction, the sequence shot according to the circumstances, as reality proposes…”</p> <p><em>– Olaf Möller</em></p>
<p>Based on research and interviews with both Palestinian hunger strikers and asylum seekers, this absurdist yet realist film stages a dialogue between the director in her mother tongue that centres on a single question: what do we know about hunger?</p> <p>This film is a poetic and musical tribute to those who suffered the aftermath of famine and migration, and to Palestinian hunger strikers whose resistance outlives the deafening silence of the colonial world. Filmmaker Diana Al-Halabi won the RTM Pitch Prize at IFFR 2023, which allowed her to realise this film.</p>
<p>When 36-year-old Amaru (one of the directors of the film) was diagnosed with a terminal brain tumour, he and his partner (co-director Mila Araoz) embarked on a trip from the UK to Bolivia. Together they created an intervention of love and play that would help him and his family face the far greater journey that lay ahead of him.<br /> <br /> <em>– Cristina Kolozsváry-Kiss</em></p>
<p>Three brothers travel to Istanbul to undergo a hair transplant. Upon arrival, they hear the clinic can only accommodate one of them. As the tension between them rises, the group dynamics reveal their different personalities, along with their insecurities – which only seem to grow with age. A stop-motion film with a healthy dose of humour and a great deal of attention to detail.</p> <p><em>– Koen de Rooij</em></p>
<p>Kai Oka's magnum opus – and only sound film – takes its key cue from Italo Svevo's 1923 axiom of modern(ist) literature,<em> La coscienza di Zeno</em>. One is taken on a very elliptical journey through Zeno's life demonstrating that “...film is a comprehensive art form which can express the stream of consciousness in real time” – Kai Oka.</p> <p><em>– Olaf Möller</em></p>
<p><strong>Being Strong Is Hard</strong> comprises a barrage of images of Kurdish activists, journalists and fighters – mostly women – facing the camera, often smiling. Scored to rapid electronic music, this visual onslaught echoes the sensory overload of contemporary media. While the similarity of portraits, whose low resolution raises its own political questions, encourages instant parsing, the sight of young women in uniform slows down our perception, inviting us to interrogate the meaning of these smiles and poses.</p> <p><em>– Srikanth Srinivasan</em></p>
<p>During the COVID-19 pandemic, photographer and filmmaker Carel van Hees (<strong><a href="https://iffr.com/en/iffr/2008/films/2km2-het-heden-van-de-stad" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">2KM2 - het heden van de stad</a></strong>, IFFR 2006) is forced to turn his apartment in Rotterdam's RVS flats into his own little world. The apartment, originally built as a home for working single women, is also known as the <em>Hunkerbunker</em> (the bunker of yearning), now its residents' lives are confined to their units. On the tenth floor van Hees meets Gerarda van Nimwegen, a 106-year-old woman who hasn’t left her apartment for the past five years. During her long life she has survived many crises, including the Spanish flu, the poverty of the interbellum and the bombing of Rotterdam – all this without losing her sense of humour. <strong>Berichten uit de Hunkerbunker</strong> is a loving tribute to a remarkable resident whose life has come to a halt in the apartment she’s lived in since the age of 44.</p> <p><em>– Christiaan Boesenach</em></p>
<p>Guido Coppis’ debut feature <strong>Bijt</strong> has lost all colour, except for the sombre orange hues that imbue the film. Dark clouds seem to gather on the soundtrack as well – as if roaring thunder is about to break out. Is there even a shimmer of hope?</p> <p>Reinout Scholten van Aschat is Mark, a young man whose life seems an utter failure. He is socially inept – to put it mildly, brimming with repressed feelings and a sense of self-hatred close to boiling point. The dismal bleakness of his living environment offers no reprieve. Everything seems intent on pushing him into the abyss. Even when he plays the trumpet, it sounds depressing. But then, at his grandfather’s deathbed, Mark meets Lisa (Frieda Barnhard). She’s almost as destructive as he is. Will love bring solace after all?<br /> <br /> It's genuinely hard to imagine that <strong>Bijt</strong> is Guido Coppis’ (b. 1998) first feature outing. The film is a quiet stylistic exercise with an extremely dark sense of humour and seems to place itself just beyond the framework of our reality. <br /> <br /> <em>– Christiaan Boesenach</em></p>
<p>David-Jan Bronsgeest’s <strong>Binary</strong> presents a captivating, culturally unique work of body horror. Nisha, a trans woman from Pakistan working as a dancer in the Netherlands, is conflicted about proceeding with gender-affirming surgery. Every time she embraces her identity, she is subjected to strange attacks and visions. Chaos ensues when her inner demons decide to take on the demons outside.</p> <p>Propelled by a dignified and sensitive performance by Inaya Zarakhel, the film examines Nisha’s experience as a double outsider: as a South-Asian trans woman with a strained relationship with her family and as a blue-collar migrant at the mercy of exploitative employers. With striking use of space, colour and décor, <strong>Binary</strong> tells a richly textured tale about the struggle for acceptance, from the world and from oneself.</p> <p><em>– Srikanth Srinivasan</em></p>
<p>“Respect for the vanquished”, remarks Steve, “is what separates man from beast.” As a champion in Swiss-style wrestling, Steve knows a thing or two about observing codes of combat. But when his family farm faces repossession, he is forced to join hands with his ex-convict brother Joel and enter the lucrative, clandestine world of no-rules fighting. </p> <p>Pierre Monnard’s smouldering sports drama <strong>Bisons</strong> charts Steve’s Dantesque descent from the gentlemanly milieu of professional wrestling into a murky universe of bare-knuckle brawls and rage-in-a-cage tournaments. Through kinetically filmed fight sequences and quieter moments of thoughtful dignity, we observe Steve’s struggle to maintain his conscience and sense of fair play, even when his environment is intent on bringing out the beast within. </p> <p>However the film’s emphasis is equally on the sibling dynamic, a relationship deeply shaped by the brothers’ complicated relationship to their parents. Monnard observes the tension and camaraderie between the men with a precise eye for gesture and ritual. Alternating warmly rustic interiors and operatic, snow-covered vistas, <strong>Bisons</strong> delivers a richly-textured family saga that fuses classical dramaturgy with a profound feeling for a particular place and culture.</p> <p><em>– Srikanth Srinivasan</em> </p>
<p><strong>Black Rain</strong>, by British artist duo Semiconductor, is based on images from the NASA’s STEREO mission (2006–2008), satellites launched to observe a host of solar and interplanetary phenomena. Spectacular light patterns intersect with flares, bands and video glitches, reminding us of a mediating perspective. Refusing contextual information or spatial and temporal scales, the film casts us adrift in the cosmos, compelling us to share its awe at the mysteries of the universe.</p> <p><em>– Srikanth Srinivasan</em></p>
<p>Blackberries are often the last berry to bloom in the summer season.<br /> <br /> Based on feminist writer Tamta Melashvili’s celebrated novel, this subtle gem follows tenacious Etero, a 48-year-old woman who lives humbly in a provincial village in Georgia. Spending her days selling household goods to the local women, dreaming of a peaceful retirement and crafting jam from blackberries foraged by the river, Etero appears content and protective of her independent way of life – despite the gossip and judgement from fellow villagers. Until, unpredictably, Etero finds romance with a local deliveryman, leading to a passionate sexual awakening and signalling the long-forgotten possibility of a different life.<br /> <br /> Georgian filmmaker Elene Naveriani returns to IFFR with their third feature, <strong>Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry</strong>, supported by the festival’s Hubert Bals Fund for ground-breaking projects. Radical in its restraint and humane in its complexity, this portrait of an older woman’s place in her circle of society excels in probing the delicate nuances of tradition and modernity in present-day Georgia. Featuring an engrossing lead performance from Eka Chavleishvili and a patient sensitivity to its subject matter, Naveriani’s film sheds essential light on a strong and beautiful life that is often left invisible.</p> <p><em>– Sophie Tupholme</em></p>
<p>Returning to his hometown after years of absence, the unexpected arrival of painter Charley (Alex Hurt, son of William Hurt) upsets the state of things by turning into a werewolf during a full moon. And from then, it's not long until the bodies begin to pile up.</p> <p>As recent successful genre offerings such as <strong>Werewolves Within</strong> (Josh Ruben, 2021) and <strong>The Cursed</strong> (Sean Ellis, 2021) prove, the werewolf genre is alive and kicking. In this modern-day variation, indie horror icon Larry Fessenden (<strong><a href="https://iffr.com/en/iffr/1990/films/hollow-venus" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Hollow Venus</a></strong>, IFFR 1990; <strong><a href="https://iffr.com/en/iffr/2002/films/wendigo" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Wendigo</a></strong>, IFFR 2002; <strong><a href="https://iffr.com/en/iffr/2007/films/the-last-winter" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">The Last Winter</a></strong>, IFFR 2007) brings his very own mumblecore sensibility to the subject. <strong>Blackout</strong> is a clever exploration of small-town politics and family melodrama, offering keen observations on group dynamics without becoming didactic.</p> <p>In the midst of the recent trend for art films masquerading as genre pieces, countless remakes, reboots and sequels of the meta-meta variety, <strong>Blackout </strong>comes like a breath of fresh air. While being a leisurely-paced matter-of-fact affair, the film finds time for stylistic flourishes such as Charley’s own transformational encounter with a werewolf which is presented as a charming animated sequence in the style of oil paintings. Most importantly, Fessenden knows, respects and visibly loves his material and its conventions.</p> <p><em>– Stefan Borsos</em></p>
<p>In computer animation <strong>Blèh</strong>, we watch through the eyes of an imaginative toddler how smartphone users turn into zombies.</p>
<p><strong>Blossom</strong> is a colourful tribute to the tiniest beings around us. Without these hard-working creatures, our world wouldn't be the same. Every single one contributes, so let's be thankful for the small blessings!</p>
<p>One day, Dai Miyamoto picked up a saxophone and with it, made a resolution to be remembered as one of the greatest players of all time. He leaves his sleepy hometown for the bustling nightclubs of Tokyo, but the journey to becoming a professional musician is not an easy one. After many struggles, his enthusiasm wins over pianist Yukinori and convinces his friend Shunji to learn the drums. Together, they form a jazz trio, JASS, and with fresh, untamed, raw energy they aim for stars, living for the moment, just like blue giants, the brightest and hottest stars.<br /> <br /> Adapted from Shinichi Ishizuka’s award-winning manga of the same name, <strong>Blue Giant</strong> by Tachikawa Yuzuru is a spirited, delightfully chaotic, intimate story of self-discovery, friendship and passion expressed by jazz music. A breath-taking visual and musical ride that borrows from anime and uses a blend of animation techniques. Earnest, undistracted and exquisite, <strong>Blue Giant </strong>resonates like a perfectly improvised note.</p> <p><em>– kijA</em></p>
<p>Close ups of leaves and flowers, rapid jumps from motive to motive, the beauty of slight haziness and the light dancing to its own tune. In the words of Kai Oka: “This was done on a trip to visit my sister in the countryside. Inspired by Brakhage, I let the camera roam around freely.”</p> <p><em>– Olaf Möller</em></p>
<p>In the wake of a sexual assault, young actress Noel goes to Blue Imagine, a refuge for people who have experienced violence. With the help of her fellow residents, she is able to reclaim some of her confidence, and decides to confront her abuser.</p> <p>In her directorial debut, actress Matsubayashi Urara takes bold and considered aim at the permeating sexual violence of the Japanese film industry. <strong>Blue Imagine</strong> skilfully addresses some of the many mental and emotional nuances of the aftermath of abuse while employing a peculiar mixture of subtle, slightly dark humour. Matsubayashi is neither exploitative, nor trivial in her approach, and is ever cautious not to fall for the pitfalls of an easy ‘girl power’ narrative seen in many cinematic studies into the subject. </p> <p>With its eye fixed on support networks rather than vengeance, <strong>Blue Imagine</strong> offers an urgent and gutsy exploration, encouraging venues of kindness and camaraderie through subtle acts of re-appropriation – a gesture much needed these days, in the arena of film as everywhere.</p> <p><em>– kijA</em></p>
<p>Gevano and Pelle were best friends when they were boys, but then they lost track of one another, years later, they finally meet again in prison. While initially it's a happy reunion fondly sharing joyful childhood memories, we slowly learn why they lost touch. Lasse Jonas Rogie’s <strong>Blue Rock</strong> is a small drama with big emotions that touch on identity and stereotypes on the streets of Rotterdam.<br /> <br /> <em>– Christiaan Boesenach</em></p>
<p>The horny ghost of a young man traverses the globe, stalking and debating with his past lovers.<br /> <br /> Scud is interested in the overlap between tradition and modernity, and the ways of spirituality vis-à-vis technology. He uses clips from his previous works, mainly <a href="https://iffr.com/en/iffr/2024/films/thirty-years-of-adonis" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><strong>Thirty Years of Adonis</strong></a> (2017), to blur the ever-so-fragile line between documentary and fiction, the actors and their roles. The characters, ghostly and living alike, carry their stories and in them, we hear powerful statements about the lingering effects of personal, social and political trauma. <br /> <br /> <strong>Bodyshop</strong> is a work of subversion that takes scenes of uninhibited sex and musical interludes as its tools to dare us to think the unthinkable. It doesn’t shy away from suicide, violence or love expressed cannibalistically, calling out issues from the spheres of intimate relations to politics at large. Scud conjures a type of cinema that intermingles Pier Paolo Pasolini, Peter Greenaway and John Waters.</p> <p>On the one hand, <strong>Bodyshop</strong> is defiantly offhand and proudly camp at its narrative core. On the other, the film is as slick as a TV commercial, thanks to an unmistakably digital sheen and a syrupy soundtrack.</p> <p><em>– Adrian Martin and kijA</em></p>
<p>In the two decades between the First and Second World War, Maurice Ravel was feted as France’s greatest living composer. Like Debussy, he was aligned with the Impressionists – a term they both loathed. His work also melded modernism, baroque and neoclassicism, with later compositions also embracing jazz. For all his range, Ravel is best-known for his 1928 composition <em>Boléro</em>, whose conception lies at the heart of Anne Fontaine’s elegant film. It weaves Ravel’s working process and life through his encounters with three women: the Russian dancer Ida Rubinstein, whose commission led to the music’s creation; his patron Misia Sert, and his pianist friend Marguerite Long. The past bleeds into the present through restrained flashbacks, which add depth to this consummate portrait of a skilled, sensitive artist.<br /> <br /> Fontaine is no stranger to the biopic, her <strong>Coco avant Chanel </strong>(2009) was a colourful portrait of the fashion designer and iconoclast. Based on acclaimed French musicologist and journalist Marcel Marnat’s admired 1986 monograph <em>Maurice Ravel</em>, Fontaine’s drama captures the composer’s life with passion, intelligence and wit, and is aided in no small part by Raphaël Personnaz as Ravel, with excellent support from Jeanne Balibar, Doria Tillier and Emmanuelle Devos.</p> <p>– <em>Ian Haydn Smith</em></p>
<p>Bonnarien is Mauricette’s surname, it means ‘no good’ in English and she’s determined to change it. A slam poet during her free time, Mauricette understands the potential words possess to inflict great harm. She decides to use her craft to free herself from a colonial name that was imposed onto her ancestors and in doing so, heal long-standing generational trauma. Set in French Guiana, <strong>Bonnarien</strong> is Adiel Goliot’s first fiction short. With a stellar cast and performance, Goliot’s tender film finds power in reclamation.<br /> <br /> <em>– Lyse Ishimwe Nsengiyumva</em></p>
<p>A bamboo forest becomes a city with bustling streets that then smoothly transform into photographs: never really in focus, ever more fragmentary and blurred. <strong>Born in Gunsan and after seven years, I was repatriated to Japan…</strong> begins as a formidable exercise in <em>fūkei-ron</em>, only to turn into a meditation on what remains of the past, with worlds, eras and personal views colliding.<br /> <br /> Akio Kambayashi was born in 1938 in Gunsan, Korea, during the Japanese occupation, and following Japan's defeat in the war in October 1945 he was repatriated to Japan. It is with surprising ease that <strong>Born in Gunsan</strong> lets you enter the incredibly detailed layers of Kambayashi’s memory and his accounts of his hometown. </p> <p>His memories become a fascinating reflection of events, from personal anecdotes to information entered into world history books. What does it really mean to be Zainichi Korean? What impact has this minority had on the history and politics of Japan and Japanese occupation in Manchuria, Taiwan or Korea? What is the story of the colonisation of Asia that surpasses the version told in history books? Gripping and contemplative, <strong>Born in Gunsan</strong> is a monumental essay whose grandeur can only be fully realised by experiencing it.</p> <p><em>– kijA</em></p>
<p>Ting is on the brink of marriage, but still wounded by her father’s departure twenty years earlier. Setting out in search of him and for a sense of resolution, she travels from Guangzhou to Hong Kong, moving through late-night fruit markets and piers soaked in blue light, as an impending summer typhoon grows near. Meeting a childhood friend and reconnecting over a bootleg CD, Ting delves into her family’s secrets and the emotional turmoil still sharply rooted in her life.<br /> <br /> An exquisitely rendered first feature from filmmaker Choy Ji, executive produced by renowned director Stanley Kwan, this delicate drama uniquely regards Hong Kong from the point of view of China’s mainland, remarking on the region’s deeply influential but intrinsically separated status – a compelling distinction that allowed for dual lives and the maturation of secrets.</p> <p>Featuring mesmerising cinematography – a sensitivity to light, shadow and warmth akin to impressionist painting – and imbued with evocative sensorial moments – the texture of peeled fresh lychees, the monumental sounds of typhoon rain – <strong>Borrowed Time</strong> asks what it means to have another life apart from your own, to suspend time and slip into a second skin.<br /> <br /> <em>– Sophie Tupholme</em></p>
<p>Two COVID-testing employees make out in hazmat suits. A blindfolded student sits on her bed, rhythmically reciting lines from the national security handbook. Evocative scenes, rich in symbolism, are strung together to form this striking, wry portrait of Hong Kong’s current socio-political climate. Arnold Tam commits to a daring visual style and doesn’t shy away from dashes of absurdity to get his message across.</p> <p><em>– Loes van Keulen</em></p>
<p>After <a href="https://iffr.com/en/iffr/2020/films/a-bright-summer-diary" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><strong>A Bright Summer Diary</strong></a> (IFFR 2020) and <a href="https://iffr.com/en/expanded/2022/films/ningdu" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><strong>Ningdu</strong></a> (IFFR 2022) we once again welcome Lei Lei to Rotterdam with this compelling tribute to bygone images and memories. As always, the mundane comes alive through a conscientious montage of gorgeous compositions. A two-part quest for what has been lost through time, <strong>Break no.1 & Break no.2</strong> fires the imagination.</p> <p><em>– Loes van Keulen</em></p>
<p>The story of a son who is secretly in love and a lonely, hard-working father. Each leads his own life – until one sultry summer day, their courses collide with a shock. Margarita Bagdasaryan’s directorial debut is a moving portrait of life: while at times harsh, it offers more affection than we might think.</p> <p><em>– Loes van Keulen</em></p>
<p>Monochrome images of the filmmaker’s ailing dog Caballito on the last day of his life, resting, drinking water and walking in the streets. Edited exactly one year later, this tender film, shot on Super-8, enacts a ritual of artistic mourning, but it is also a celebration of life. Where <strong><a href="https://iffr.com/en/iffr/2002/films/sirius-remembered" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Sirus Remembered</a></strong> (IFFR 2002) stoically observes the decomposing body of Stan Brakhage’s deceased dog, Claremi’s film embalms Caballito’s final moments of vitality for eternity.</p> <p><em>– Srikanth Srinivasan</em></p>
<p>Doing the America thing: riding around in a car, looking out at the landscape (desert, trees and bushes, cities), observing the driver, enjoying the ride as a pure, almost primeval cinematic act. All bookended by phantom rides through the bright lights of Las Vegas.</p> <p><em>– Olaf Möller</em></p>
<p>A fluffy white cat wants nothing more than to find the most comfortable place in the universe, but little does she know that someone else has her eye on it too.</p>
<p>A hypnotic hum sounds as black and white footage shows a group of women filling bags with dried vegetables, making and vacuum packing sandwiches and weaving camouflage nets. This is not just a chat, this meeting appears to serve a higher purpose: we look at the unseen practices of wartime Ukraine. <strong>Centre for Creativity </strong>offers a hopeful perspective and shows the daily work of survival, solidarity and creativity.</p> <p><em>– Christiaan Boesenach</em></p>
<p>For the first time in its history, Finland became an autonomous state when it broke away from a crumbling Russian empire in 1917. Witnessing the upheaval of the First World War and all too aware of the threat posed both outside and within its borders, the newly installed government initiated harsh and draconian policies for its younger generation. All children and youths were drilled in the importance of discipline, rectitude and nationalism. With no exceptions.</p>
<p>The film portrays a metaphorical renovation of the burned-down church of his past in and with cinema. As tools, he merely has his computer and files of his own films, as well as masses of faces long gone and places razed from memory. One drifts deliciously through a super-edit of his own oeuvre, removed from established modes of this type of filmmaking and instead functioning in an intimate and poignant expression, where fleeting gestures can unleash avalanches of unexpected memories.</p>
<p>Sexuality, suppressed emotion and urban alienation occupy the minds of the Hong Kong baseball team, searching for their place in a city where baseball culture is non-existent. Who are these invisible players if no one is cheering them on? Stripping bare the cast of real athletes, the movie is a postmodern youth drama and a sports film, that plays cheekily with each genre’s iconographies. The handsome and charismatic protagonists play alongside camaraderie, crushes, love, competition and homoeroticism that seep beyond the locker room in a strikingly bare manner that marks a new approach to queer films in Hong Kong.</p>
<p>Is the black mass at the heart of The Clearing gradually filling the frame of this enigmatic short film with meaning? Or is it a growing, but still empty void, clearing out the picture and rendering the film an all-encompassing nothingness? Turning charcoal drawings into digitally processed imagery, the director creates what he describes as an “indefinable space.” Assisted by the co-director stretched-out abstract music, The Clearing becomes a haunting reflection on how space and time fold into each other.</p>
<p>Cloud Migration presents a body of work by the talented South African artist whose diverse practice delves into contemporary themes, exploring complex issues of identity, migration and the human condition. Cloud Migration specifically addresses the movement of digital assets and artistic artefacts to a computing environment, a digital cloud. In a distinct collage style, this animation reflects on physical migration, animating a privatised history where digital private images become public. The film uses archival photographic images from Alfred Duggan Cronin's travels to South Africa, originally only intended for consumption outside the country they purported to chronicle, and juxtaposes them with animated narratives from the present. The film thus utilises post-lens media, indicating a shift from traditional photography to a more modern or unconventional method of visual storytelling. By doing so, the viewer is invited to reflect on the contemporary use of filters so prevalent in social media and imaging technologies.</p>
<p>Rabbit and Duck are best friends. They’re playing together in the park and having a great time. Along comes Cat with a gaming console. Rabbit immediately pricks up his ears. He's keen to give it a go! Cat and Rabbit play together, but what about Duck, who's left on his own?</p>
<p>In the stark black-and-white images and clamour of the bells, an ecstatic reverie emerges. The simplicity of the premise is deceptive – fanged teeth, in positive and negative – it's in the rhythm of the edit that a new language pulsates. The spirits of these beasts live through their enduring dentata, here resurrected.</p>
<p>Pietro is a revered teacher, Teresa his brilliant and precocious student. Their affair is both illicit and tempestuous. After one fight, Teresa suggests that each tell the other a secret, one so shameful or shocking that were it to be made public, it would destroy that person’s life. Time passes, Pietro’s stature as a writer grows and his family settles into the comfort of a bourgeois life. But he is haunted by the possibility that Teresa may one day reappear and tear apart his world with the secret she knows.</p>
<p>With lyrics translated from an imaginary language, Sonia Oleniak’s filmic song cycle follows a cohort of sleepless solitaries through the night of a lunar eclipse. Strange singing and luminous images make mythopoesis of their labors and losses. In a boardwalk café, they convene for respite from their surreal nocturnal rituals, shot through with birds, salt, and violin rosin.</p>
<p>At 91 years of age, the director is solidly regarded as a trailblazing figure in New German Cinema and the avant-garde. He remains active and curious about media, so it’s no wonder that he recently began experimenting with artificial intelligence. He has been exploring a particular programme developed in Munich for medical research, which he systematically strains in order to find his images at the farthest ends of the system's creative faculties. With these, the director plays in the same essayistic fashion beloved from his television work – historical footage and a plenitude of texts, comics, charts and cabaret. In short: facts and fictions freely intermingle.</p>
<p>In Aztec mythology, Coyolxāuhqui was the Moon goddess who was dismembered by her brother Huītzilōpōchtli, the sun god of war and sacrifice. The film brings this deeply embedded story of Mexican heritage into a modern context, and parses out the legacy of patriarchy in a country that in 2022 was called "femicide nation".</p> <p>Music by Gustavo Nandayapa.</p>
<p>Strange things seem to be happening to the citizens chasing Good Seconds along the riverbank, as they are wandering around between infinite possibilities. The newly released Distant Heart Glasses they wear offer them an escape from reality which is as tempting as it is daunting. In a world where the lines between our urban spaces and our digital environment are continuously blurring, what is the best possible path forward, if there still is one?</p>
<p>After the death of his wife, Mit moves with his teenage daughter May to a derelict mansion in a Muslim-majority suburb of Bangkok. A thorough sceptic, Mit gets rid of the talismans in the house, defying the warnings of the locals, and in the process unleashes a furious djinn and its 200-year-old curse. As Mit sinks into delirium and self-harm, May must undertake a journey to the south to seek help.</p>
<p>Was the celebrated Spanish surrealist Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) ever not 'in character'? He fashioned a flamboyant public persona – “eccentric and concentric, anarchist and monarchist”, and completely lived by it, 'acting out' his outrageous whims and impulses to the point where his daily life became his principal artwork, and the perpetual demonstration of his self-proclaimed genius.</p>
<p>Filmmaker Daniel Auerbach lives with his cat in a run-down apartment in Tel Aviv. He is broke and struggles to write a script which is supposed to be a testimony of his own life. Coming from an ultra-Orthodox Jewish family, he became secular at a young age but has paid a heavy price for abandoning his community ever since. His family turned their backs on him, while he got caught in an endless fight with his inner self that triggered many neuroses and obsessions, sexual and otherwise.</p>
<p>Daphne was a torso ending in leaves is a playful and witty ode to a star of classical mythology: Daphne. Here, the beautiful nymph, who was metamorphosed into a tree to escape a stalking God, is celebrated as a heroine and master of her destiny. But this cinematic gem, shot on 16mm is above all a rich filmic experience, in which images and sound are meticulously intertwined to immerse the spectator in a universe of myth and legend.</p>
<p>Murayama Kaita, a Japanese painter, novelist and poet died in 1919 at the age of 22, leaving behind an impressive and time-defying body of work. In his most recent film, the director offers a surreal, time-crossing, meta-layered essay on the artist, his originality and his legacy.<br /> </p>
<p>A phone call from within a dream recalls a childhood encounter with shadows in a photographic darkroom. What begins as a private recollection gradually opens onto silenced ancestral experiences under the Cultivation System, the Dutch colonial regime that bound land and labor in 19th-century Java to the production of export crops such as sugar. From this regime of extraction grew the railroad, an apparatus that moved commodities across the colony while staging the spectacle of progress. Working with colonial archives produced as propaganda, the film reverses the question within the very material that once carried imperial desire. In dialogue with the history of cinema, where the passing train stands as one of its primal images, the railway reappears here as both machine and ghost: a moving trace through which colonial modernity, memory, and displacement continue to echo across time.</p>
<p>With the erasure of fingertips as a point of departure, Denials, Decoys takes the idea of a cut on the body and obfuscates it within the cut of the moving image. The result is disorienting, alienating and freeing. Like those seeking total anonymity within a culture of absolute control and surveillance, we spectators dissolve ourselves into shadowy rooms set to broken time, false time, end times.</p>
<p>The steel and glass jungle of contemporary London, scaffolded and climbing skywards at breakneck speed. With signs of supposed growth at every turn, a disorientating feeling of falling but never landing pervades. Despite the vast distance between the bottom and the top – the haves and have nots – a softness and a hope for reclamation of the cityscape glimmers at the edges of the 16mm frame.</p>
<p>In confrontational conversations with his wife and his lover, a middle-aged Indian policeman opens up about his work as a 'sacrificial assistant', a state-designated agent tasked with extra-judicial killings of Muslim men. Elsewhere in the city, Lord Krishna and the prince Arjuna enact a dialogue from the Bhagavad Gita. Paralysed into inaction during battle by human considerations, Arjuna seeks the counsel of Krishna, who instructs him on the moral duty of a warrior.</p>
<p>Who really is Diabolik, the ruthless Italian comic book antihero? The final chapter of the adaptation sets out to find the answer. Taking a leap in time to the 1970s, a period of unrest marked by the Vallanzasca and Magliana gangs, student protests and street killings, the story begins with car chases and machine gun shots that leave innocent victims dead on the street. It’s not Diabolik pulling the trigger, as he has his own code of ‘professional’ ethics and only kills when necessary. Instead, it’s a gang of criminals responsible for the bloodshed, wreaking havoc in the city with gratuitous and unscrupulous violence. Captured by the gang, Diabolik and his nemesis, Inspector Ginko, find themselves locked in a cell with no way out.</p>
<p>The opening credits of the second chapter of Diabolik bring to mind the universe of James Bond, the special agent who, in the late 1960s, the era in which the film is set, was the world’s most famous hero with a "licence to kill". Diabolik is an anti-hero who needs no official permission for his conduct. Unlike the first film, where we see Diabolik through the eyes of Eva Kant, who gives him a more 'human' dimension, in Diabolik – Ginko all'attacco!, the perspective is that of his arch-enemy, Inspector Ginko.</p>
<p>For decades, Diabolik – a character created by the Giussani sisters in 1962 – has been a sort of forbidden fruit for directors and international producers. The rights holders kept the series well under wraps, preventing the exploits of Italy's most famous thief from making it to the big screen. This conservative approach to guarding the series was a result of the 1968 film directed by Mario Bava, which was perceived to have betrayed the spirit of the original. Eventually, the Manetti Bros. broke through and acquired the rights, promising that they would be faithful to the original series.</p>
<p>A large ensemble features in the directors adaptation of Pavese’s text, with characters ranging from mortals to gods, creating ‘a conversation between divinity and humanity’ – an attempt to reconcile the artist with the place in the world. Shot across a range of locations, harnessing nature as a way of conveying the full scope of the writing – one of Pavese’s final works, that he was arguably most proud of and a copy of which he was carrying when he committed suicide – the director immerses us in these conversations in order to bring enlightenment to the ambiguities and elliptical nature of the writer’s extraordinary work.</p>
<p>This is not a tale of two refugees from Nazi Germany meeting to discuss the current world situation. Instead it is a kaleidoscope of impressions consisting of interviews with fellow Chilean exiles talking about the daily problems of living abroad, with no perspective of what the future might bring. There are also a number of scripted scenes in which more problematic, potentially factious, questions are discussed: what image of Chile should be projected abroad, what should be expected from their host nation and its good-willing but maybe politically naive inhabitants. How can the struggle be continued and, perhaps the most contentious, what kind of mistakes were made by the Left.</p>
<p>A fictional reimagining of the real-life friendship between Pannonica de Koenigswarter, aka The Jazz Baroness, and the famous pianist and composer Thelonious Monk. This new film by the Dutch visual artist is a rare example of experimental narrative dealing with jazz, beautifully freewheeling and meandering as the music itself. Featuring the motley crew of four-legged jazz cats and moths as gramophone needles!</p>
<p>A deluge of digital detritus, a frame-by-frame visual assault on the pleasure dome in our skulls. All set to appropriate music made by means of appropriation: chopped, screwed and then thrown in the blender. Digital Devil Saga is an opus of post-Covid life where heavy screen mediation has been completely normalised. But the film is also an act of preservation, embalming each ephemeral image, each frame, in preservation-grade 35mm ESTAR-base filmstock.</p>
<p>Reflection – action. Split screen. One image is a close up of a woman talking about dancing, how she first became involved in the art and her observations of people’s thoughts. The other image is a wide shot of the woman dancing in a study, starting movements, stopping, starting again and doing something differently.</p>
<p>Dina is a young Russian filmmaker working on a film about Stalinist repressions and the massive intergenerational trauma they caused that continues to resonate in modern-day Russia. Together with her friend Johan, a German sound designer whose grandfather went missing in the USSR during the Second World War, she embarks on a journey to the former Soviet labour camps. Almost deserted, the abandoned lands of Gulag still bear traces of those who perished there. Although this trip becomes somewhat therapeutic for the two of them, it also puts their relationship to the test.</p>
<p>An Islands' diary, told through the sombre but loving portrait of its oldest inhabitants. The Galapagos Islands and their majestic tortoises suffer the same fate of exploitation and disfigurement as the influence of humans on this once pristine and untouched corner of the world develops and devours. This film is the first 'chapter' of an ongoing adaptation of Herman Melville's 1849 novel about the islands, The Encantadas.</p>
<p>Finnish artist Dossier of Tentacular is an unclassifiable, shape-shifting creature that sprawls like a cephalopod along wildly varied lines of inquiry. A network of intra-frame montage sets up formal rhymes and oblique associations between the organic and inorganic worlds, whereas, elsewhere, we stare down at a loose field of ideas animated on a notebook during an academic lecture. A dense, tantalising work exploring the mechanisms of knowledge production.</p>
<p>Dr Cute is a video lecture from an off-brand Care Bear Professor of Sweet and Sinister Studies. A rational dissertation on the nature of cuteness is quickly unhinged by the intense emotional responses the subject elicits, begging the question: what happens when something is too cute?</p>
<p>“We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe.” These words of Frantz Fanon conclude Harris’ sobering and chilling mash-up of frantic Chicago Police audio messages with frenetically animated Google Maps imagery surveying the city. The sound refers to the protests during 2020 that followed the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery; the image does not directly depict these events, instead evoking urban space as an ultra-controlled prison.</p>
<p>In an arctic village in the north of China, an elderly woman awaits the return of her deceased father – the rhythmic tapping of her fingers echoes the hooves of his horse when he rode off to war. Inspired by Buddhist philosophy, Wang Hanxuan's directorial debut finds unshakable confidence in the loving bond between father and daughter.</p>
<p>Charting the legacy of Greek architect and urban planner Constantinos Doxiadis, the director has crafted an equally introspective and critical installation that explores how utopian thinking can be usurped by state propaganda. By linking Doxiadis’ 'ekistic' concepts of the 'Ecumenopolis', a world-encompassing city of the future, to the Cold War propaganda of The Ford Foundation, Somers retraces buried historical layers, revealing the pervasive ideologies lurking in the remnants of the past.</p>
<p>By the water, under the gleaming sun, a rebel couple needs to kill a dictator and his wife. All cool, all casual. A splendid mix of Eurospy with real political tensions in the background – assassination attempts and bombings included. South America, the Balkans, wherever you went, violence was in the air.</p>
<p>The director continues his mission to explore and push the boundaries of our sensory perception in new and surprising ways. In The Electric Kiss algorithmically generated images are harmoniously paired with a tantalising score by Jung An Tagen.</p>
<p>Half a century ago, the director started to work on a film about Antoni Tàpies because at the time Tàpies was going through one of his career's most important developments. In the late 60s, under the Franco regime, Tàpies changed from a Spanish to a Catalan artist, becoming a voice of hope. The film might only be finished now, but the political questions remain…</p>
<p>A son, his shy mother and unhappy grandmother share a desire for a different life to the one they have. They’re left to live them out in their dreams, fantasies or online. Diogo Costa Amarante’s impressive debut is a refreshing portrait of modern family life.</p>
<p>As one of the first feature-length Chilean exile documentaries, Ancelovici and Lübbert’s work remembers the desperate origins of Chile’s labour movement around the turn of the century.</p>
<p>Archive and reenactment tell the story of resistance via television broadcast in 1980s Northern Ireland.</p>
<p>A witty yet full frontal agitprop style work drawing parallels between dictators Hitler and Pinochet.</p>
<p>When 15-year-old Holly calls in sick to school, stating that something bad is going to happen and ten students subsequently die in a fire, some believe she might be in possession of otherworldly gifts. Once subject to bullying, Holly is now feted as a near-religious figure, who can lift the pain of grief and suffering just by her presence. But when money begins changing hands for her services, some are unsettled by this power and how it is being used.</p>
<p>The home destabilised by outside forces of capital is accompanied by a relentless percussive rhythm.</p>
<p>Stranded in her hometown due to a lockdown, Bonnie is forced to spend the night at the family-owned café, where she encounters the ghosts of her dead relatives gathering for a scrumptious meal. A heartwarming, food-centric dramedy about lost connections and new beginnings.</p>
<p>In a psychedelic journey among deities, heroes and titans, the film reads old mythology anew.</p>
<p>Kingsley (Paul Nnadiekwe), erudite and impressionable, is struggling to make ends meet. He is fresh out of university with little to no prospects for work in sight. In addition to his mounting financial woes, his father’s health takes a turn for the worse, leaving him as the sole breadwinner for the family.</p>
<p>A caring cinematic homage to the filmmaker’s ancestresses, and the neglected region of their origin.</p>
<p>A triptych portrait of the filmmaker's father done in his ineffable style.</p>
<p>An interactive stroll through an imagined dark future for the urban UK. A post-post-post-Brexit shooter.</p>
<p>New Rio, 2054 AD. The Order of Truth wreaks havoc on the streets, killing every being that has special powers. Renowned witch Dahlia is determined to beat the Order and assembles a clan of trans and queer people, each with their own supernatural talent. The fate of the city is in their hands.</p>
<p>Three stories about the daily lives of Chilean exiles living in Quebec: Rodrigo González Roja, Marilú Mallet and Jorge Fajardo.</p>
<p>A surrealist sci-fi animation about a burn victim in an imagined future of healthcare.</p>
<p>When hair begins to sprout all over a man's body, his only choice is resistance.</p>
<p>The octopus’ aquarium is spick and span. But when a child spills ice cream on his immaculate window, the octopus needs all his arms to get the attention of a cleaner.</p>
<p>A suburb in Southern California comes together to create a community and heal from loss.</p>
<p>A film teacher begins her class with a fun camera exercise involving all the students.</p>
<p>Before the US pro-wrestling circuit became a multi-billion-dollar industry, there were the Von Erichs, a sibling clan who dominated the sport in the 1980s. Sean Durkin's impressive drama features performances by Zac Efron, Jeremy Allen White and Lily James.</p>
<p>Black churches in West Philadelphia and South East London offer a harbour for marginalised communities.</p>
<p>A meticulous study of how climate change is reshaping the Norwegian island of Svalbard.</p>
<p>L'ispettore Coliandro: Black Mamba encapsulates the philosophy of one of the most innovative Italian crime series. A blend of action, comedy and twists featuring an eccentric and carefree inspector who, unwittingly, manages to unmask a ruthless international killer, only to end up falling in love.</p>
<p>The inherent madness of the modern, neoliberal business model: constantly disrupting itself and tearing down tradition, yet demanding its workers’ total emotional investment. The behaviour of the Swedish employees in the inventively minimal It is Lit reflects this psychosis.</p>
<p>A rush of images, the beating of drums: awaken Itzcóatl, the 'Obsidian Serpent'!</p>
<p>Tasked with eliminating a ruthless gangster, Kirubai masquerades as a filmmaker to lure his Clint Eastwood-loving target with dreams of movie stardom. The two embark on a film project together, but they soon find their fictions overwhelmed by the weight of reality.</p>
<p>What does home mean when everything feels in-between and transient?</p>
<p>In a future Assam, India, rains have destroyed vast parts of the state and few speak the language. The first Assamese film, Joymoti (1935), provides a route into the past in this essay on cultural heritage and its various political and spiritual dimensions.</p>
<p>A young filmmaker crosses the pond to hunt down film financing in the Big Apple.</p>
<p>Can you build a kingdom solely around a King, a Servant and a mannequin Queen made of wood? Two men shut off the outside world and live their comical fantasy – that is, until role reversals, power play and dark visions of dream demons intrude.</p>
<p>A thrillingly contemporary take on age-old fables, Midhun Murali’s gorgeously constructed worlds, drawing on various media and layered to dazzling effect, create a dense narrative, told at a sprightly pace, that plays out as a knowing political thriller.</p>
<p>Grandpa gives a kite to his grandchild, they play with it together. One day, the wind picks Grandpa up and takes him away.</p>
<p>It's Indy's birthday, but she doesn’t have money to treat her friends. Still, she doesn’t want to show up empty-handed. How will she solve this problem?</p>
<p>The stones beneath our feet will bear testimony to our future in silence.</p>
<p>A war film with a difference. A lone Norwegian vessel in 1942, unprotected and largely unarmed, decides to maintain its mission to reach Russia during the German invasion. Is it sheer, suicidal folly? A tale of wits and wills rather than combat action, Konvoi thrills.</p>
<p>Cheerful locals play witnesses in this humorous faux report about UFO sightings in backwoods America.</p>
<p>Two young women in a desolate village discuss the recent, mysterious vanishing of Leela.</p>
<p>A poetic study of a hummingbird in flight captured and eco-processed on 16mm.</p>
<p>When the star player of a Brazilian high-school volleyball team discovers she is pregnant, her attempts to seek an abortion in a country where it is illegal are undermined by right-wing activists, in this timely and moving portrait of resilience and friendship.</p>
<p>Intriguing portrait of summer fireworks, in which delayed and separated sounds create a unique rhythm.</p>
<p>A fast-paced, exhaustively researched documentary recreating the ferocious public controversy surrounding the Peace Sculpture 1995 installation created by Elle-Mie Ejdrup Hansen to commemorate Denmark’s liberation from Nazi occupation.</p>
<p>A mesmerising account of the lives of women in Kosovo made from archival VHS footage.</p>
<p>A displaced protagonist explores his fragmented sense of self in the digital realm.</p>
<p>In Lose Voice Tool Kit wordless children invent new forms of communication and play.</p>
<p>Mahboube, a woman in her early thirties, enjoys a solitary existence. But her world is turned upside down when she lets a film crew into her home for a week-long shoot. First, she sees the objects that comprise her physical life used without thought or care. Then, the filming process affects her on a deeper level, forcing her to come to terms with the ghosts of her past and her place as a woman in Iranian society. Iranian cinema has long blurred the line between reality and fiction – questioning the way people live their lives, those who govern them and the structures they enforce. Shot as the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement was building support in the country following the killing of Mahsa Amini, Farshad Hashemi’s feature directorial debut gradually peels away the layers of Mahboube’s life as she comes to terms with the limitations she faces as a woman, and a history she has long chosen to suppress but which now haunts her waking hours. At the same time, the film is a reflection on the nature of filmmaking, exploring its capacity to truly capture the complexity of everyday lives. – Vanja Kaludjercic</p>
<p>Within days of giving birth to her stillborn baby and returning home with her husband Jonas, Robin’s breasts begin to produce milk. Grappling with a bottomless sorrow neither can quite articulate, she continues to pump. As the days turn into weeks and their fridge begins to crowd with dozens of bottles, Robin’s determination to donate her milk grows from a cautious curiosity to an uncompromising, near-obsessive commitment.</p> <p>In her achingly poignant debut feature, filmmaker Stefanie Kolk explores grief not through an excessively plying score or heavy-handed dialogue but rather at its most bare and natural: in moments of silence, gazes and thoughts unsaid. The result is a film that is deeply penetrating in its quietude, Frieda Barnhard gives a revelatory and understated performance as Robin, embodying the complex bond between mother and child, the profound melancholy of its loss and Robin’s guardedness with exquisite nuance. </p> <p>Shot with graceful simplicity by cinematographer Emo Weemhoff, <strong>Melk</strong> is a delicately painful tale about forging a path forward through the subtle complexities of bereavement, that illuminates Kolk’s freshly astute, deeply resonant cinematic voice.</p> <p><em>– Fiona Armour</em></p>
<p>Guilty of having allowed greedy businessmen to take over her city and wipe the memories of its residents clean, mayor Teo conspires with a motley bunch of outsiders to set things right. Armed with homemade hallucinogens, the gang sets out to free citizens from their painless, amnesiac existence. </p> <p>Mila van der Linden’s neon-drenched dystopian fantasy <strong>Memory Dealers </strong>presents a tongue-in-cheek political fable in which voracious non-conformists liberate a blissful, sober society that are under the thrall of a corporate technocracy. The film’s emphatic visual style, influenced by both graphic novels and silent cinema, reflects an attitude of pure play that belies the repressive universe of the narrative. Shot in psychedelic colours and scored to trance music, Van der Linden’s intoxicating film invites the viewer on a literal trip down memory lane.</p> <p><em>– Srikanth Srinivasan</em></p>
<p>That look! For audiences watching the radically changing – and charged – European cinema of the 1960s, Michelangelo Antonioni’s <strong>L’avventura </strong>(1960) was defined by Monica Vitti’s expression as she searched a barren Italian island for a missing friend. Their collaboration would reach its apotheosis with<strong> Il deserto rosso</strong>’s (1964) radical experiment in colour. Two years later, she was the titular hero in the comic strip adaptation <strong>Modesty Blaise</strong>. These films placed her alongside Seberg, Bardot, Moreau and Karina as a key figure of that era’s cinema. In Roberta Torre’s gleeful cine-homage, Alba Rohrwacher plays Monica, a woman who loses her memory and discovers a new lease of life through her passion for Vitti’s most memorable roles.<br /> <br /> <strong>Mi fanno male i capelli</strong> is no biopic of the Italian screen icon. Instead, it is a paean to the cinema she helped create – a celebration of its transformative power and the indelible images that enchanted audiences. Shifting between colour and monochrome – and with it, reality and fantasy – Torre revels in cinematic illusion. She’s abetted by Rohrwacher, an actor who, like Vitti, exudes charisma, but who also possesses a chameleon-like ability that makes her shift between the two Monicas both a thrill and a delight.<br /> <br /> <em>– Ian Haydn Smith</em></p>
<p>Skalde lives in a small rural community, far from a world that may no longer exist. She is an interloper in her own home, having been born to an ‘outsider’ mother and therefore marked by a social stigma she cannot easily erase. Displaying a loyalty to the codes of the community, she has earned the respect of the village elder. However, when she encounters a mysterious girl in the local woods, Skalde risks everything by befriending her, eventually giving the girl a home. She attempts to hide her subterfuge to maintain her standing with the villagers, but her plans threaten to unravel.<br /> <br /> Sophia Bösch’s directorial debut is an intelligent adaptation of Helene Bukowski’s 2021 novel. The film is not only a story of survival and paranoia, but about the toll isolation takes on everyone in a world assumed hostile if not simply empty. In a poignant exploration of the human desire to belong, Bösch has crafted a story that navigates the realms of witches and wolves, offering a fairy tale-like vision of the end of the patriarchy. Combined with stellar performances and a rich atmospheric quality – conjured by cinematographer Aleksandra Medianikova’s captivating images – <strong>Milk Teeth</strong> features a world as eerie, unsettling and immersive as the themes it explores.<br /> <br /> <em>– Vanja Kaludjercic</em></p>
<p>It’s an unusual summer on the Mediterranean coast in Konstantinos Koutsoliotas’ quirky comic actioner <strong>Minore</strong>. A strange fog descends on a laid-back port town in Greece, causing its inhabitants to experience bizarre visions and drawing them into the sea. As malevolent, multi-limbed monsters invade the town, slaughtering people and preparing the way for the Great Devourer, a ragtag bunch of townsfolk must take up arms – and musical instruments – to fight the otherworldly invaders. </p> <p>Defying easy categorisation, <strong>Minore</strong> gradually shifts registers from an ensemble comedy to an eerie mystery movie before becoming a full-blooded creature feature with copious amounts of guts and gore. In the process, the film finds a complex, idiosyncratic tone to tell a tale of communal solidarity, which possesses both a mythical significance and a contemporary resonance.</p> <p>Shot in painterly colours with a pronounced play of shadows,<strong> Minore</strong> proceeds at an unhurried pace reflective of the town’s epicurean way of life dominated by food and music. Even when the drama reaches fever pitch, the film creates space for low-key moments, leisurely interactions and absurd non-sequiturs. The result is a constantly surprising work that reimagines how action cinema should look and feel like.</p> <p><em>– Srikanth Srinivasan</em></p>
<p>Withdrawn animation artist Eric lives under the loving supervision of his supportive mother. He has a crush on his kindly colleague Carlo, an affection he doesn’t dare voice. Nor can he, as Eric cannot speak and interacts with others using a whiteboard that hangs from his neck. But when Eric is asked by his mother to check in on his estranged uncle Rogelio, he is wrenched out of his isolation and confronted with repressed childhood memories and sinister extraterrestrial beings.</p> <p>Filipino filmmaker Carl Joseph E. Papa’s absorbing, animated psychological drama <strong>The Missing</strong> tells a highly personal tale of trauma and reconciliation. The film’s composite visual style, blending rotoscoping and traditional 2D animation, both retains the subtlety of actors’ performances and heightens the expressivity of their physical environment. More importantly, it allows the viewer to experience the world as Eric does, in defiance of conventional logic and true to his changing emotional state.</p> <p>Despite its sophisticated approach, <strong>The Missing</strong> is a transparent work that does not rely on narrative twists or eye-popping spectacle to hold attention. Even as it borrows elements of sci-fi and fantasy, the film remains focused on Eric’s inner life, tracing his journey from alienation towards healing and self-realisation.</p> <p><em>– Srikanth Srinivasan</em></p>
<p>Molecular Delusions is a tale of illusion and an exploration of new, possible worlds.</p>
<p>Moscas goes beyond the classic thriller to deliver a precise and unapologetic character study. Alberto Machi is the ultimate embodiment of an anti-hero. Yet thanks to an elaborate and precise script rich with flashbacks and coup de théâtre, it is impossible to anticipate Machi’s next move.</p>
<p>A daughter moves back with her mother in the sour aftermath of a relationship.</p>
<p>Looking at Sigmund Freud’s final work and his fascination with Moses, experimental visual, media and performance artists Jenni and Lauri Luhta embark on an exploration of the two historical figures’ lives and the emergence of monotheistic religion.</p>
<p>A deeply affecting rumination on grief, memory and what no longer feels like home.</p>
<p>In her forties or near them, life isn't what she expected. She takes a trip down memory lane and finds the young man she once fancied. The sole directorial effort of costume designer and art director Ester Krumbachová.</p>
<p>Edgar leads an utterly predictable life. But one day, when visiting an abattoir, he witnesses the birth of a calf. After that, nothing is the same.</p>
<p>Sequestered in a cavernous mansion in a sleepy hill town in Southern India, three boys grapple with the overpowering influence of a disciplinarian father. An uncompromising memoir brimming with lived-in details, Naangal delivers a domestic epic of remarkable integrity and vividness.</p>
<p>Immerse yourself as jazz musicians symbiotically merge their sound with microscopic images of plankton.</p>
<p>Cicely is cast in an indie film, one she considers much more tasteful than the Blaxploitation films her mother made. But when she’s suddenly supposed to appear nude, she must confront the same problems. Bridgett M. Davis’ sole fiction feature: a legend of Black US cinema.</p>
<p>The director's final dedication to the art, places and people he loves. Naked Nations is a joyful, poignant and heartbreaking film about freedom and its many manifestations and limits, a film about life and difficult decisions. But above all, a film about love.</p>
<p>In town for an audition, eighteen-year-old Lilja decides to stay with her estranged grandparents. She feels at home in their middle-class mansion, but unbeknownst to her, she becomes entangled with the dark past of her family, learning secrets that will threaten her life.</p>
<p>The filmmaker's mother tells the story of her own relationship with her fiercely independent mother.</p>
<p>A man and a woman, the last of their kind, wake up in a stark, otherworldly landscape on the brink of abyss. Grafting the Christian creation myth onto a poetic approach to the spaces of Beirut, Nécrose presents a piercing, highly personal city elegy.</p>
<p>Whilst on leave in England, an Argentinian captain’s outlook on life and politics is changed.</p>
<p>In this hard-hitting, relentless early vision of Chile right after the coup, the politically disinterested architect Manuel is arrested and imprisoned in the National Stadium. An engaging and effective film. </p>
<p>The regeneration process of the flatworm, set to the eighteenth-century myth of the Rotte river.</p>
<p>Struggling to get home to her stranded baby, a young mother in Amsterdam receives an emergency alert on her phone: a nuclear missile has been launched at the city and residents have forty-five minutes to evacuate.</p>
<p>An exploration into the ‘sonic shadows’ that colonial moving images continue to generate.</p>
<p>A postscript to the Judit Elek retrospective during IFFR 2023. Made during Elek’s Silentium period when she was forbidden to direct features, Nobody's Daughter is Elek’s autobiographical screenplay about her lonely and humiliating year as a powerless and nameless farm servant.</p>
<p>The story of Miguel Enríquez, founder of the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria.</p>
<p>In Sana Na N’Hada’s Nome, the veteran director from Guinea-Bissau revisits the years of his youth, and the turbulent struggle against the Portuguese colonial army from 1969 to the mid 1970s. His approach is minimal and stylised, yet bursting with lyrical beauty and spiritual mystery. The tale begins in a village far from the armed conflict, observing the daily life of Nome, his mother, and the woman he loves. Nome leaves home to join the guerrillas and becomes a heroic leader – but the personal relationships he has abandoned will return to haunt him during the complicated and confused post-revolutionary period. Nome probes the hopeful, utopian dimension of African revolutionary movements and confronts, with the wisdom of hindsight, the seeds of corruption and betrayal that always existed. But never embraces despair. A special feature of Nome is the archival footage from the time originally shot by Na N’Hada and his comrades. These images do much more than guarantee documentary authenticity – in their very fragility they allow the film to elevate the materiality of scratched, battered frames into a full-blown poetic language. – Adrian Martin</p>
<p>Pae isn’t doing too well at his new high school. His only chance to go to university and avoid working at his father’s flour mill, arrives in the form of a short film contest. Betting on the sentimental potential of a story about his recently deceased classmate Joe, Pae embarks on a short film project with his schoolmates amidst much hype and hope. But the group’s best laid plans go awry when a close friend of Joe’s returns to school after illness.</p> <p>Thai filmmaker Atta Hemwadee’s vivid and flavourful <strong>Not Friends</strong> begins as a sprightly high school comedy before blooming into a bittersweet drama about the meaning of friendship. Despite its playful setting and persistent humour, Hemwadee’s debut feature unfolds as a series of real ethical dilemmas that its teenage protagonist must learn to negotiate. Every decision that Pae makes involves determining the right thing to do. In the process, he comes to discover what originality means and where the true character of an individual lies.</p> <p>Dynamically shot and edited, <strong>Not Friends</strong> is an ode to the heady adventures of adolescence and to days and nights consumed in passionate collaboration</p> <p><em>– Srikanth Srinivasan</em></p>
<p>The immediately recognisable voice and sweet wistful words of the late legend of the avantgarde, Jonas Mekas, is heard over the images of an imagined trip to Mexico. He speaks about memory as being testament to suffering, while expired 16mm film shows us an act of remembering, memory as a verb: peaceful protest.</p> <p><em>– Cristina Kolozsváry-Kiss</em></p>
<p>A site of rapid redevelopment, the Hung Hom district of Hong Kong is home to the Kwun Yum temple, which attracts droves of devotees seeking financial betterment during the grandiose Treasury Opening Festival. Across the street, however, is a run-down yet lively block running a parallel economy consisting of recycling shops, illegal flea markets and modest restaurants, all on the verge of extinction.</p> <p>In unobtrusive wide-angle shots, Wong Siu-pong’s finely observational street documentary <strong>Obedience</strong> casts a curious glance on this vulnerable microcosm. Sustaining this ecosystem is a group of elderly workers who patrol the area with their wheelbarrows, salvaging recyclable objects from garbage in order to exchange them for money. Without condescension or sentimentalism, the film documents the precarious life of these frail men and women, cast out of Hong Kong’s economic boom and left to fend for themselves by rummaging for food in bins.</p> <p>The film’s socioeconomic and ecological enquiry is enriched by a subtly existentialist perspective that invites us to question the meaning of prosperity and well-being in a lopsided society. Looking beyond the glitz and glamour of Asia's World City, <strong>Obedience</strong> presents a face of Hong Kong rarely seen on screen.</p> <p><em>– Srikanth Srinivasan</em></p>
<p>Clouds white ablaze, a painting of a manor in a vast forest, finally a young man running and leaping in the streets. After these suggestions of paradise, tightly framed shots of houses old and new, garish sights of 70s pop fun include Raquel Welsh and some wrestling, suggesting how lost it is. Kai Oka in hindsight:<em> </em>"This was obviously the post-sixties confusion."</p> <p><em>– Olaf Möller</em></p>
<p>During the long days and nights of Covid-19, filmmaker and theoretician Rea Wallden invited her mother, feminist avant-garde beacon Antoinetta Angelidi, to be part of a film about her art and thoughts. Of course, it was not a normal interview affair – for that would go against the aesthetic principles Angelidi had long-established for herself. Angelidi has been a filmmaker for more than half a century: she thinks in cinematographic installations and performances and so, Wallden offered her the necessary spaces for that. </p> <p>Very often when talking, Angelidi seems to float in an ocean of darkness. <strong>Obsessive Hours at the Topos of Reality</strong> feels like an invocation or incantation of a past and the ideas that grew from it. The future is unknown but it still needs the nourishments that these first thoughts provide. </p> <p>What becomes present is the portrait of a most unusual artist who was a path-breaker on at least two fronts at the same time. At home in Greece Antoinetta Angelidi is a key figure of the nation's founding group of moving image artists and in the world, she was one of many female directors trying to define a feminist film language. And she achieved it all!</p> <p><em>– Olaf Möller</em></p>
<p><strong>Ojitos mentirosos</strong>, the latest work from Elena Duque, takes us to Madrid, where trompe-l'œil is used in both modern and classical architecture. But what is cinema if not an instrument to deceive the eye? In an elegant game of reflections and details, Elena Duque uses her surroundings and the unique texture of 8mm to pay tribute to the magic of film. </p> <p><em>– Rebecca De Pas</em></p>
<p>In an Iran weighed down by a struggling economy, two middle-aged brothers live with their bullying father. A man prone to rages and driven by chauvinism, the father’s abusiveness found his second wife leaving him. Now he picks on his eldest son, while the younger sibling fantasises about ways to kill his father. When the man rents out the flat above to a young woman, with intentions of marrying her, the woman’s attraction to the older son slowly pushes this profoundly damaged family to breaking point.<br /> <br /> If Oktay Baraheni’s debut feature,<strong> Bridge of Sleep</strong> (2016), drew inspiration from Dostoevsky’s <em>Crime and Punishment</em>, his sophomore feature channels the dark soul of Shakespeare’s family tragedies. A coruscating critique of patriarchy, like the best Iranian films <strong>The Old Bachelor</strong>’s power lies in balancing the specificity of its locale with a wider, more universal commentary on any society where gender inequality exists, and patriarchy is accepted as the status quo. The performances by Hamed Behdad, Hassan Pourshirazi and Mohammad Valizadegan are roundly superb, while Leila Hatami excels as the new resident unaware of her landlord’s intentions. Baraheni once again proves himself a writer and director of rare sensitivity and profound compassion.<br /> <br /> <em>– Vanja Kaludjercic</em></p>
<p>Steeped in the isolation of suburban Tasmania, Imogen and Audrey reflect on their lives, families and dreams between puffs on bongs, vapes and cigs. Dark clouds approach in the conversation and landscape as local wildlife looks on indifferently. Beyond the drugs and arcades, what possible routes of escape remain?<br /> <br /> <em>– Leonie Woodfin</em></p>
<p>Keep your cool!” yells the ageing, secretly ailing trainer Jin to his young protégé Shogo during boxing matches. But that’s easier said than done. Everyone in One Last Bloom carries the emotional baggage of dysfunctional family backgrounds, missed opportunities and the strange peril attached to any second chance. One Last Bloom of course brings to mind the dilemmas and dynamics of Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby (2004) and the Rocky series, with breathtaking choreography of the sparring and a story that builds towards the final, title bout. The film holds firm to its particular naturalistic, anti-sensationalist and engaging depiction of fighting and the preparation it takes alike.</p>
<p>Luis Ospina, frontman of the Grupo de Cali – a pioneering group of filmmakers, artists and writers active in Cali, Colombia – was a most fascinating, impossible to place figure in Latin American cinema. He made fiction features as well as proto-Punk style documentaries that gave short shrift to categorical niceties, instead opting for hybridisations. Sure, a film like <strong><a href="https://iffr.com/en/iffr/2024/films/pura-sangre" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Pura sangre</a></strong> (1982) is fiction, but with so much reality in its details that one easily forgets it is all fantasy. It could have been real, these things do happen in one way or another, for this is Colombia.</p> <p>In 2018, film director-teacher Jorge de Carvalho and his students sat down with Ospina in the comforts of a very fake jungle to talk about his life and works. With contributions from fellow Grupo de Cali-members including Carlos Mayolo and Andrés Caicedo, this interview became the basis for <strong>Ospina Cali Colombia</strong>. It’s a perfect and concise auteurist reading of Ospina's complete work – to which little could be further added, as he died the following year. Since then, interest in Ospina seems to have only grown, especially as genre tropes and references to popular cinema are so elemental to his art. So, please, enter the labyrinth of Luis Ospina's mind – for Cali, by now, is everywhere…</p> <p><em>– Olaf Möller</em></p>
<p>A genre-bending reverie of hyper-saturated green screen and found-sound, <strong>Over the Rainbow</strong> is the cannibalised beast of television brought to life. From auditions for competition talent shows to royal engagement announcements, fragments of recognisable pop pulp mash together into a schizophrenic romp that is both bewildering and tantalising. What’s over the rainbow? More rainbows of course!</p>
<p>Some half a decade after Persona Beach, Georg Tiller returned to Fårö for a new film again featuring Edward Weki. Of the three films they have made together so far, Overnight Flies has become the one least connected to the legacy of the island's most famous erstwhile inhabitant, Ingmar Bergman.<br /> <br /> While one can indeed draw some loose parallels to Hour of the Wolf and Shame (1968), consider the strangers here debris of a world in turmoil, unnecessary for the proceedings. This is very much Weki's film. He's walking the island with a video camera of dubious quality, recording his surroundings, maybe searching for reflections of the life he had once in another world, maybe looking for a sign of something greater and kinder in that most overlooked of treasure troves: the present as such.<br /> <br /> Sometimes, Jan tags along with Edward. Jan is a somewhat mysterious fellow, a solitudinarian with an ascetic streak who carries his own history in silence. Overnight Flies is a landscape film: an essay on time passing through spaces and the beauty that is to be found in its contemplation. Which maybe makes this Weki's and Tiller's very own Fårö Document (1970; d: Ingmar Bergman)...!</p>
<p>After being diagnosed with progressive Parkinson's disease, the legendary Croatian experimental filmmaker Ivan Faktor (b. 1953) decides to visualise his physical state with a mobile phone camera. Through interventions into received documentary modes, he creates a surprisingly spirited inner world of an artist imprisoned in space. This is filmmaking as the act of self-preservation.</p>
<p>In Luiz Fernando Carvalho’s A paixão segundo G.H., Clarice Lispector’s highly philosophical prose finds a cinematic rendering that surpasses all expectations. G.H. is a well-off Brazilian sculptor who, one day, encounters a cockroach in her maid’s closet. Following this incident, she descends into unknown regions of her being. The breakdown – a sort of madness, but also a passion in the religious sense – strips all masks, undoes her completely, and leads her to a new experience of life. The film combines the confessional, the experimental and the psychological to achieve an existential horror with echoes of Ingmar Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly (1961) and Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965).<br /> <br /> Set almost entirely in the heroine’s apartment, A paixão segundo G.H. is a stunningly sensorial film with frames and cuts precise as a scalpel, sumptuous camera movements, a constant use of visual distortion, and a sophisticated soundtrack (mixing musical snippets, noises and voice tracks with different densities and textures). Maria Fernanda Cândido – capable of turning the diction of a sentence or the holding of a cigarette into truly cinematic occurrences – offers us an intense, electrifying performance that is the perfect counterpart to the arrested inner journey the film presents.</p>
<p>Georg Wilhelm Pabst was one of the world's most well respected filmmakers during the 1920s and early '30s. Described as a staunch socialist auteur, Pabst became something of a black sheep during the 1940s, when he agreed to work for the Nazi industry – the circumstances under which are still up for discussion. In cinematic 'politics', Pabst is a left-wing love affair gone dreadfully bad, with few feeling inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.<br /> <br /> Angela Christlieb approaches Pabst from an angle that feels eerie: his family. There's his writer-actress-artistic confidante wife, Trude, who’s present solely through words and archival images. Then some of their children and other relatives who are still around and willing to discuss this seemingly mysterious man make an appearance too.<br /> <br /> Pandoras Vermächtnis is less about the meaning of Pabst in cinema and more about the imprint of his life and work on those closest to him. It's fascinating to hear the letters Georg and Trude wrote to one another when they were young, it becomes mesmerising when his next of kin discuss him in detail, separating the myths from their precious recollections. Pandoras Vermächtnis looks at film history from a different angle – how rare and precious!</p>
<p>Nico prepares for a journey that will change his life forever. He can't stop himself from packing every object he loves.</p>
<p>Former tennis coach Dutch has had it hard since he was the victim of a hit and run car accident a year ago. Limping and embittered, he decides to undergo psychic training to unlock his latent mind-control powers, to find and take revenge on the driver. He finds – or rather is found by – Lyra, a witchy disciplinarian who might perhaps be the perfect psychic tutor, much to Dutch’s chagrin. But all is not what it seems and Lyra herself has an ulterior motive, involving her evil brother Haxan, a parallel universe and a cosmic crystal called The Paragon.<br /> <br /> Having directed shorts, cooking shows, music videos and episodes of the cult TV show Power Rangers, Michael Duignan’s feature film debut brims with non-stop laughs, budding friendships, the forgiveness of wrongdoings and lo-fi psychedelic antics with a generous serving of sincerity.<br /> <br /> The Paragon shifts from a tale of the quotidian revenge of an average suburban guy to a battle of psychedelic mind-control forces. With a uniquely Kiwi brand of laconic humour and sincere love of 1980s sci-fi and fantasy, it's a midnight movie cosmic adventure straight from the heart.</p>
<p>Accompanying the world premiere of Suman Ghosh's documentary Parama – A Journey with Aparna Sen, as part of IFFR 2024, is Sen’s own film from which it takes its title: Parama (1985).<br /> <br /> In her second feature, Sen acts in a secondary role, not the protagonist Parama, whose life is defined by her relationship with her family, never as an existence of her own. The joys of individuality are revealed to Parama by Rahul, a photographer, who starts taking pictures of her for a series on typical housewives. As they grow closer, the shots slowly become more intimate. When Rahul publishes these images without Parama's consent, her family, starting with her husband, violently turns against her.<br /> <br /> In the work of Aparna Sen, family is typically the source of problems and rarely the spring that offers comfort or answers to those in need. Never again did Sen paint as bleak a picture of the structural terror that, in many ways, is an ordinary Indian experience, as she did in Parama.</p>
<p>After stunning audiences with Ghawre Bairey Aaj (IFFR 2020) it was an easy decision to select Suman Ghosh's Parama – A Journey with Aparna Sen this year.<br /> <br /> As the daughter of seminal Bengali critic, filmmaker and translator Chidananda Das Gupta, Aparna Sen was born into the art. Discovered at the age of sixteen by her father’s friend Satyajit Ray for a part in his Omnibus project Teen Kanya (1961), slowly but surely her career began. In the 70s, she became a key presence in Bengali and Hindi cinema, both in their more artistic as well as their more popular veins.<br /> <br /> In 1981, Sen directed her first fiction feature, 36 Chowringhee Lane. Today, fifteen films further down the road, she's one of the most prodigious female Indian filmmakers.<br /> <br /> In Parama – A Journey with Aparna Sen, Ghosh takes Sen on a journey to some of the locations where she shot her iconic films. Surprise sights and meetings, accompanied by stories from her nearest and dearest, this is a perfect introduction to one of world cinema's most important oeuvres!</p>
<p>Damián subsists on his meagre income, existing more than living. When he receives news that his father has died, he returns to Ferrol, his hometown, which he has stayed away from for over two decades. No sooner has he arrived than he finds himself the subject of mistaken identity and his fate is now entwined with another whose destiny is predetermined.<br /> <br /> In La Parra, Alberto Gracia (The Fifth Gospel of Kaspar Hauser, FIPRESCI Prize winner IFFR 2013) constructs a portrait of the Galician coastal town. Ferrol, once the proud home to the country’s maritime industry, now languishes in obscurity, its populace ageing or without work, with little hope for the future. Damián’s dilemma reflects the mood of the town, as both are enveloped by a sense of hopelessness. But Gracia’s film eschews despair, instead presenting a surreal and compassionate portrait of a community that despite its misery hasn’t given up on searching for a better future. With its striking combination of sounds and music, and an evocative use of archive footage, La Parra is a further exemplar of Gracia’s unique approach to form and distinct cinematic voice.</p>
<p>Jan Kulka is an experimental filmmaker from Prague working predominantly with analogue technologies. Using the ‘Archeoscope’ (in Czech, Pramítačka), a special opto-mechanical projecting apparatus he invented and constructed for live film performances, Kulka aims to find radically different ways of perceiving, understanding and working with film material, alongside new, aslant approaches to the act of projection. His latest work Paterny is created mainly with 60mm optical printing.</p>
<p>When a woman meets the filmmaker she claims to admire most, she offers him a story to use as the premise of a film – leading to an unnerving piece of theatrical storytelling and sensual movement. Sustaining a remarkable level of tension and possessing an eerie eroticism, this short from South Korean filmmaker Han Changlok explores the seeds of inspiration with a feverish intensity that’s sure to unsettle.</p>
<p>Frame by frame, we see abstract, hand-painted images tussle with scraps of photographic representation. Which will win? Woloshen crafts a cascade of visuals in the manner of Stan Brakhage: scratches on the celluloid, sprocket holes, fleeting geometric shapes are glimpsed for a split-second before being snatched away. Intermingled are flashes of heavily erased faces and places, occasionally bursting through into visibility. Cinema is the sum of this endless struggle.</p>
<p>Ivan, a handsome and brilliant IT guy, is coming to terms with his identity and sexuality in Scud’s sophomore feature, Permanent Residence.<br /> <br /> Ivan meets Windson at the gym, a man so beautiful and athletic he must be a fantasy. They strike a queer friendship, spending their time together, sparring, travelling, going to beaches and having all sorts of manly fun wearing nothing but Adam’s robes. There is only one catch. Windson is straight and draws a strict boundary when it comes to sex, and so Ivan’s odyssey begins.<br /> <br /> Scud draws on his own personal experiences to continue to challenge the usual image of queer men in Hong Kong cinema. Promoting camp to higher art, Permanent Residence continues to showcase the Asian male body so ostentatiously celebrated in City Without Baseball (2007). This film marks one of two collaborations with the Hong Kong legend Herman Yau as cinematographer and the beginning of Scud’s gusto for self-referentiality, a detail which fortifies the fictional world Scud has built for his protagonists. A world where beautiful fantasies become reality, but one that has no immunity from pain or heartbreak, provoking contemplations of life, love, death and belonging.</p>
<p>In April of 1960, Ingmar Bergman set out towards the island of Fårö for the first time, to scout locations for his upcoming feature, Through a Glass Darkly (1961). Not only did he find what he was looking for – he discovered his life's new centre. In 1965, he moved to Fårö, turning his Stockholm home into a pieds-à-terre for whenever business demanded his attendance in the capital.<br /> <br /> At the time of his death, Bergman's Fårö estate counted four houses. It was also where he shot half a dozen features and TV series and two documentaries detailing the plight of the island's inhabitants. Not long after the grandmaster's demise and having already made a short tribute to his cinema (Vargtimmen – Nach einer Szene von Ingmar Bergman, 2010), Georg Tiller set out for Fårö in search of a spiritual residue. He was looking for the imprints, left by the island's most famous adopted son, on those living there now. He found quite a few souls who were originally strangers to the place, just like Bergman and with one he struck a particularly strong bond. Sudanese stone quarry worker Edward Weki, whom he made the lead in what would become Persona Beach, as well as writing the film with him. Neither knew that this would be the beginning of a long journey together...</p>
<p>Somewhere deep in the woods, in the house of her youth, she is thinking of ending things. All that matters is that she saved herself, and that nothing in her remains of them. The IFFR debut by Finnish conceptual artist is an intuitive stream of thoughts, pictures and feelings expressing the protagonist's deep pain at the mistreatment of our planet. Fascinating, unnerving, funny and unlike anything you've seen before.</p>
<p>The premise is a winning idea: three characters who suddenly find themselves stuck in a lift and one of them is carrying an explosive device that is about to detonate. How will they get out? Piano 17 leaves one with bated breath and a feeling that what is narrated on screen was produced with at least three times the budget than it actually was, with the ambition to compete with Hollywood cinema and cult series like 24</p>
<p>Agitprop-documentary about political oppression and torture in Chile. The reasons and players behind it as well as the faces and voices of those resisting Pinochet's fascism despite the danger. At the end, Chile is shown as just another example of imperialist terror.</p>
<p>A short agitprop piece made mainly from children's drawings. For all its verve, the film's key stab at subversion is its title. Made for Swedish national television, the words "Pinochet: fascista, asesino, traidor, agente del imperialismo" were printed in every TV guide – hollering out the truth at the vastest possible audience. Now they all knew!</p>
<p>What do female shooters, holsters and love handles have in common? In the Spanish language, they can all be referred to as pistoleras. The director's debut short is a feminist reimagining of the classic standoff – although eventually, the shooter's biggest opponent may just be herself.</p>
<p>Planktonium is a short film about the unseen world of living microscopic plankton. It is a voyage into a secret universe, inhabited by alien-like creatures. These stunningly beautiful, very diverse and numerous organisms are unknown to most of us because they are invisible to the naked eye. However, they are wandering beneath the surface of all waters around us and they are of vital importance for all life on earth.</p> <p>Jan van IJken filmed the plankton through his microscopes, revealing the beauty and delicate structures of the minute organisms in the finest detail. The film is without any voice-over or explanation.</p> <p>Renowned Norwegian artist <a href="https://www.janawinderen.com/">Jana Winderen</a> made a sound composition for the film. She is recording audio environments and creatures which are hard for humans to access, both physically and aurally – deep under water, inside ice or in frequency ranges inaudible to the human ear.</p> <p>Phytoplankton (small plant-like cells) are producing half of all oxygen on earth by photosynthesis, like plants and trees do on land. Zooplankton are forming the base of the food chain of aquatic life. Plankton are also playing an important part in the global carbon cycle. The plankton are threatened by climate change, global warming and acidification of the oceans.</p>
<p>A short documentary about a young artist and his friends in Rotterdam who connect through music and creativity as they wander through a life that they experience as a pleasant hell. Filmmaker pairs contemplative camera work with innovative production design, enabling her to shed light on her characters' inner worlds.</p>
<p>A shoal of herrings, adopting fantastic formations, roams the vast ocean. When seagulls suddenly attack, one small herring finds itself stranded in a tidal pool. As it searches desperately for a way out, it discovers many other sea creatures here. And now there is no time for fear: only by joining forces can they hope to defend themselves against the hungry seagull.</p>
<p>At the end of the 1940s, Lebanon is sliding towards a devastating conflict. Catholic siblings Emilie and Emir decide to leave for Brazil. Aboard the ship to their new home, Emilie falls in love with Omar, a Muslim merchant. For an enraged and jealous Emir, the relationship is intolerable. As the story unfolds against the backdrop of the majestic rainforest, Emir’s actions and the choice that Emilie subsequently makes lead to disastrous consequences.</p>
<p>The found fragments of exile bring life to an unfinished film started by a Brazilian artist who lived in Los Angeles. Working under a pseudonym, the unknown filmmaker lingers on absences, empty landscapes and disembodied voices. These visual vacancies act as apparitions of a distant Brazil wrought by US Imperialism and military dictatorship. An unfinished piece, the film portrays the lingering fragments of work as dispersed as the diasporic maker.</p>
<p>Like any industrious coastal town or city, Rio de Janeiro's port region has always been a hub for the confluence of cultures, nationalities and identities. Since 2013, it has also formed the basis of a research project for filmmaker. Her third feature-length film shifts away from straightforward documentary and towards a more fictionalised form as it presents the story of Muanza, a woman born in the Kingdom of Kongo in the early nineteenth century and trafficked to Brazil, who awakens to find herself in the present, roaming the streets of Rio’s rapidly changing port region, known as ‘Pequena Africa’, or Little Africa.</p>
<p>Sophie and Jessica are anthropomorphic beings that wander through different worlds – searching for themselves and for one another. Their bizarre and battered appearances are modelled with so much detail you can almost touch them. The terrifying, but endearing result leaves an impression that we’d perhaps rather forget – but at the same time also poignantly asks what causes us to feel this way.</p>
<p>In 1947, the Franco regime opened the first film school in Spain. Originally it was called Instituto de Investigaciones y Experiencias Cinematográficas, but from 1961 until it closed in 1975 it was known as Escuela Oficial de Cinematografía. This is the story of how under López García and Sáenz de Heredia two generations of geniuses blossomed at this institution. The school’s impact was felt far beyond Spain, including in Colombia where graduate Jose María Arzuaga would later become the mentor of Luis Ospina.</p>
<p>Denmark, mid-eighteenth century. With the begrudging approval of the royal court, retired captain and social outcast Ludvig Kahlen sets out to the barren plains of Jutland, hoping to turn it into arable territory and secure wealth and honour for himself. However to achieve his goal, he must overcome the cold-blooded landlord Frederik De Schinkel, who sees Kahlen as a trespasser on his domain. The drama unfolds at a brisk pace, with an inner necessity that draws it inexorably towards a devastating conclusion. Adapted from 2011 novel The Captain and Ann Barbara, this widescreen spectacle is powered by Mads Mikkelsen as a tenacious, resourceful pioneer whose unshakeable allegiance is to the crown, but whose motivations are all personal.</p>
<p>The ‘book of life’ is a familiar metaphor: the typical progression of birth, family, career, death… But have we entered the era of the punched tape of life? In this prophetic montage, set to electronic music, the director intercuts early computerised work systems with glimpses of people frolicking in nature. Is everything recorded on film destined to become mere digital data, fitting a stereotype of existence? Or does real life continue to resist its encoding?</p>
<p>Roberto Hurtado is a very rich man – but also a seriously ill one. The main cure for his ailment is the fresh blood of young men. And so, ever so often, his driver, Perfecto, must walk the seedier streets of town to trap boys of a fitting age. Then he drains them to death, sometimes helped by Hurtado's nurse, Florencia, or Ever, the driver of Hurtado's son Adolfo. But, there’s another killer with similar tastes on the loose</p>
<p>Only in 1976, the materials filmed could be sent to Venezuela where de la Barra finished it in this hybrid style. The fictional material now becomes a reason to reflect on the Unidad Popular period, especially the illusions – if not outright mistakes – made by a Left unwilling to believe what their opponents were willing to and indeed would do. Queridos compañeros became one of the last exile films to begin production in Chile.</p>
<p>Against a backdrop of the beaches of 1940s South Africa, Questioning the Existence of Alec is a voyage shared by friends from adolescence to adulthood. Roger Horn masterfully uses 8mm found footage, stop motion and additional in-camera effects, taking us on a chimerical journey that blurs the lines between past and present. “It's as if you were never here.”</p>
<p>Taking place in post World War II London, the film recreates the radical anti-colonial sphere in the city at that time. Two important figures come together, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti and Sylvia Wynter, to imagine a revolutionary play. Mixing narrative reenactment with documentation of the making of the film, A Radical Duet is a radical reworking of archival material and histories.</p>
<p>Rainboy tells the story of a boy who waters the clouds, but when he accidentally angers the sun, he teams up with the rain clouds to make the sun happy again.</p>
<p>Your brother Jacob has been ensconced in the world of addictive pixels and languishing souls that is Realmbreak Hotel for a while now. Can you convince him to come home – or will you get lost yourself? Don your VR headset and step straight into this dreamy world, where you can traverse an actual set and use your mic to communicate with your fellow characters, moulding your own story. Behind the scenes, the characters are played live by actors Bram Gerrits, Claire Bender and others. Too much of a challenge? Then witness someone else take it on.</p>
<p>The director re-entered Chile in secrecy to film this exposé on the privatisation of education under Pinochet and how the lower classes were adversely affected. The film was finished in Mozambique on invitation from the nation's film institute. Gonçalves then relocated to focus on making documentaries about Mozambican life and culture.</p>
<p>Sometime in the past but not a thing of the past, there is a fictitious Latin American country that could be each and any of them. Its president, residing in Old World Parisian splendour, receives news that back home a coup has been staged. So, to quell the uprising, he must return for a while. Once order is restored, he returns to his life of luxury – only to find out that news of his brutal campaign has made its way to Europe and so, he is no longer welcome there. But a new cycle of violence will change all that once again...<br /> <br /> Based on the eponymous 1976 novel by Alejo Carpentier, one of Cuba’s greatest writers, Miguel Littin creates a splendid, visually luscious and stunning master fable on the Latin American state of things – which is, of course, applicable to the rest of the world as well. The combination of Littin and Carpentier is more than fitting, particularly on a biographical level, considering that both spent many years in exile and created many of their best works abroad. Regis Debray, one of the leading Left-wing figures of the day and a known Unidad Popular-sympathiser, co-writing the scenario, perfectly rounds things off.</p>
<p>The title of Tanaka Toshihiko’s ambitious exploration of human relationships is polysemous. A genderless given name, the kanji character can similarly represent a variety of meanings. As such, it’s the perfect symbol for this portrait of early thirtysomething company employee Matsushita Hikari. Her life is stable and seemingly without worry, unlike many of those around her. But it’s through their struggles that they find their counterparts in life – the balance in relationships that steadies them. Hikari lacks this ballast and this begins to worry her. However, on a trip into the mountains of Hokkaido she encounters a Deaf landscape photographer, Masato. Through him Hikari embarks on a journey that will transform her sense of being and connectedness with the world.<br /> <br /> Working with a cast and crew of mostly non-professionals and students, Tanaka’s impressive directorial debut (he also produced, edited and acted in it) unfurls at a measured pace, the drama’s tempo perfectly attuned to the shifts in Hikari’s worldview. By contrasting the exquisite beauty of the Hokkaido landscape with often raw emotions of his characters, the film successfully mines our feelings towards loneliness, dependency and the feelings that bind us together or tear us apart.</p>
<p>One of the very few Chilean exile films made in the Netherlands – at the now closed Vrije Academie-Psychopolis in The Hague. Three actors sit side-by-side facing the camera and laugh. Sometimes, the camera zooms in on a single face, the overall effect is disquieting, bordering on scary.</p>
<p>A couple live an obsessively ordered life, together with a monkey and an anglerfish. They go through their daily rituals of together-life – like synchronised swimming, but are sleeping separately – until one of them decides it’s time to die, and the other, remorseful and guilt-ridden, takes off on a journey of self-discovery to an unknown island. Rather than find solace in their odyssey, they gain a deeper understanding of what it means to be alive.</p>
<p>A brief overview of the achievements of Unidad Popular and how life became better for the Chilean people, until the Pinochet regime reversed these gains. A mixture of live action by Chilean artists and collages created by one of the few genuine GDR avant garde filmmakers.</p>
<p>As college life comes to a close, roommates and lovers Suku and Charlie prepare to part ways. They spend their final days together drinking on the beach, discussing literature, making love and taking long drives down deserted roads. A health emergency forces Suku to leave town early, and when he returns following a near-death experience, he finds Charlie leading a spectral existence, intimate to him but invisible to everyone else.</p>
<p>In the temple of film, we are invited to peel back our eyelids and stare straight into the sun. We are here to worship the light in the darkness, the lunar and solar rituals that move the body into fits of dance. For the initiated, a manifestation of the cult of cinema.</p> <p>Music composed by Lluvia de palos </p>
<p>Seeking to explore his newfound power to perceive beyond the strictures of time, Cambodian migrant Jit travels to Phimai, Thailand, believed to be the site of the epic conflict between prince Prajit, his beloved Orapim and Phommathat the King. In this temple town, Jit meets Pim and Tat, a young couple drifting apart, and together, the trio find themselves reprising the love triangle of legend.</p>
<p>Wrestlers Choi Heehwa, Kim Dahye, Yang Yoonseo, Song Songhwa and Lim Soojeong are novices of the Kolping Women's Ssireum Team. A women's sport that was only accepted by the Korean Ssireum Association in 1999 and only began to receive attention ten years later when Lim Soojeong won the championship.</p>
<p>Rumours about a mythical free land sow havoc in an ultra-regulated society where citizens wear paper bags on their heads to dissolve their differences. In this stylish sci-fi animation, a well-oiled system with echoes of George Orwell’s 1984, starts crumbling when whispers of a land where freedom reigns begin to spread. The hero, a fresh council member in love with a free-spirited girl, finds himself involved in a complicated net of incidents that open his eyes to a new reality.</p>
<p>Schlafsand (the sand that makes us sleep) is here our refutation of the existential threat linked to human induced climate change. Shot in Switzerland, a land famous for its breathtaking mountain landscapes and its comfortable living standards, the film investigates the visual evidence of this denial. From a coal mine to a dying glacier, the film uses pictorial beauty to address the political and social blindness surrounding climate change.</p>
<p>“The visual is essentially pornographic”, wrote Fredric Jameson, adding that “pornographic films are thus only the potentiation of films in general, which ask us to stare at the world as though it were a naked body”. Turning down the Prince’s invitation to watch the passionate lovemaking between the Evil Queen and the Hunter, Snow White retorts, “Rather than look, I’d rather hear”.</p>
<p>Sovereignty starts with food and within the power of self-governance, seeds have all the might. Seeds is an exaltation of the kernel of life, and in the case of Mexico that is the humble corn. The smallest of objects can contain the histories of man and through them, we germinate freedom.</p>
<p>Born from the snake of sacrifice, Sensemayá is shamanic and demonic, ecstatic and fantastic. A slight manipulation of home movie footage changes its context completely. Small moments from decades-old holidays in Mexico take on the weight of eternal myths full of euphoric rapture and evil evocations. A dance, a trance, a trip to the temples.</p>
<p>Seven Fragments of Her Life is a hand-drawn animation from pianist, illustrator. In the film, we follow a solitary woman as she explores and makes sketches in Rotterdam, the city in which she lives. When her sketchbook lands on the train tracks, she’s impelled to see the many colours of the city through the people around her.</p>
<p>Set on a moving train on a rain-soaked night, a chance encounter between a 32-year-old everyman and an 8,000-year-old immortal – and a rat!– triggers a series of events that will intertwine their destinies. Amidst moral dilemmas and unexpected compassion, the ordinary man grapples with survival while the immortal – played with no small amount of relish by the charismatic Nivin Pauly – seeks to heal centuries-old wounds. Tamil filmmaker Ram’s fifth feature is a cinematic mediation on Tamil philosophy, whilst simultaneously offering an exploration of love, pain, suffering, compassion and redemption – what might surprise anyone familiar with Ram’s previous work is how markedly different, in tone, style and scale Seven Seas Seven Hills is.</p>
<p>World War II has just ended. In a ruin that was once a diner, a woman forced into sex work, a small boy and a soldier meet. While the world around them transitions from terror to dismay these three survivors, each carrying their own set of scars, are looking for safety. A chamber drama that segues into a road movie of sorts, the film explores a new reality: where the coming of age of the nation is anchored to the coming of a young boy.</p>
<p>Rocks are people too. At least, that’s the basis of the director’s deliciously offbeat sophomore feature, whose rainbow palette is one of the film’s many treats. A celestial body makes its way through the Earth’s atmosphere, transforming into a young woman on impact. But with that change goes all memory of what she was before, leaving her in a strange present, with an uncertain future. She keenly observes human lives, gaining insights into beings like herself, which includes Zheng Zhe, who believes that every object has a unique sound. If that’s true, what sound does she project into the universe?</p>
<p>Minas Gerais in Southeastern Brazil, is a place whose identity, history and even topography has been greatly influenced by the mining industry. Taking a very personal approach, the filmmaker explores this legacy within the region she calls home. Weaving in and out of narrative, archival footage and documentation, The Silence of Iron challenges the way we look and think about landscape.</p>
<p>Two campers follow their clothes as they float away on a stream in the Belgian Ardennes. Along their journey through nature, they observe the various ways that people disturb the peace. Illustrator-animator Nicolas Piret has an incredible eye for detail and uses only a single sheet of paper to tell this story. With this impressively meticulous approach, he deploys a playful form of storytelling.</p>
<p>The Silent Path, an unassuming, composite portrait of Father Bert Hagendoorn, a Dutch missionary who worked for fifty years in the autonomous Indonesian province of Papua. Given the name Soebertono Mote by his hosts, Hagendoorn was involved in several community-oriented projects in the region, at times against the wishes of his diocese, such as when he campaigned for the use of contraceptives to combat the AIDS epidemic.</p>
<p>Titi pushes the concept of unconditional love to its extremes with prank phone calls to his mother who is working abroad in Italy. Sorin reluctantly goes along for the ride but seems to be struggling with secret battles and desires of his own. Are we witnessing adolescent fun gone too far, or are these signs of destructive narcissism and a harm to come?</p>
<p>Sourdough Creek, a logging town few miles north of nowhere, is sprucing up for a major motion picture shoot. The town’s corrupt mayors, Jeb and Zeke, plan to raze a fishing village to build a resort, crushing all resistance at the barrel of a gun. But in their way stands the combined force of Hellbug, a fearsome super-insect that inhabits the adjoining woods, and Slide, a masked avenger who doubles as a guitar-playing cowboy at the local watering hole.</p>
<p>They say that love is all you need, but what happens when those who are supposed to care most about you are the perpetrators of violence? Or, when you cause harm to the ones that you love? A surreal and touching 360° experience, Small Acts of Violence seeks to expand our conception of domestic violence beyond simplistic assumptions and binaries, and in doing so, raises urgent questions about intimacy and safety.</p>
<p>A telephone, an ashtray, a tape recorder, a rough corner of the wall – these are among the only objects we see in the opening movement of Singaporean filmmaker austere chamber drama Small Hours of the Night. A woman is being interrogated in a dark room by a stern young man on a rainy night. As the hours pass, identities and historical time periods begin to blur. Her testimony becomes a scrambled, personal record of her country’s complicated legal history.</p>
<p>“We are the gods of technology. In the beginning, we built its shape, but over time it has come to shape us.” The unmistakable and evocative voice of rock icon Debbie Harry echoes through the void, acting as a narrative guide through this timely, sensorial documentary about the interwoven relationships between cinema, humanity and technology.</p>
<p>In quite a few ways, Somnambulance plays like a pendant to Georgica. If the latter is set in the period soon after the occupation of Estonia by the Soviet Union, then the former takes place during the last autumn of independence, in the midst of the Red Army's advance.</p>
<p>Song of All Ends gently leads us into the daily life of a family living in the Shatila Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut, sixteen months after the dreadful port explosion. With slow determination the atmosphere builds through intriguing, as-yet unconnected, images in stark black-and-white – the face of a young girl, a teddy bear, rags flapping in the breeze, roofs strewn with rubble and tarpaulins. Water streams everywhere and skeletal buildings are set against a grey sky littered with clouds.</p>
<p>Is it still possible to narrate the wonders, contradictions and colours of Naples after so much cinema, Italian and otherwise, has dissected its beauty and miseries? The answer is yes and it's two filmmakers from Rome that are responsible.</p>
<p>The opening images set a brooding tone: a man on foot, gazing at dark, scarcely inhabited mountains. He’s about to investigate a string of child disappearances and will soon cross paths with a woman looking into murders in the same, intensely secretive village. These intertwined cases keep turning up references to a horrific local legend, the supernatural “soul eater”. But wasn’t this just a myth parents used to scare the young?<br /> </p>
<p>How can we cancel this displacement?" Impossible questions are posed to refugees, queries that form the springboard for an associative collage with an ironic slant. With a surprising combination of archive material and video game footage, filmmaker Malaz Usta portrays the absurd reality and consequences of displacement. As viewers, we get a taste of the confusion, insecurity and loneliness that are part of this experience.</p>
<p>Two frantic views of Roberto Taroni and Luisa Cividin's private life in New York. The first faces a double window at night, with Cividin smoking and getting dressed while Taroni putters around; the second shows a studio-like wide room, a toilet and ironing board, with Taroni looking lost in some work while now Cividin putters around.</p>
<p>A young woman wakes up feeling like there is a hole in her chest, as she goes about her daily routines she tries to navigate her fragmented memories. Later that day, a mysterious goat appears: reality and fiction seem to be slowly blending. In search of answers and attempting to break free from her anxiety and feelings of powerlessness, she ventures on a transformative journey into the night.</p>
<p>In exchange for his overdue rent, Kutani, an out-of-job director in Japan’s declining adult film industry, is recruited by his landlord to evict another tenant, Iseki. A struggling screenwriter, Iseki is surprised by the rain-drenched Kutani’s unconventional manner and invites him inside to dry off. Over several drinks, the men recount their failed relationships, unaware that they have more in common than they expect.<br /> <br /> Transplanting Matsuura Hisaki’s eponymous 2001 source novel to post-Fukushima Japan, veteran screenwriter Arai Haruhiko’s A Spoiling Rain presents a lush and melancholy ode to failure. Centred on deadbeats cast adrift in a waning world, the film oscillates between the present and the past, charting the parallel decay of two relationships which seem to mirror the waning fortunes of the pink film industry.<br /> <br /> With an offhand irony that comes with certain life experiences, A Spoiling Rain delivers an account of male self-deception, doomed to wreck lives and oblivious to the damage it causes. The romantic destinies of Kutani and Iseki who seem diametrically different in their nature and attitudes to life become enmeshed in odd ways – in their humorous self-absorption and in their cynicism, both casual and corrosive.</p>
<p>Found in the first dictionary of the Egyptian language, is the hieroglyph ‘sr’, meaning ‘giraffe’. The tallest living terrestrial animal, its oldest ancestor roamed the Earth some twenty million years ago. In Lea Hartlaub’s endlessly fascinating film the animal is contextualised in terms of myth, fable, and both natural and human history. The result is as far from the anthropomorphic-centric trend in contemporary nature documentaries as you could get – and all the better for it.<br /> <br /> Divided into diverse episodes, the giraffe is present more as a link between the diverse entries than the main subject of them. A plethora of narrative-driven tableaux, across thirty locations, spirit us through a sweeping history of the world, a genuinely epic story traversing millennia and continents, all anchored to this one creature. One of the remarkable strengths of Hartlaub’s narrative tapestry is its refusal to adopt a rigid formalist approach, instead remaining flexible and agile. This fluidity enhances the storytelling experience, allowing for a diverse and engaging exploration of history. Meditative, immersive, sometimes mischievously witty and often breathtaking in its visual and narrative sweep, sr is as contemplative as it is informed and as captivating as the animal that inspired it.</p>
<p>A civil war rages across a vast, seemingly unpopulated landscape. As men fight and die, a mute woman searches for her son who has been kidnapped by child organ traffickers. She is accompanied by ‘the Steppenwolf’, a reformed ex-convict now hardened into a ruthless investigator. They resemble a bloody odd couple, but are determined to see their mission through, removing every obstacle – most of them human – in their path.<br /> <br /> Following the success of Assault (IFFR 2022), prolific filmmaker Adilkhan Yerzhanov returns with Steppenwolf, his fifteenth feature in twelve years. Maintaining his signature absurdist touch, Steppenwolf stands as a testament to his prowess, skillfully interweaving classic elements from Westerns (with John Ford’s The Searchers, 1956, a key inspiration) road movies and revenge dramas. Yerzhanov's mastery lies in reducing these genres to their elemental core, presenting them in a clean-cut manner, almost resembling the structure of a video game – shoot, get treasure, repeat. This film is his most stylised, visually arresting and genre-defying work to date and as before, he doesn’t hold back on violence: it is bloody, furious and copious. Formally striking, Yerzhanov makes the most of the breathtaking landscape the action unfolds across, its beauty contrasting with the film’s bloodier elements, whose impact might be unbearable had Yerzhanov not leavened it with humour, albeit of the darkest kind.</p>
<p>Speaking Kiswahili on the school grounds is against the language policy. For Bruce Koech, this repressive Anglo-Western education system goes against his rebellious spirit. With the heart of a warrior and an imaginary sensei by his side, Bruce attempts to defy this unjust rule by becoming Stero – a badass hero, honouring his true self and wild spirit. Stero, directed by Tevin Kimathi and Millan Tarus, is a subtle and charming reminder of the power of childhood imagination.</p>
<p>Inside a shopping mall. Storefront after storefront, moving from one promise of consumerist bliss to another, with people casually vanishing, images bleeding into each other, the film suddenly changing its lateral tracking direction. A meditation on a very American realm, a shopping mall, in all its colours and sounds and lights. Pure genius.</p>
<p>Between 1968–73, Ålandic writer Anni Blomqvist published five novels that together chronicle the life of Stormskerry Maja. A simple peasant woman whose days are long and full of hard work, Stormskerry Maja believes in God in an unassuming, humble way, and as years pass, finds herself with a small amount of independence.<br /> <br /> The books were instantly popular in Finland and remain so today. Tiina Lymi's congenial adaptation makes it clear why Maja remains so appealing: because she grew through her suffering, not because of it. She learns and is willing and able to share her new understanding with her husband Janne. Her journey of emancipation is about equality, they both work equally hard to eke out an existence on the barren island of Stormskerry.<br /> <br /> The greatness of Tiina Lymi's adaptation lies in her artistic discretion, Stormskerry Maja is a visual feast and yet feels gracefully unadorned. It's carried by the rhythm of the days, it's anchored in the colour palette of the natural surroundings; it understands that the story's heart, the values of kindness and perseverance, is best understood without anything superficial in the audience's way. Lymi's is the art of lucidity.</p>
<p>When Suli's day starts with an eyeball in her beverage, it's only the beginning of a series of rather absurd events. Various fantastic elements – ranging from an enormous cat to frogs that talk – all seem to be business as usual in Suli’s world. Enriched with casual commentary and a playful sense of humour, the director presents an amusing and clever adventure in four acts. In the format of a storyboard, it leaves plenty of room for our imagination.</p>
<p>The painter's brush draws the first line in this play between instruments. The paintings are connected by the improvised sounds of the musicians. An exciting journey from ear to eye and back again, guided by sharp sounds and flowing lines.</p>
<p>Sounds as if from space. A ribbon of vertical shots show three different bodies of waters rolling from left to right – vertical shots of fire are woven into the movement, slowly replacing the water – and back again until all is water. A simple meditation on some basics of cinema.</p>
<p>A lyrical, impressionistic portrait of Manhattan, partly shot in Kinemacolor, a process that was used in 1915 to obtain colours from black-and-white stock by filming and projecting through synchronised red and green filters. Buildings, parks, sign boards and shop windows dotting the landscape, captured with a roving hand-held camera, dip into and out of abstraction, pulsating with chromatic energy and embodying the whirling sensation of being in a city of colours.</p>
<p>When a family arrives at their villa in a remote coastal village, they find a stranger floating in their swimming pool. The mysterious woman with green fingernails claims to be a botanist and her lingering presence comes to emphasise the distance that already exists between the parents, war-correspondent Isabel and melancholic poet Joe. Tensions mount, temperatures rise and a perfect vacation transforms into a perilous spectacle, magnified by the beauty of the landscape that it erupts across.</p>
<p>While he was alive, Amos Guttman remained a red flag for the notoriously conservative Israeli film establishment. A Romanian migrant, he, never truly found his place in his new home. He was gay and made the nation's first movies on the subject. He was an artist who wanted to make films not for the masses but for the few. Conversely, he wanted to make movies that connected with the rest of the world and not only Israel – works that maybe Derek Jarman or Pedro Almodóvar could watch by chance and feel understood.</p>
<p>We close the programme with a visceral exploration of freedom and autonomy by focusing on its most concrete expression: the breath of life. Flickering images of chest x-rays flash with deep and laboured breaths, a body in duress in black and white. A final reminder of the very real danger involved in righteous struggle.</p>
<p>Hormones pulsate to the rhythm of fourth-period marching band practice. Cheer for the boys! Stay upbeat! Feel the rush of desire! Breathe the rage in deep. Make sure you aren't late for the bell or he might make you stay after school, alone together. These are the lurking aggressions in Teen Girl Fantasy. But whose fantasy was it anyway?</p>
<p>Following her mother’s death, manga artist Soriya travels to her ancestral home in Phnom Penh, with hopes of reconnecting with her distant family and using the visit as inspiration for her work. All goes well initially. Renting an apartment in Metta, a rundown Khmer Rouge-era housing complex, her visit to her maternal relatives finds her welcomed with open arms. But Soriya’s waking hours in the apartment and its surroundings are punctuated by terrifying, bloody visions, almost as though she were a conduit for horrors of the past wanting to seep into the present.</p>
<p>In the dense Colombian jungle, eras jump, genders blur and fluids flow freely. The rubber trees, tapped for their viscous sap, take on another connotation of kink while a 15th century European Missionary tries to tame what is inherently savage. In the thicket of trees, all things are wild, animalistic and queer.</p>
<p>Terminal Island is a portrait of Paradise Lost. Los Angeles, California is a place of immense beauty and a perfect climate, but it is also a nexus for ecological dread. Smoggy skylines, overdevelopment and the dying off of the iconic (and invasive) LA palm tree are some of the clues that Tinseltown is in trouble.</p>
<p>In nine simple vignettes, filmed indoors with a static camera, civilians in Tehran come face to face with individuals vested with power – parents, teachers, functionaries, businessmen – in delicate dialogues that broach taboos, minor and major. These range from hijab to hair colour, from baby naming to dog ownership. Each of the vignettes unfolds as an interview between a visible subject and an offscreen authority who grills them, at times with a sadistic relish.</p>
<p>Once again, Maclean’s work seems to predict the future. Though made in 2012, the film speaks to the tensions between England and Scotland, which have only escalated since the 2016 Brexit referendum. The lion (the symbol of England on the Coat of Arms of the United Kingdom), the unicorn (the symbol of Scotland) and the queen dance the same dance that they have for centuries.</p>
<p>The project consists of a series of performances mediated on the computer screen and built up from web pages, images, ongoing chats, computer code and sound. Solomon’s digital persona appears through streaming video from unusual physical environments such as an ice cave, in a swimming pool, or on a boat cruising through the Amsterdam canals – all while holding a laptop with which she interacts online with her audience in virtual video conference environments.</p>
<p>The director was one of the most outstanding screenwriters of German-language cinema and television. The Thief was a film school exercise, long believed lost and only recently found again. The first of only a few attempts at directing, it encapsulates the director's laid back attitude to life!</p>
<p>Adonis, a young actor at the Beijing Opera dreaming of stardom and a love that transcends the oceans of time, leaves everything behind and exposes himself to a whole new experience. In his late twenties, he yearns to explore new meaning in his life and ends up in the world of the male sex industry. And so he surrenders himself, to daydreams and nightmares alike.</p>
<p>An improvised drumming installation performance which delves into the possibilities that lay at the intersection of music, film and technologically-mediated human interactions. Through the premise of a drummer in conversation with their audience, this expressive work aims to enter uncharted visual and percussive territory while laying trust in the concepts of chance and spontaneity. The rhythms of daily life, the fluidity of time and humankind's relationship with technology all serve as inspiration.</p>
<p>Wind instruments mutate breath into expressions of the soul, the body synchronises and prepares for surrender. Layers amass in the image, colours start to bloom, but our grip on the concrete and rational begins to slip. Allow for the release, give in to the kinetic energy taking over your body, move with the rhythm. “This is the Entranced Earth”. Screened on stunning 35mm.</p> <p>Music composed by Gustavo Nandayapa</p>
<p>Zalán Szakács made the sensuous <strong>Tisztás</strong> after a ten-day exploration of the Romanian region of Transylvania. The film combines interviews with visual interpretations and gathered sounds. Against the backdrop of this remarkable landscape, we watch and listen to the residents and their myths, tales and traditions, that revolve around the connection between culture and nature.</p>
<p>Claire (Kayije Kagame from <strong><a href="https://iffr.com/en/iffr/2023/films/saint-omer" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Saint Omer</a></strong>, IFFR 2023) is an ambitious businesswoman working in La Défense, but the cold corporate environment amplifies her loneliness, pushing her to the verge of breakdown. The office is a prison and the only way out is to burn it down. A psychological horror, with a 1990s-inspired noir aesthetic, with <strong>To Exist Under Permanent Suspicion</strong> Valentin Noujaïm offers a genre-blending glimpse into the microaggressions Black women face in the workplace.</p>
<p>A brief musical musing on themes of loss and grief, featuring a song written and performed by the filmmaker. A short film with a lot of heart that beckons to the audience "May we meet again someday?". I hope we will.</p>
<p>In <strong>Together 99</strong>, Lukas Moodysson reassembles the cast of <a href="https://iffr.com/en/iffr/2001/films/together" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><strong>Together</strong></a><strong> </strong>(IFFR 2001) to take stock of the Tillsammans commune twenty-four years later. It is 1999, and Klasse and Göran are the only remaining members of the group. To raise their flagging spirits, Klasse secretly invites the erstwhile members of the commune for Göran’s birthday bash. As estranged friends catch up with each other over a highly eventful evening, old scars resurface alongside new hopes. </p> <p>Possessing the immediacy of a fly-on-the-wall documentary and the formal wit of a sitcom, <strong>Together 99</strong> crafts a biting ensemble comedy of middle-age disillusionment in which the ideological and sexual certainties of yesteryear have ceased to be. If its predecessor looked at the foibles of communal living through a post-Soviet lens, <strong>Together 99</strong> observes post-internet social atomisation from the vantage point of contemporary cultural politics, this temporal distance equally revealing of our times.</p> <p>Moodysson’s film is motored by social awkwardness, but it gradually deepens to examine the personalities behind character types. The result is a touching, bittersweet portrait of lingering regrets and frustrated desires. A work that assures the viewer that everyone is profoundly, necessarily messed up in their own way.</p>
<p><strong>Tonalli </strong>is cinema as ritual, with pulsating images, the rhythm of the music and the ecstasy of light flashing in a darkened room. The film has three movements: Xochiyáoyotl (the 'Flower war'), Tlecacitl (a solar-lunar ceremony where Xolotl, the god of lightning and death, emerges) and Tonalli (the sun's radiating warmth). In collaboration with student musicians from Codarts who will perform a live accompaniment, this Mesoamerican incantation will stir our Rotterdam audiences.</p>
<p>In contrast to the titles of Angelidi’s other films, <strong>Topos</strong> is simply one word, it suggests in the most general way possible, ‘spaces’. Which is, in fact, what we see throughout the film – spaces. Theatrical spaces usually dedicated to the re-staging of a famous scene or sight from a painting known to experts of the Western canon. Some of these are intricately stage-bound, others feel stylised but are set in a real environment – Angelidi does not insist on a formal approach.</p> <p>To further muddle the artistic waters a bit, we see here and there projections in the background. Or groups consciously arranged into a <em>tableau vivant</em> in the middle of an already abstract artistic display as if to satirise the concept of artifice itself. So what do all these levels of alienation do to the way we see women's bodies, how do they warp the idea of beauty – in which way does pain become a key to female existence? There's little in cinema quite like <strong>Topos</strong> and surely nothing else that looks at Western art in a similar critical style.</p>
<p>A film on Nigerian emigration to Rome, seen through the eyes of the migrants themselves. The Torino Boys are a group of young Nigerians who travel down from Turin to Rome to watch a football match where one of their compatriots is playing. They meet the Roma Girls, with whom they discuss the problems of a community transplanted from the other side of the world, struggling to find its place within an indifferent society.<br /> <br /> <strong>Torino Boys</strong> tells a love story that offers a social cross-section unprecedented in Italian film production. Touching on topics such as trafficking, prostitution, marginalisation, extended family, soul music, hairstyles and even magic. Told with a light and good-humoured tone that conceals deep intentions, <strong>Torino Boys </strong>also features a hip-hop soundtrack that has made history in modern Italian music.<br /> A breakthrough film that began as a television project but broke out of the shackles of the small screen to land successfully at Locarno and the Turin Film Festival, where it won an audience award. <strong>Torino Boys </strong>became a phenomenon within the festival circuit.</p>
<p>Nova (Sigrid ten Napel) is an aspiring artist who can’t seem to get her career off the ground. She feels the reason is her lack of life experience. While it may seem like there is no quick fix for a problem like this, the dark fetish app Sano offers just that. With a few taps, users can gain traumatic experiences, including torture. Nova connects with her darkest side, but then bites off more than she can chew in this Dutch body horror film.</p>
<p>In <strong>Trees of Rotterdam</strong>, Alice Ladenburg and Ollie Palmer portray the greenest inhabitants of the city of Rotterdam. In a single, virtual shot we glide through the city, while listening to stories about its green giants – that incidentally outnumber the people. Initially the artificiality of the imagery seems to contrast with the nature we see, though eventually, the two intertwine like stems – the city embraces the trees and the trees embrace the city.</p>
<p>Besides Miguel Littin, Patricio Guzmán and Raúl Ruiz, Helvio Soto was the most famous Chilean director to go into exile. During the Frei Montalva government and the Unidad Popular era, Soto had directed films similar in tone and style to the popular political cinema en vogue in Italy, France and the United States at that time.</p> <p>His very Damiani<em>-esk</em> titled <strong>Metamorfosis del jefe de la policía política</strong> (1973) was among the very first Chilean films to be screened outside the country after the putsch. With <strong>La triple muerte del tercer personaje</strong>, Soto continues in this vein, albeit in a decidedly more paranoid as well as allegorical register. After surviving incarceration and torture in a Latin American dictatorship, journalist Arturo writes a book about his experience. In his descriptions of the people and situations, he unwittingly unveils certain information deemed vital by a mysterious, internationally operating Organisation which goes on a killing spree. While Arturo finds himself in the centre of an affair beyond his immediate understanding, another prisoner who also survived slowly reveals himself as a key figure in this operation – player or target? One of the most enigmatic and suspenseful films of this corpus!</p>
<p>A true lost treasure from the twilight years of New German Cinema – when it was still shining so brightly that not all shades and hues could be seen with equal clarity. Well 'lost', among enthusiasts of Arthurian fiction, the film always held a special place for being arguably the most faithful cinematic retelling of this mediaeval Celtic legend. It was also one of the more serious attempts at grappling with complicated subjects like the conflicts between the ancient Gods and Christianity.</p> <p>But still, few ever heard of it, for rarely was it screened, most likely because of the release of John Boorman’s <strong>Excalibur </strong>(1981), also set in Arthuriana and perhaps easier to embrace.</p> <p><strong>Tristan and Isolde – Director's Cut</strong> has a lyrical quietude – simple set design, a restraint in its use of colours, but also a will to tell an engaging and entertaining story. It is the first credited lead for Christoph Waltz of Tarantino fame and Max Zihlmann's casually laconic dialogues add another layer of uniqueness to the film's classical Hollywood-beauty. Having existed in several versions, Von Fürstenberg has now created his definitive take on the material.</p>
<p>A visual accompaniment to Tōru Takemitsu's sonically sparse composition 'Corona for Pianist(s)'. Taking inspiration from the graphic score that interprets notes as circles and dots, the film focuses on the micro, elemental and sensual. Light flickering on water, the patterns of landscape, the movement of hands: here time is slowed and a great sense of focus is thrust upon us.</p>
<p>Broadcast on the Austrian Television (ORF) in June 1972, <strong>TV & VT-Works</strong> comprises a series of ‘tele-actions’ in which a cigar-smoking newsreader is periodically interrupted by public interventions raising the question “Is this Art?”. Disrupting the smooth flow of information and thus the illusion of comprehending the world from one’s living room, these actions interrogate TV temporality to examine the mechanisms of production and spectatorship. A work of culture jamming avant la lettre.</p>
<p>Lithuanian artist Deimantas Narkevičius’ alluring period piece <strong>Twittering Soul</strong> is set in the late 1800s, yet it is haunted by the spectre of the twentieth century. It’s the dawn of automobiles, human aviation, psychoanalysis and of course, cinema. Indifferent to, but not ignorant of, these historical upheavals, a small wooded village in southern Lithuania prepares for doomsday.</p> <p>Two women discuss afterlife, an itinerant musician witnesses strange happenings on his journey, accounts of stones that grow in size and float in the air, a band of faeries weave busily away in a cottage, a feudal lord pores over an optical contraption as his daughter is warned about the witches that haunt a nearby tree. The nature of these events remains mysterious, the connection between them tenuous. Like Breughel’s <em>Netherlandish Proverbs</em>, the film weaves them into a sumptuous, mystical rural tapestry embodying a distinct, pre-modern conception of life and beyond.</p> <p>Narkevičius draws his material liberally from Lithuanian folk song, superstitions, sayings, prayers and games, concocting a work that hovers between reality, fantasy, dreams and visions. Presented in stereoscopic 3D and shot with a painterly attention to light, <strong>Twittering Soul</strong> gazes at once into the past and the future.</p>
<p>Angelina Vázquez looks at the exile situation. She shows her fellow country folks huddled together in apartments stuffed with Chileniana while wrestling with the demands of their new environment. She later described the conundrum like this: “[Our] cultural identity is not our mountains, empanadas, red wine, and our cueca, even though it is all of that as well.”</p>
<p>Orlando Lübbert is a very particular case in the context of Chilean cinema in exile: while many directors moved between countries, he was the only one who worked in both German states. Starting in the Federal Republic of Germany with <strong><a href="https://iffr.com/en/iffr/2024/films/die-f%C3%A4uste-vor-der-kanone" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Die Fäuste vor der Kanone</a></strong> (1975; co-director: Gastón Ancelovici), he then signed a contract with DEFA in the GDR where his most important film was made: <strong>Der Übergang</strong>.</p> <p>It’s late 1973, several months after the putsch, Carlos, a textile factory worker, tries to flee Chile via the Andes to Argentina. On his way he meets two fellow refugees: Lorenzo, a white collar worker and Juan, a student who had been tortured by the junta. The three join forces – but this union will be tested by circumstances…</p> <p>A fable about human nature in extraordinary circumstances realised in a quietist, humble style. Lübbert knows how to focus on his characters' moral dilemmas and psychological breaking points without making any dramaturgical fuss. Not all will make it across the border and some will be forced to act in ways they never considered themselves capable of. But the vast emptiness of the mountains couldn't care less.</p>
<p>The Sylvester Stallone vehicle <strong>Rambo III</strong> (1988), is both a superficial commentary on the failure of war to resolve differences and a surreal interpretation of American exceptionalism through the actions of the individual. Although set in Afghanistan, with the hero besting a Russian army, the film was shot in the Israeli desert, with the involvement of the country’s military. Filmmaker Daniel Mann employs a variety of approaches to unpack what was to most audiences a brainless shoot ‘em-up, but to Mann is a work of many meanings.<br /> <br /> Interspersed with the reading of letters Mann wrote the Hollywood star, <strong>Under the Blue Sun</strong> contrasts Rambo’s exploits with the ways the media in our reality constructs narratives around conflict. Through Mann's investigation, he encounters Bashir, a Palestinian Bedouin and self-taught artist who worked on <strong>Rambo III</strong>. Bashir's experience as an indigenous individual stripped of tribal land in Israel, serves as a powerful reflection not only of colonial politics but also of how these dynamics are perpetuated and amplified in mass productions. Mann’s film delicately unveils interconnected narratives that define the geopolitical, physical and environmental landscape of Israel/Palestine. The result is an intelligent and discursive exploration of propaganda, war and colonialism that manages to avoid falling into the trap of militancy, and ultimately leaves us wondering if we truly need another Rambo in this world.</p>
<p>Helicopter footage examines the desert, surveying ancient natural formations and human interventions. Dynamite changes the face of the land. Farmers work their fields. Children play hide-and-seek. Employing archival footage, <strong>UNDR</strong> constructs an eerie narrative of calculated incursion. We cannot help but recall that Palestine remains a land subjected to aerial surveillance that seeks to appropriate the landscape.</p>
<p>The year is 2070 and you are about to be catapulted into an absurd, yet eerily plausible yoga session. Through an odyssey that transcends the bounds of conventional cinema, a captivating experiment unfolds, one that plunges its participants into profound contemplations on the interplay between humanity, nature and the wellness industry.<br /> <br /> At the heart of this journey, is a gilded figure who gracefully undertakes a series of poses under the guidance of an off-screen narrator. Through celestial cues, serenity takes a surreal turn, evolving into a paradoxical and ultimately rather uncomfortable experience. <strong>Unfolding</strong> disrupts the instructor's role as a spiritual guide, illuminating the delicate dance between humanity and the environment.<br /> <br /> Anne Fehres and Luke Conroy weave a narrative that challenges preconceived notions about our relationship to the natural world. By doing so, they invite viewers to reimagine their surroundings and actively respond to the climate crisis, through a distinctive, emotional approach that fosters empathy for both the human and the non-human in our existence. Their methodology combines visual stimulation, profound content and a dash of humour, providing a unique lens through which to explore the urgent issue of our time.</p>
<p>Mimi is a lovely little girl who is perfect in every way. According to her magic mirror, she is the cutest in the land – as long as she never ages. Maclean’s first fully animated video work, <strong>upside</strong> <strong>mimi ᴉɯᴉɯ uʍop</strong> is a twisted fairytale that’s equal parts Disney and TikTok.</p>
<p>Two men approach a pair of escalators; each boards a separate one, forming an uncanny mirroring effect. This final shot of <strong>USSA</strong> sums up the film, which juxtaposes images and languages of USSR, USA and elsewhere in order to stress not differences but similarities. Military rituals; identical street fixtures or architectural facades multiplying in a serial progression; the zombie-like gestures of the civilian masses: all are alike. Featuring an inventive soundtrack montage by Marie-Catherine Miqueau.</p>
<p>Love and Death meet again in <strong>Utopians</strong>.<strong> </strong>Hins, a dreamy student with a passion for literature and a thirst for a deeper understanding of life finds himself overwhelmed by Antonio and Swan, a charismatic teacher and his elegant assistant. Charmed by their love for art and wisdom, Hins plunges into the uncharted waters of spiritual learning and the pleasures of the flesh, taking his religious girlfriend Joey along for the ride.<br /> <br /> <strong>Utopians</strong> resumes Scud’s meditation on the true notion of home and belonging to a place that permeates <a href="https://iffr.com/en/iffr/2024/films/permanent-residence" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><strong>Permanent Residence</strong></a><strong> </strong>(2008), and moves towards the idea that Utopia could be a place on Earth, a safe harbour for the soul to breathe freely – only to find it in Bangkok. In a way foreshadowing <a href="https://iffr.com/en/iffr/2024/films/thirty-years-of-adonis" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><strong>Thirty Years of Adonis</strong></a> (2017) and <a href="https://iffr.com/en/iffr/2024/films/apostles" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><strong>Apostles</strong></a><strong> </strong>(2022), his two following films, Scud here places his literary and philosophical fervours into the narrative equation. Moreover, in <strong>Utopians</strong>, he also lets his cinephilic inspirations fly free, mainly playing around with hints and references to Pasolini and Greenaway.<br /> <br /> For those unfamiliar with Scud's favoured mise-en-scène, the film is also rich with naked people and explicit sex.</p>
<p>Alvaro de la Barra went into exile without knowing. He was little more than a year old, unaware that his parents, Ana María Puga and Alejandro de la Barra, both activists in the MIR Revolutionary Left Movement, had been assassinated near his kindergarten. Alvaro was spirited out of his fatherland under a false name and a forged birth certificate, growing up first in France and then Venezuela with his paternal uncle, filmmaker Pablo de la Barra – whose <strong><a href="https://iffr.com/en/iffr/2024/films/queridos-compa%C3%B1eros" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Queridos compañeros</a></strong> became a point of departure for <strong>Venían a buscarme</strong>.</p> <p>In a style similar to the classic of Chilean exile cinema, Alvaro investigates the family archive, including video tapes which are played, discussed, paused, commented on and placed in historical perspective. Also, painful personal details are discovered, like Alvaro referring to Pablo as “dad”. But it's not only Alvaro who comments – Pablo does so as well, making this a dialogue between two generations of exiles whose memories are, for obvious reasons, completely different. And so are their feelings regarding the past, one remembers and the one discovers their history through documents. Alvaro gets his real name back – but will he ever get a true home?</p>
<p>After losing her boyfriend in a mysterious mass extinction event, in which all the men in the world die by suicide, Joyce seeks solace at Nostalgyl, a company helping women reconnect with their past experiences. But when her emotional dependence turns into addiction, Joyce is swept into the dark recesses of a post-masculine world.</p> <p>With its intense colour palette, inventive prosthetics and intricate editing, Gonzalo Fernandez’s dystopian psychodrama<strong> Venus </strong>plunges the viewer into a lurid universe of an oppressive atmosphere. Lingering close to Joyce’s perspective, the film shuttles rapidly between reality and fantasy, experience and memory, such that we come to share the protagonist’s anxiety and confusion. Drawing elements from sci-fi and body horror, <strong>Venus</strong> opens the door to a nightmarish fantasy of a mythical nature.</p>
<p>Kumaresan is a newly appointed police constable in a district plagued by an armed resistance against the government’s mining interests. His loyalties are tested not only by the harsh treatment from his superiors, but also by the daily violence against the local population, and an encounter with rebel leader Perumal forces him to make a choice.</p> <p>Often in critics’ parlance, every new film is considered its director’s magnum opus, but in the case of <strong>Viduthalai I & II – The Film</strong>, this designation actually rings true. Rarely seen since the days of David Lean, Tamil master Vetri Maaran (<strong><a href="https://iffr.com/en/iffr/2018/films/ruthless-man" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Ruthless Man</a></strong>, IFFR 2018) has created an epic tale marked by both a visual grandeur and an epic breath of life. While the first half is more plot-driven, ending in a marvellous set piece of Perumal’s capture, the second half offers an elaboration in moral and political discourses told as a dense suspense thriller, before concluding in a devastating finale.</p> <p>Audiences in Rotterdam are in for a treat: while part one was shown last year to great success and part two is to be released sometime later this year, audiences can here experience the full epic story as originally imagined by the director!</p>
<p>In Die Vogelpredigt, the protagonists of a film Clemens Klopfenstein directed over two decades ago (Das Schweigen der Männer, 1997), Max and Polo, are now looking for him as they need work. Playing with the harsh reality for actors in Swiss cinema, the two actors go on a quest for Klopfenstein in hopes of acting in a new film about sex, crime and thrills.<br /> <br /> Despite art not selling so well these days, they must first find Klopfenstein, who has vanished. Headed for an Italy rich in myths and visions, Max and Polo go on searching for the filmmaker with their heads full of ideas for scenes, including one of Ursula Andress at the centre of a pietà and several others in which a delightful Migros employee appears regularly. Landing its message without the need to watch Das Schweigen der Männer, Die Vogelpredigt goes down a rabbit hole with Klopfenstein that will certainly make the filmmaker's latest, Cinema bruciato (2024), shine ever more brightly.</p>
<p>Asagi's classmates don’t seem concerned when her friend Satake suddenly dies in a strange way: they just continue their conversations about food and karaoke. While Asagi struggles with her loss, everything around her becomes increasingly absurd. A promising, idiosyncratic psychological horror debut with a generous dollop of dark humour and an eerie atmosphere.</p>
<p>What would you be willing to do to escape an intolerable, dead-end living situation? How far would you compromise on basic ethics? For Hassan and his Egyptian pals in <strong>Voy! Voy! Voy!</strong>, any way out is preferable to the rut they’re in. Europe beckons as a realm of utopian opportunity and a privileged path to success is offered by sports. Hassan’s choice is novel: football as played by the visually impaired (the title refers to the Spanish word for ‘I’m here’ used by players to signal their position). Little does he realise, however, how widely shared his bold playing-blind deception may be…</p>
<p>A psychiatrist debating the link between his choice of profession and his mental state, gets on his boat and embarks on a voyage. Grappling with his own depression, he revisits encounters with former patients. His attempt at self-therapy becomes an anthology of short stories, where Yuan (exiled to Inner Mongolia under Mao's Chinese re-education policy), Ming (a young man with disabilities), Leni (a German columnist coping with the death of her mother) and Sebastian (an artist romantically involved with a young woman in the Netherlands) become the characters.<br /> <br /> <strong>Voyage</strong> is a further cinematic excursion into the depths of the human mind, that offers different perspectives on the realities of depression and delves deep in the search for its source. In doing so a new motif that will become evident in Scud’s later films surfaces – ghosts and the afterlife. The nakedness of men stands in for the nakedness of souls, and sexual encounters and relationships act as proof of life with distorted undertones. <strong>Voyage</strong> dances in the space between expressions of radiant vulnerability and absurdity. </p>
<p>Mary, Billybud and Fumbleton are the stars of the 80s TV show <em>Wander to Wonder</em>. After their creator dies, they have to fend for themselves in the studio. As their hunger grows, the show becomes increasingly grim.<br /> <br /> This sinister stop-motion film – made with a remarkable attention to detail – was selected for the 2023 Venice Film Festival. Previously, filmmaker Nina Gantz made the animated short <strong><a href="https://iffr.com/en/iffr/2016/films/edmond" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Edmond</a></strong> (IFFR 2015), which won multiple awards – including a BAFTA.</p>
<p>Images – derived from the Prelinger Archive – of people doing office work (mainly women), are mixed with lines from heavily redacted FBI files full of suspicious, paranoid notations. A story of patriarchal surveillance is suggested, but the soul of Battle’s film is elsewhere: in the strange, spooky glow that emanates from filing cabinets, or the animated birds that pass freely from one screen to another. An elegant arrangement of mysterious materials.</p>
<p><strong>The Washing Machine </strong>offers a colourful glimpse into the complex relationship between a washing machine and its owner.</p>
<p>A full century after publication, <strong>The Waste Land</strong> considers T. S. Eliot's namesake poem alongside our present, assuredly asserting that the words continue to resonate and to fuel our imagination. Filmmaker Chris Teerink offers no analysis of the poem, but instead seeks parallels. With a soundtrack by Dutch singer-songwriter Blaudzun, and using photographs and stills instead of moving images, he creates a slideshow that mirrors the fragmentary core of Eliot's language.<br /> <br /> The poem itself is a tapestry that draws on material from Dante Alighieri, Buddhism and Hinduism. In this documentary, Teerink shows how these threads course through our present. As we listen to writers, literary scholars and other thinkers ruminate on Eliot's poetry, powerful imagery illustrates how the faith in progress literally falters at the boundaries of our society.</p> <p>Stretching out from the cityscapes of London to the no man’s land of the Mojave Desert, and from writer Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer's Italy to the borders of Poland, a recent site of violent restriction for those seeking refuge. <strong>The Waste Land</strong> is everywhere.</p>
<p>On its way to being delivered to an unknown destination, a big trunk travels all over the world – by plane, by train, by boat, by bus. It's even hauled by bicycle. And everyone who helps with transporting it wants to know: what's in that trunk?</p>
<p>Words on screen, appearing individually or in clusters. Is this a film or, as the unfolding text suggests, “sort of” a film? Answer: both! On a black or coloured background, graphically printed words appear on screen – we follow the words in time, taking the bait of constructing partial sentences and meanings. Meanings which are then endlessly recombined and remade, slyly and wittily. Here, Asselberghs bridges political, avant-garde cinema and the age of the ubiquitous telephone text message.</p>
<p>Sergeant Bulut spends his nights in a watchtower waiting for an enemy that doesn’t arrive, until suddenly strange lights appear on the horizon. Ali Cherri creates a universe in which a suspended and void time opens the door to ghostly presences from a past made of war. Shot with an extreme and detailed precision of vision and sound, <strong>The Watchman</strong> is an urgent film that deconstructs the myth of duty, laying bare the absurdity of the omnipresent war rhetoric. </p>
<p>A child is spending the holidays with their family. The setting is perfect for relaxation and for wondering. Next to the house, workers are building a pond. Attracted to it, the child senses a presence, someone familiar yet still unknown. Alexander David captures on screen all the beauty of a childhood self-discovery and the first uncertain steps taken outside of parental control. Evocative and mellow, <strong>Water Hazard</strong> explores queer identity with a delicate and empathetic eye. </p>
<p>A child is drawn to the stillness of nature beyond a city. A teenager, rising from sleep in a thicket, makes their way back to a trailer: to warmth, a caretaker, a dog. But the thudding on hard concrete from the highway above is no comfort. A tree envelopes a fence with its growth – grasses sprout through cracked and decaying industry. The individual is searching, pushing forward through landscapes and time. Adulthood leads into the forest.<br /> <br /> Enlisting the work of seven performers – all women or non-binary – to embody a lifespan in seven stages, filmmaker Andrea Luka Zimmerman’s <strong>Wayfaring Stranger</strong> is a sensorial observation of the transformative quest for a truthful existence. On this singular journey, Zimmerman experiments with the fabric of genre and experience, burrowing into the individual’s wordless encounters through a lush soundscape of field recordings by acclaimed sound artist Chris Watson. These sonic textures of liminal spaces, some familiar and foreboding, others guttural and peaceful, partner this symbolic journey of being, blending fiction and documentary into an ecosystem all its own.<br /> <br /> Full of profound reflections, <strong>Wayfaring Stranger</strong> is experiential cinematic innovation.</p>
<p><strong>We will definitely talk about this after the last air raid alert stops</strong> presents a neon-coloured utopian vision set in a post-war city, where humanity strives for harmony with nature through a recultivation programme. The film transcends the binary opposition between culture and nature, instead envisioning a society where individual goals align with the well-being of others, be it humans, trees, rivers or mushrooms. The cinematic journey navigates post-war resilience, cultural shifts and ecological challenges, exploring a world liberated from obsolete mechanisms of exploitation. The narrative unfolds on a single screen, complemented by two additional screens offering visual tours through forests in the near and distant future.<br /> <br /> Yuri Yefanov, a Ukrainian artist and filmmaker, initiated this introspective yet exuberant film amidst the aftermath of the Russian invasion. His work delves into a world where the environment no longer feels distant, and becomes, yet again, an integral part of our existence.<br /> <br /> Like a time traveller, the viewer witnesses a city that embraces a hopeful future, shedding the shadows of war and striving for coexistence with nature. Offering a glimpse into a harmonious and rejuvenated world.</p>
<p>When you see Carlijn Kingma’s impressive artwork The Waterworks of Money, that efficiently illustrates the way the financial sector runs through everyday life, it’s hard to imagine how one would even begin creating something so highly detailed and intricate. But patience seems to be the keyword of this documentary portrait that follows Kingma from the inception of The Waterworks of Money to its display at the Biennale in Venice. Filmmaker Ariane Greep shows a master at work, slowly but surely refining her work into the masterpiece it became.</p>
<p>An ageing activist wages a solitary struggle against the expansion of an oil refinery in his tiny fishing village. All the while the other villagers are infectiously united in their indecisiveness between sustainable change and short-term social security. A simple and charming portrait with a humorous undertone that hits the nail on the head: if we compromise on health risks and environmental pollution, we’re not going to make it.</p>
<p>Where do ideas come from? Using seemingly unrelated archival material, the filmmaker uses a split-screen to probe this question. And, it's not just the images that are recycled: the voiceover consists of various excerpts pondering the origin of ideas. Meanwhile, we witness the emergence of a new idea.</p>
<p>This is high-octane Hong Kong action cinema at its best. Undercover cops Billy and Wing had it all worked out. They set up drug smuggler Suchat, but the operation goes awry, with Wing’s cover blown and Billy, badly injured, leaving with Suchat, his cover still intact. Suchat relocates to Thailand and expands his ambitions, leaving the two cops with an even greater challenge of figuring out how to bring him down.<br /> <br /> Benny Chan began the <strong>White Storm</strong> series in 2013, with Herman Yau taking over as director for the first sequel in 2019. He returns for this latest – and best – instalment and like the previous films, it features the same principal characters but can easily be watched as a standalone entry. What links the three is the breathless pacing and kinetic action sequences, combining state-of-the-art visual effects and some hair-raising physical stunts – a signature of Hong Kong genre filmmaking. Plot is secondary to sensation, but Yau’s script maintains the internal logic of this world and, with actors Aaron Kwok and Louis Koo as the cops, and Sean Lau as Suchat, he ensures there is a conveyor belt of punchy, frequently self-deprecating one-liners.</p>
<p>“Everyone is like a new canvas that can be painted in different colours.” So speaks art student Chi-wei, who is about to enter a turbulent phase of her young life in which all matters of politics, sexuality and creativity are open to question. Su I-hsuan’s film revisits the memory of a prolonged strike at a Taiwanese art school in the 1990s, in which the students protested the cause of 'creative freedom' in the face of patriarchal authority figures who insisted on conformism and conventionality. Worse still, the art history curriculum is entirely Westernised and Taiwanese art is accorded no value. This is a system seemingly impervious to the waves of social change that began earlier, like the 1990 Wild Lily student movement.</p>
<p>On the eve of his coming-of-age ceremony, Shreedhar uncovers the secret of his father's death, forcing his mother to choose between the truth and his protection. The director returns to Rotterdam with <strong>The Witness Tree</strong>, a subdued, yet poignant story of identity within family and community, set against a stunning mountain backdrop that serves as a silent witness to the past.</p>
<p>The director’s simmering mediaeval horror <strong>Witte Wieven</strong> explores the confluence of religion and patriarchy in an excessively puritanical Dutch village. Blamed by her community for being childless, Frieda immerses herself in prayer and ritual. When she returns unscathed from the forbidden forest surrounding the village, having evaded a lecherous butcher, she is condemned as an agent of the devil. Frieda, however, finds new faith in the dark powers that inhabit the woods.</p>
<p>In her masterful 16mm ethnographic essay, the director investigates the story of an early twentieth century botanist Ida Hayward, who discovered peculiar connections between sheep’s wool, migratory plant seeds and the River Tweed in Scotland. An extremely well made film about a surprising confluence of themes – the global wool industry, colonialism, the fraught interconnectedness of fauna and the region in which it is set.</p>
<p>Milazim, Fatmir and Liridon are veteran manual labourers who experienced accidents in their workplaces in Kosovo, Europe's youngest country. In this poetic experimental documentary tribute to a now almost extinct class of people, Ilir Hasanaj gives voice to gentle, sincere and dignified, but almost invisible individuals, who fell prey to harsh and primitive capitalistic machinery and policy in the Balkans. </p>
<p>Who was Charles Augustus Howell? He may now be a mostly forgotten figure from the Victorian era of the late nineteenth century, but in his day he cut a fascinating and morally dubious figure in London’s art circles. Rodrigo Areias’ sumptuous biopic recreates the world to detail Howell’s Machiavellian skill at rising through high society, manipulating those around him to acquire works that would establish his reputation and security, and when that didn’t work, resorting to blackmail. It charts his relationship with key figures from this time, such as the painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti (who was convinced by Howell to dig up the poems that were buried with his wife Elizabeth Siddal so he could sell them). To some, he was viewed as a charming rogue. To others, like the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, he was “the vilest wretch I ever came across”.</p>
<p>The diretor’s latest feature, like his previous Cross the Line (2022), grapples with illicit aspects of the labour market in Indonesia. But whereas the earlier film dealt with the problems faced by migrant workers, Yohanna is a nerve-wrecking thriller that looks at the all-too-common exploitation of young children as part of a workforce. The situation is seen through the eyes of the titular character, a young nun whose faith is wavering. When the car she uses to deliver humanitarian aid disappears, her search draws her into the shady world of children forced to work long hours and in harsh, sometimes even dangerous, conditions.</p>
<p>A series of photos and screenshots tell the story of how the directors, two transmasculine artists, fall madly in love with each other. We witness their first meeting, the start of a long-distance relationship, the meeting of the families, Z’s top surgery – all milestones are recorded in a uniquely intimate and moving way. A portrait of queer/trans love that we don’t get to see often enough.</p>
<p>In yours,, a group of artists reflect on both the relationship between different artistic practices and the balance between individual and collective works, as they come together to create one joint work dedicated to Chantal Akerman.</p> <p>Throughout its five short films, yours, interacts with different facets of Akerman's extensive body of work as it revisits many themes elemental to her films: from alienation to a variety of mother-daughter relationships and reflections on the mourning of loved ones.</p> <p>Akerman's career is reflected geographically as well. Taking News from Home (1976) as a starting point, we travel from the subways in Brussels through the interior of domestic spaces, the details of handwritten notes, to the Negev desert where Akerman shot parts of her final film No Home Movie (2015), until, finally, we cross an ocean in an attempt to return.</p>
<p>December 1976, a three-day revolt erupts in the small town of Majunga, Madagascar. Ali (Soeuf Elbadawi), a widower, is caught in an abrupt and violent turmoil between communities. His first and only preoccupation is how to protect his young daughters.<br /> <br /> With the close collaboration of non-professional Comorian and Malagasy actors from Majunga, Hachimiya Ahamada invites us to bear witness to an untold and disquieting conflict that left an indelible mark on the inhabitants of Majunga.</p>
<p>A delicate, episodic adventure, ZONE blends the sweep of a novel, the lyricism of an intimate diary and the rich production values of a widescreen epic. Propelled by a variety of contrapuntal music and a stream-of-consciousness voiceover, the film charts the oneiric journey of a young woman who escapes an oppressive detainment facility to encounter a range of situations, people and emotional states, all waystations in her coming of age.</p>
<p>Recalling one of Italy's most famous erotic comic strips, the real inspiration for Zora la vampira, by direct admission of the two directors, comes from much further afield: William Crain's Blacula, a reimagined vampire horror film and a classic of the blaxploitation genre. At the beginning of the 2000s did have their first TV feature film under their belt, but they were still best known for their music videos.<br /> <br /> Zora la vampira was part of a spontaneous film experiment of its time coined 'hip hop cinema', in which soundtracks with predominantly Italian rap took centre stage.</p> <p>The ingenuity to transform a blaxploitation classic into a modern film injected with Roman youth culture ignited the interests of producer and director championed who not only financed the film but also played a role in it. The result is a film that tackles sensitive topics like immigration with a playful balance between humour and horror, recounting Count Dracula's surreal journey from Transylvania to Rome, in search of the reincarnation of his lost love. </p>
<p>This silent, 8mm film combines two camera procedures: time lapse and the zoom lens. It aims not for technical smoothness but a beguiling abruptness. Starting at the same time each evening, the camera records, in jerky leaps, the moment when the sky darkens and an urban streetlight turns on, illuminating the screen. Alternating zooms-in and zooms-out, Ranmaru Usui – part of a Japanese 1970s movement that explored 'cinema of the soul' – offers transcendence within the everyday.</p>
<p>Religious faith as the everyday experience of ordinary people is rarely treated seriously, or even depicted, in cinema. Often it is either magnified into extravagant lyricism, or mercilessly derided. <strong>Zwischen uns Gott</strong> takes a very different, more honest and intimate documentary approach. Director Rebecca Hirneise feels estranged from the beliefs of her Protestant upbringing, and so returns to the culture of her family in order to understand it better and come to terms with it. She initiates a literal circle in which theological discussions take place between her mother, aunts and uncles.</p>
<p>The Maynards and their children lead an almost perfect billionaire family life. Amon is a passionate hunter, but doesn’t shoot animals, as the family’s wealth allows them to live totally free from consequences.</p> <p>In this social satire, directors Daniel Hoesl and Julia Niemann push the rich’s untouchability to an extreme, revealing the consequences of an unchecked system and the dangers of a world where people are not accountable for their actions. The Maynards cannot be stopped, not by another man’s word, or journalistic evidence, or even the law. Now there’s only freedom: without limits and impossibilities, no matter the violence. Those with wealth are free to do as they please, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. The Machiavellian family study allows the rich to be as fearsome and violent as they pretend to be kind and giving.—AE</p>
<p>In 1858 Bologna, a 6-year-old named Edgardo Mortara was seized by authorities of the papal state, taken away from his Jewish parents, and placed in the care of the Church. Believed to have been baptized in the cradle under odd circumstances, the child would be claimed as a Catholic. His mind erased of his family’s religious heritage and beliefs, Edgardo was, unbeknownst to him, at the center of an international firestorm that led directly to the Italian people’s rejection of the Pope’s rule amidst the tumultuous Risorgimento. In this sumptuously mounted film from treasured octogenarian director Marco Bellocchio, the Mortara case becomes an extraordinary, nearly operatic historical drama. <em>Kidnapped</em> is at once a personal, human-scale narrative of a family in crisis, following parents who will do anything to retrieve their child from the clutches of a ruthless theocratic government, and a wide-scope portrait of a country on the cusp of revolution.</p>
<p>Artifacts from a Maoist life intersect with machines grinding books, the piecing together of destroyed DDR documents and children undergoing education. A comment on the earlier work ”When the Sun Sets It’s All Red, Then It Disappears” from 2008.</p>
<p>A dirty bomb. Downtown Washington DC. Tonight. These are the first and crucial pieces of information we receive which efficiently provide a concise explanation and drive the whole suspense narrative in James Nunn’s terrific actioner <strong>One More Shot</strong>.</p> <p>A direct sequel to Nunn’s <strong>One Shot</strong> (2021), we find again Scott Adkins, fresh off his memorable appearance in the latest chapter of the <strong>John Wick </strong>franchise (Chad Stahelski, 2023), reprising his role as terrorists-battling Navy SEAL Jake Harris. Set entirely in an airport and again shot in a (seemingly) single-take, <strong>One More Shot</strong> ups the ante in several ways. While the time-bomb formula is much more present, creating a continuous tension, the script offers more twists, turns and reflections on recent US politics. Most importantly, Nunn perfects his already clever single-take staging knowing when to pause, when to provide drama – and when to go for all-out action!</p> <p>Right up there alongside Renny Harlin’s classic <strong>Die Hard 2</strong> (1990), <strong>One More Shot</strong> offers an exhilarating ride with plenty of expertly choreographed shootouts, hand-to-hand combats, stunts and car chases. As usual, Adkins more than delivers as the major action star of his generation.</p>
<p>The Night Visitors is a movie about moths. In large and small fragments, looking both inward and out, through a critical lens that is by turns social and personal, the film closely examines these underknown creatures. While The Night Visitors is interested in moths as organisms, with fascinating life histories, staggering biodiversity, and a functional importance as indicators of climate change and habitat degradation, its engagement with them is not primarily entomological. Instead, the film looks at moths as aesthetic beings and as carriers of meaning, aiming for a deep encounter with the beauty and incommensurability of the profoundly other.</p> <p>The small hours of the night are threaded through with a sense of mortality and loss. Moths, with their trembling and exquisite impermanence, provide both a kind of solace and, in their diversity and difference, a focal point around which the desire to know can be organized.</p>
<p>When Russian workers in Bernie’s house turn out to be wanted criminals, Bernie has to man up and save his ’90s sitcom family.</p> <p>In their hotly anticipated English-language debut, Dutch directing duo Steffen Haars and Flip van der Kuil (<em>New Kids</em>) spare no one, unleashing a deliriously fucked-up ode to the sanctity of family that consistently outdoes itself. Taking a studio audience–approved world and nuking it from the inside, Haars and van der Kuil bless us with their demented sense of humor and depravity. Nick Frost embodies Bernie Christian with zest, doing justice to his last name as a meek, devout head of household who’s suddenly forced into a bloodcurdling, jaw-dropping crusade when his spiritual foundations fail; Alicia Silverstone matches his madness as his gleefully mischievous wife. Miraculous in its very existence and gloriously unhinged, <em>Krazy House</em> begs to be seen to be believed.—AS </p>
<p>Three British teenage girls go on a rite-of-passage holiday, drinking, clubbing, and hooking up in what should be the best summer of their lives. As they dance their way across the sun-drenched streets of Malia, they find themselves navigating the complexities of sex, consent, and self-discovery.</p> <p>While the girls seem initially equally captivated by the nonstop bacchanal, the film’s increasing focus on bubbly, inexperienced Tara — who carefully reconsiders her vacation, her friendships, and herself after a questionably consensual late-night encounter on the beach — turns an incisive viewing experience into a searingly unforgettable one. In her feature debut, Molly Manning Walker embeds a devastatingly honest examination of sexuality and consent within a multifaceted portrait of female friendship, all set against the backdrop of a vivid rendering of alcohol-fueled party culture.</p>
<p>A heist picture unlike any other, <em>The Delinquents</em> upends genre expectations with a gentle yet deftly constructed existentialist fable. Timid bank clerk Morán (Daniel Elías), fed up with his dead-end middle-management job, decides one day to simply walk into the vault, pack a bag with enough cash to cover his salary until retirement age, and saunter out. Knowing he has been inevitably caught on security camera, Morán plans on turning himself in, but not before passing the stash along to his coworker Román (Esteban Bigliardi), now an accomplice who agrees to hold onto the money until Morán gets out of prison. From this gripping premise, Argentinean writer-director Rodrigo Moreno spins an endlessly surprising tale that moves into increasingly idyllic territory, adding layer upon layer to the twinned stories of these two men’s lives, and inquiring what it means to be free in a world of monetary satisfaction. Argentina’s official entry for Best International Feature Film at the 2024 Academy Awards.</p>
<p>The likeness of a relative of the filmmaker surfaces as a tattoo on the arm of a Ukrainian soldier. A U.S. Army post in Oklahoma, built to fight Kiowa and Apache, is rededicated to aid in the fight against Putin’s own Western expansion. In <em>Dau:añcut (Moving Along Image)</em>, Adam Piron explores the contradictions of colonialism and anti-settler solidarity across time and geography and in the muddled spaces of TikTok, where representations of Indigenous peoples are caught up in the ongoing and increasingly rapid circulation of images.</p>
<p>Spanish director Víctor Erice’s fourth film in 50 years, <em>Close Your Eyes</em> is the culmination of one of the most legendary careers in modern cinema, following the masterpieces <em>The Spirit of the Beehive, El Sur, </em>and<em> The Quince Tree Sun </em>(NYFF30)<em>. </em>In this elegiac personal epic about time, memory, and, of course, the movies, an aging filmmaker named Miguel (Manolo Solo) is reluctantly pulled back into a decades-old mystery connected to his final, unfinished work, titled <em>The Farewell Gaze</em>. During production, his leading actor and close friend, Julio (Jose Coronado), vanished and was never heard from again; in the process of trying to track him down so many years later, Miguel must come to terms with his own past, his present life, and the irrevocably changed processes of his art form. Featuring captivating performances from a cast that also includes Ana Torrent (<em>Beehive</em>’s unforgettable child star) in a moving role as Julio’s grown daughter, <em>Close Your Eyes</em> is a poignant, summative work that finds original ways to remind viewers of the moving image’s ability to reach across time.</p>
<p>With her customarily bewitching mixture of earthiness and magical realism, Alice Rohrwacher (<em>Happy as Lazzaro</em>, NYFF56) conjures a marvelous entertainment set in a rural Italy eternally caught between the ancient and the modern. Josh O’Connor (<em>The Crown</em>) stars as Arthur, a ne’er-do well Englishman, handsomely rumpled and recently out of prison, who returns to a rural town in central Italy where he hesitantly reconnects with a ragtag group of <em>tombaroli </em>(tomb raiders), for whom he uses his uncanny powers of divination to locate graves that date back to the Etruscan period and teem with antiquities of immense value to collectors and museums. Yet the melancholy Arthur has other ghosts on his mind, including his long-lost love Beniamina, who haunts his memory like her own ghostly civilization. Featuring gorgeous rough-hewn textures from the great cinematographer Hélène Louvart and outstanding supporting work from Isabella Rossellini, Carol Duarte, and Alba Rohrwacher, <em>La Chimera</em> is a dreamlike descent into a majestically tattered world right beneath our own.</p>
<p>A filmmaker consistently unafraid to wade through the weird miasma of contemporary life, Bertrand Bonello (<em>Nocturama; Coma</em>, NYFF60) works from the outside in, dramatizing the psychological toll of the political and cultural world around us. Here he has created a dynamic and disturbing parable that jumps between three different time periods (1910, 2014, and 2044) to diagnose our acute—and perhaps eternal—feelings of estrangement and alienation. Using Henry James’s haunting 1903 short story “The Beast in the Jungle” as his film’s provocative inspiration, Bonello tells the story of a young woman (Léa Seydoux) who undergoes a surgical process to have her DNA—and therefore memories of all her past lives—removed. In so doing, she realizes her fate has long been intertwined, for better and worse, with a young man (George MacKay). Touching on modern anxieties of AI and incel culture, which may recur throughout history as commonly as love and hate, <em>The Beast</em>, like all good science-fiction, asks essential questions about the ever-shifting status of humanity itself.</p>