Playlist
In this genre-hopping road movie from Daughters of Fire director Albertina Carri, Violeta, the director of an amateur lesbian porn hit, is invited to make a mainstream crossover. With a budget and cast, but no firm idea where to go, the crew head off on a road trip in search of their perfect film.
A comedy about a straight guy who thinks his girlfriend is leaving him because he loses in comparison with a friend. Very frustrated by this situation, he decides to seduce a film school classmate with dark intentions.
After 48 years filmmaking, legendary Slovenian experimentalist Davorin Marc has his IFFR debut with an archetypal example work from the later part of his career. . . . . Rumene zore is a carefully crafted miniature in which he digitally mimics some of the analogue procedures from the past. If Marc's analogue works from the 80s were post-punk, then the new ones could well be post-film!
Woland from Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, the guide at the Bulgakov Museum, little Mikhail on his own, and his nanny, united in a single narrative in this experimental documentary inspired by the biography of the writer.
At 't Eethuisje van Delfshaven, connoisseurs have been eating the classics of Dutch cuisine for almost 27 years. Martin and Bea are of the 'actions speak louder than words' variety, but there is a physical expiry date on their work ethic. For regular customers, 't Eethuisje serves as a second living room, and a new generation is queuing up: tourists from all over the world are eager to try the famous prakkie. Understandably, because this Rotterdam cuisine leaves you wanting more!
Two teenage girls, Yin Jia and Tong Tong, live together in this colour-drenched vision of Changsha, China. When Tong Tong drifts away and falls in with a drug dealer, Yin Jia's love for her means she'll risk everything to keep Tong Tong by her side.
The omnipresence of face masks during the pandemic absented a key signifier and definer of humanity: our teeth. In this gorgeously grainy silent short, Friedl vom Gröller wittily guides us from the dentist's chair to the street and to the park, encouraging the revelation of teeth – crooked, gappy, canine, with dentures – and in doing so distills 2020's period of isolation and unknowingness into something unique, indicative and truly personal.
A masked apeman traverses a dystopian society in this twisted finale of Norbert Pfaffenbichler's 2551 trilogy. Eerie locations, striking cinematography and a thundering industrial soundtrack form the backbone of this extreme kind of contemporary silent film that sits somewhere between experimental and underground.
We follow Bob Dylan during the first four years of his career, from his arrival in New York to the beginning of his electric period. We observe his love life, his encounters with other folk musicians and above all – a lot of music.
In a run-down neighborhood, Zoe and her little brother Theo are left to fend for themselves. A young adolescent, Zoe is a ball of anger haunted by an intimate terror. Theo, still a child, flees reality into a fantastical world. During a scorching summer day, the two children will have to burst the abscess of their relationship so as not to lose each other.
Marriage is a highway that leads straight to the hell of paranoia. At least for this couple, who both believe that their better half is a cheat. And so, they decide to separate – while continuing to live together in the same house, studiously ignoring each other, until…
A Light Unseen invites the viewer to see the invisible: the reflected and refracted light caught and morphed by the fine threads of a spider web. Here the camera goes beyond the limitations of the bare human eye reaching for a spectacle of light and shape that is sure to delight.
In A Metamorphosis, Lin Htet Aung transforms the uncanny and absurd experiences of what it is like to grow up with state television propaganda into a kind of counter-broadcast, redefining the compositions and narratives that defined them. This distorted, eerie broadcast explores the daily experiences of living in a dictatorship and the imagery you get accustomed to as a child, accompanied by a lullaby that will haunt you afterwards: Yee, lé-lé! Yee, lé-lé-
Taking inspiration from the haunting Japanese dance/performance art form Butoh, the film offers a cinematic interpretation of this singular style of expression. With high contrast, exaggerated grain, abstracted colors and flickering frames, A Monster with Its Mouth Agape captures the unsettling and chaotic climate of post-war Japan. Featuring a rare audio recording of Butoh master Yoshito Ohno.
A Patriot of These Woods is a film inspired by the novel The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino. Calvino's book tells the adventure of a boy who climbs up a tree to spend the rest of his life inhabiting an arboreal kingdom. He dives into the vegetal world, undertaking his own journey into the trees around him using his body as a metaphorical soldier who defends the trees and plants that grow around him. An otherwise concealed world opens up revealing the symbiotic relationship between humans and plants. A hybrid creature emerges, partially plant, partially human, their bodies merged, their thoughts processes entangled. These woods respect no borders.
Feature film on romance and social life of the minority ethnic in the Northwest of Vietnam. Mi and A Phu, a Meo couple, freed themselves with the aid of communist leadership and joined the rising against the French in August 1945.
Bodies of water are intervened upon, moved, disrupted and exploited. Labouring bodies experience similar pressures from the same forces of power and extraction. Distant communities – Northern England and Jamaica – share similar histories of manipulation and oppression whose record is kept in the living memory of its waterways. But water, like people, can find a way to exert its own will.
Amidst lush foliage, vibrant flower beds, babbling brooks and neatly kept lawns, characters move tentatively. As they carefully observe and interact with their surroundings and each other, a mysterious tension is growing. Beautifully shot on 16mm, and accompanied by the rousing sounds of music from Nika Son, Helena Wittman's latest work is a feast for the eyes and the ears.
One of Lax's most personal works, A TIRED DOG IS A GOOD DOG, PART ONE explores animal husbandry from the perspective of a quadruplet raised in a dog breeding family. Incorporating original footage and family archive, the film analyses canine behaviour, humans playing as dogs through kink, and his own identity.
In part two, pack behaviour is explored along with notions of dominance, submission, trust and consent, both within human and dog relationships and within pup play. Love and bonding become a central theme, weaving together further investigation into pup relationships, training sessions with a traumatised dog and Lax's own relationship to the dogs in his life that he has loved and lost.
The Chilean artist and filmmaker Martín Baus assembles a political object that can be found below and to the left, in the same place where Latin America is located (if we place Europe in the centre of the map). Guerrilla radio broadcasts, voices from Godard's first film or photographs of the Ecuadorian tropical forest compose his resistant found footage, a cocktail of old sounds and slogans that reverberates in contemporary times.
A simple and ubiquitous pose: two glossily made-up women gaze into the camera's eye and smile. But what begins as an ordinary image of femininity descends into raw uncanniness as the camera audaciously lingers and zooms, illuminating the tense and gruelling bodily labour involved in holding onto something that may have seemed so natural.
A woman living quietly in a religious community in rural Denmark gets her orderly life disrupted by the arrival of her brother. Slowly his presence exposes a secret from their troubled past. Acts of Love is a film about children in adult bodies, the power of therapy – and how unresolved trauma shapes the way we love and what we believe in. The siblings' secret ultimately forces the members of the community to ask themselves: who gets to decide over love?
This meditative exploration of vision – both literal and metaphorical – finds symbolic ways to convey the traumatic loss of Shannon Liang's then-partner. The film opens with unflinching footage of Liang's own laser eye surgery, which leaves her with a persistent 'halo' distortion in her left eye. In this sensitive short film about the transformative power of grief, the 'halo' becomes both a symbol of impaired vision and an enigmatic marker of loss, subtly shifting the way we perceive the world around us.
The sound of the sea, waves – and a yellow plastic stick floating in them. An image that now seems like an allegorical commonplace of the Anthropocene forms the prelude to Michael Heindl's Afterlives. It is about the afterlife of all sorts of plastic objects that, when withdrawn from the consumption process, often travel long distances before finally ending up in the sea. In this case, the director has collected the remains of rubbish washed up on the coast of Tanzania, mostly high-quality and still intact plastic, in order to take them back to their fictitious places of origin. In Afterlives, these are partly inconspicuous, partly cleverly prepared everyday contexts in the urban space of Vienna, which here stands pars pro toto for the West's wasteful, throwaway society.
With pointed interventions, Heindl exposes their functionality by feeding selected plastic parts into the supposedly smooth processes of public life. A sandy tennis ball blocks a subway door, a piece of hose on a fountain causes water to run all over the square in front of it, a sandal placed in a rotating company sign produces a disruptive squeak. All of these interventions, which Afterlives assembles in a frictional staccato, mark an inventive retrieval of the superfluous and useless. These small everyday dadaistic acts meanwhile give expression to a return of what was once produced with a great deal of energy, subsequently consumed largely thoughtlessly, and later carelessly thrown away. It's as though an awareness of the fundamental imbalance of our (disposable) economic system could only be brought about by creative irritations in the thoroughly familiar. Even if the mountains of waste can no longer be brought under control in reality, it is crucial, as Afterlives shrewdly explains, to make a new start on the mental and imaginative level. (Christian Höller)
Translation: John Wojtowicz
From ritual dance performances on the Indonesian island of Java, to colonialist film images, to an intervention at the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum: T.A. Kusno settles the score with colonialism.
A one-hour biographical documentary about Alice Guy-Blaché, one of the first women to direct films.
Viktor Timofeev's Alice, Bob, Carol and David combines film, gaming and choreography. Featuring four characters in structured randomness, the work reflects on control, improvisation and emotional engagement. Through annotated video, it highlights the paradoxes of logic, autonomy and generative creativity.
In Mumbai, Nurse Prabha's routine is troubled when she receives an unexpected gift from her estranged husband. Her younger roommate, Anu, tries in vain to find a spot in the city to be intimate with her boyfriend. In Mumbai, Nurse Prabha's routine is troubled when she receives an unexpected gift from her estranged husband. Her younger roommate, Anu, tries in vain to find a spot in the city to be intimate with her boyfriend. A trip to a beach town allows them to find a space for their desires to manifest.
We have seen before that winter sports resorts provide the perfect conditions to put family relationships on edge and Jan-Willem van Ewijk's Alpha. is no different. When young snowboard instructor Rein is visited by his father Gijs the two must brave the snowy mountains and one another's grievances. Under the permafrost of the ascent, unprocessed traumas emerge and even harsher weather conditions are expected on the way down.
In this wondrously captivating experiment, Albert Sackl creates a quasi-stereoscopic effect by moving a Bolex camera on a rail from left to right, continuously capturing two frames on each side. The way in which these come together in a small perspectival point makes gestures seem to quiver, bodies tremble, and buildings shake. Silently, not only the two different angles but also the individuals in the frame find their way towards each other.
Masks, bananas, dreamlike landscapes and apes. On a night like many others, a sleepless neighbour discovers suddenly that there is a whole shocking planet upstairs. Filmmaker Alexandre Sousa, in an agile animation with an amusing and absurd tone, reflects on the isolation in our society, on the creation of imaginary spaces alienated from the grey outside world, about dreams and dreamed realities.
AMERICAN FOLK examines authenticity, provenance, and the narratives we construct around art and material history. Weaving together exploitative casting tapes, the hanging of un-attributed Dutch master paintings and the history and cultural meaning of denim fabric to reach a deeper understanding of the entanglements of class, labour and aesthetics.
Moroy has one job: travel to Manila, hundreds of kilometres away, and bring back a t-shirt and some pills. As he sets off on this peculiar assignment, his puzzled and sleep-deprived mind wanders between reality and fantasy, piecing together past transactions with his employer, casual conversations with fellow chauffeurs and fleeting visions of symbolic import.
January 2020. A film crew reunites near Wuhan to resume the shooting of a film halted ten years earlier, only to share the unexpected challenges as cities are placed under lockdown.
In Anatomy of Nostalgia images from colonial archives, originally intended as propaganda, follow one another as a stream of fragmented memories. What we see is recognisable and, at the same time elusive and disorienting; a fused abstraction of the past. By making history ambiguous, Kusno invites us to question what we actually see, creating space for new interpretations and meanings.
Dreamy housekeeper Aliye spends her days between hotel rooms, escaping into the lives of the guests. But after a brief encounter with a famous filmmaker, Aliye decides that she has a story to tell, leading to an entanglement of lives and fictions.
Katja Raganelli was not solely interested in female filmmakers, but women artists in general. This early work offers a portrait of painter-educator-pacifist Anna Ottonie Krigar-Menzel, also known as Annot. Suppressed by the Nazis and forced into exile, it's tempting to consider Annot a key inspiration for Raganelli, as one of her main works is a late 1920s cycle of paintings called Faces of Working Women, depicting female surgeons, physiotherapists, all manner of women's labour.
Ariel is a play-within-a-play on film, about an Argentine actress who sets ashore a strange and enchanting island where its inhabitants have transcended into Shakespearian characters. Lois Patiño adorns his latest feature with sparkling waterscapes and enchanting terrains that are seemingly possessed by otherworldly energies.
Just as the bird weakens under the wax, suffering the drama of the human perspective vicariously, so human motor skills harden under the wax, and humans freeze into lifeless wax figures that can no longer communicate anything, although they wanted to communicate so much. Humans and birds as partners/parts of an anthropomorphic sculpture, sculpture (the fine arts) as the freezing of visual expressiveness (of human communication) demonstrate the tragedy of human communication in the tensions between the materials: bird (symbol of imagination and freedom), wax (symbol of lifelessness), human, and in the tensions between the forms (movement and freezing).
"The strange joy of living", as the Italian poet Sandro Penna wrote, or how to make love until the end of our days. A middle-aged Cuban couple live in the countryside surrounded by animals. They do not own many belongings but they do have large doses of passion. Filmmaker Giuseppe Polerà possesses a fragile ability, capturing intimacy to sense the nature of eroticism and pleasure.
B and S is the third letter in Lipika Singh Darai's essay series. During the filmmaker's imaginary conversations with her late grand aunt, she tells the story of B and S. As she starts, B and S appear, sharing their memories, negotiating the meaning of transness, love, loss, friendship and violence. A teak tree and a little parrot help Darai intertwine these narratives. The result is a personal, warm and heartfelt ode to friendship, and to building a different kind of home.
The Mercedes Benz 300 SLR is the most expensive car ever sold. But how was the value of this car collectively imagined? Is it a coincidence that this Benz was released the same year as the Benzo? What is the meaning of the idea of Pamela Anderson? Sara Cwynar drops us into the churning thoughts of her interior infinite scroll, endless search terms and fantasies about capitalist fantasies.
Upon hearing her beloved grandmother is dying, a young woman returns to rural Lithuania, where she must confront a past she's tried to forget. Sharunas Bartas unflinchingly examines family fractures, capturing unspoken tensions and simmering resentments within a rural household isolated by geography and emotional distance.
From her journey through high school and college, then out into the wider world, Ramya's dream of finding the perfect guy is obstructed by societal mores, strict parents, unrequited love and the untrammelled chaos of her own mind, in Varsha Bharath's naughty and affecting comedy.
Albert Oehlen steps behind the camera to present a portrait of himself, in life and at work, albeit substituted by actor and similarly brazen iconoclast Udo Kier, with musician Kim Gordon as his inner self, interviewer and judge.
In this meditative documentary shot on the Maltesian island of Gozo, Franziska von Stenglin avoids the tourist cliché and follows the daily routine of a disillusioned, sea-worn fisherman, who, perched atop 50-metre high cliffs, practices his ancient method. A contemplation on the cost of the relentless march of progress, and the irreparable loss felt by the delicately balanced life beneath the waves.
When two clueless trust fund kids start a money lending business during COVID-19, they find themselves facing off against a ruthless loan shark mafia boss, who isn't willing to share his playground.
Every morning, Boris the village baker makes a fresh batch of crusty bread and pastries for all his neighbours until… Achoo! He can't stop sneezing. He has become allergic to flour. How will he manage to keep baking for everyone in the village?
The naivety of youth is confronted with the brutality of war in this sombre tale set in Sardinia in 1940. Realising some horses on the island are to be sent into battle, two boys plan to release them before they are delivered to the army.
portrait of sacrifices from a modest farming family to ensure their survival in a period of profound social change.
On the lawless eastern border between Bangladesh and India, lives a group of proud bandits, obsessed with Heath Ledger's Joker. Re-enacting their past and celebrating their outsider status, they philosophise on their role in society, and the balance between order and chaos. In BAN♡ITS, not just the borders between states are unclear, but the borders between fiction and documentary blur, and ultimately, as do the borders between resistance, art and crime.
Young Keran is visiting his family in the snow-covered grasslands of northern China. He loses sight of a sheep destined to be sacrificed according to Kazakh ritual for that evening's New Year's festivities. Together with his cousin, he embarks on a search that leads towards a heavy responsibility and a heart-wrenching decision. A tender story of formative childhood, offering an ode to the stunning environment and the beauty and harshness of the traditions it harbours.
How do you make a portrait of a music group when nobody knows who the members are? Marie Losier takes up the task and travels to San Francisco to create a documentary on cult band The Residents. There, we meet Homer Flynn, president of The Cryptic Corporation, who guides us through The Residents' archive, sharing a variety of anecdotes related to the objects it contains. Complementing his stories with archival footage and a historical context, Losier delivers a compassionate portrait and a celebration of creativity.
Two bumbling store clerks inadvertently erase the footage from all of the tapes in their video rental store. In order to keep the business running, they re-shoot every film in the store with their own camera, with a budget of zero dollars.
Becoming is a short film about the miraculous genesis of animal life. In great microscopic detail, we see the 'making of' an Alpine Newt in its transparent egg from the first cell division to hatching. A single cell is transformed into a complete, complex living organism with a beating heart and running bloodstream.
The first stages of embryonic development are roughly the same for all animals, including humans. In the film, we can observe a universal process which normally is invisible: the very beginning of an animal's life.
Bisagras is a film that triangulates the journey of African slaves to America and draws a line that goes through my brown skin.
Before his legendary proto-cinematic studies in motion, photographer Eadweard Muybridge was commissioned to document the United States Army's war against the Modoc tribe in Northern California in a series of stereographs, many of them staged. Alternately unnerving, meditative, and explosive, Adam Piron's Black Glass examines the entangled histories of visual technology and the genocide and expropriation of Indigenous populations by white settlers through a violent collision of image and sound.
Blazing Fists is a more than memorable first instalment of Miike Takashi's new revolution in the Japanese film industry. As a versatile auteur who is well-deft in the craft and art of film – he has over 100 films under his belt – Miike delivers an enthralling film, mixing fresh and familiar energy and attitude.
An unexpected kiss unburies memories and longing for Shu-yi, a mother quietly holding her family together despite her unhappiness. As her rebelling son Han grows drawn to the enigmatic Xue-jin, Shu-yi rekindles her past connection with the same woman in this tenderly crafted exploration of family dynamics, identity and desire.
Talking bunnies, dancing harlequins and charming songs inhabit the memories of infancies. Visual artist Igor Schiller stages a performance to immerse us in his childhood world, diving into the depths of his remembrances affected by a bloody war. Surrealistic scenes and choreographies emerge in the playground of memory, with its joys, fears and confines to be demolished.
Blossom 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!
Blue Sun reflects on the 1984 mining accidents in Northern Taipei and their enduring impact. Inspired by the works of Taiwanese novelist Tong Wei-Ger, the performance explores how these events continue to shape memory and identity. Through 16mm film projections, modular synth soundscapes by Nick Tsai, and live drawing by Chin Meng-Hsuan, Blue Sun bridges literature and performance, exploring the lingering energy of the landscapes evoked in Tung's fiction.
A kaleidoscopic visual feast existing in liminal digital space, Blushing Phantom playfully examines the boundaries of concealment and exposure through animated collage. Accompanied by a pulsating score, this experimental short features a dancing human figure, vibrant flowers, glowing eyes, neon landscapes, and hallucinogenic textures that artfully bend the brain, coalescing into an experience at once nostalgic and divinatory.
Instead of going to school, a young boy roams the streets of Budapest. With unhappily divorced parents, where else should a lonely child go? A superb example of Mészáros' early cinema of poetics and social concern where the grit of daily life fuses with moments of weightless joy.
Anahita, traumatised by the brutal disappearance of her mother, finds comfort in Shalini, her history teacher. But on an unconventional school excursion to a mysterious prehistoric site, it seems this teacher has nefarious plans for the timid teenager. A visceral high-school-set supernatural horror.
Bore Lee returns to his hometown of Sinj for a series of meditations. Upon his arrival, he notices unusual behavior among the townspeople, signaling that something sinister has occurred during his absence. The town's vital essence has been corrupted by drugs. Determined to save Sinj, Bore Lee confronts not only a dangerous gang but also more monstrous and perilous adversaries.
"Every body can exercise and move," a member of Rotterdam-based Queer Gym explains; however, not every person feels comfortable in typical sports environments that often hone in on heteronormative beauty ideals and fitness aspirations. That's why Romy started Queer Gym, a safe space in Rotterdam, where queer folk can comfortably enjoy sports and exercise. Through intimate conversations with members, trainers and owner Romy, Esmée van Loon's endearing portrait reveals a true physical need for spaces where queer communities can discover their own strengths.
Harsh brutalist architecture and oh-so-soft athleisure wear, ecstatic platitudes about consumer goods and bizarre one-liners, Bozo Over Roses plays out like a terrifying cult that nobody wants but that we all deserve. A dystopian transmission from a future humanity brought to the brink of extinction through endless streaming and next day shipping.
Basir Mahmood creates cinematic re-enactments of the journeys of migrants: evoking tension between what we see and the harsh reality, exploring how we understand and choose to represent these stories.
Bubbling, a cultural movement fusing dance, rhythm and electronic music born out of Rotterdam's Afro-Caribbean community in the 1990s
A burglar's life takes an unexpected turn when he stumbles upon a plaster statue of a woman and is then overpowered by the resident of the house. A special connection develops between burglar and the old man, who fervently wishes to lie next to his deceased wife forever. Together, they decide to take a trip across the Vietnamese desert, a final trip for the old man. With Bury Us in a Lone Desert, Nguyễn Lê Hoàng Phúc delivers a surprisingly warm, quirky film in which genre elements are playfully woven into an original drama.
Ever since her abortion, Jana has been trying to reorganise her life. Aaron was there for her during the procedure, but since then he has been distancing himself from her. Although, he was never going to stay in Paris anyway. Aaron is keen to avoid a last get-together with Jana and during one of his last nights out he loses his wallet, a great excuse to avoid meeting up. But Jana insists she wants to help him search. Together they roam the streets of Paris for an afternoon, trying to navigate their emotions. Once upon a time, they were very close but now it seems they are unable to understand one another. The silent moments are the most meaningful.
The vibrant yellow Caltha Palustris flower grows abundantly in the Biesbosch National Park in The Netherlands. This visceral short film takes the myth behind this flower, about a maiden named Caltha who yearned so badly for Apollo that she withered and turned into a flower, and turns it into a sweeping portrayal of desire. Exploring the impact of floods – both on literal and emotional level – Isabel Legate creates a sensory experience with striking colors over black-and-white imagery that captures the sensation of being washed away by something bigger than yourself.
Though he passed away in 1989, the controversial Orthodox monk Father Arsenie Boca has recently become one of the most popular religious figures in Romania, awaiting sanctification. In Alexandru Solomon's filmic interplay between reality and fiction, a documentarist arrives at the home of an old Securitate officer who was following the priest 60 years ago, in a quest to film the unfilmable. Part of the story becomes visible, while the rest stays silent, out of the frame.
In Switzerland, the Scout Movement is not a nostalgic fantasy but a vibrant social reality. This bubbly documentary captures the communal cycle of activities during a 14-day camp for youth. No reality TV-style contrived scenes here, this is a moving, joyful glimpse into life-changing experiences.
Another comedy about the pitfalls and perils of marriage from Alice Guy-Blaché. This time, the bride's father is the problem. A great lover of music, he'll only accept a musician for a son-in-law. Sadly though, his daughter's sweetheart has other qualities and abilities, among them that of acting… Once again, shrewdness saves the day for the good at heart!
An enormous story – a train journey, a wedding and a tragedy – all in two minutes. A remarkable example of cinematic economy of means, the film's brevity does not deter from its impact. Based on true events.
The film is set across the first two decades of the 21st century and tells the story of how a Chinese woman lives to herself in silence, celebrating the prosperous Belle Epoque with songs and dance. Some 22 years in the making, the film's first elements were shot as far back as 2001.
CHIME – An Extended View is an exploration of temporal expansion through the use of high-speed cinematography.
Filmmaker Vani Subramanian tells the story of India's small cinemas through the memories of the people who worked in them and loved them, a story she reveals to be inextricable from the social and political changes of the country over cinema's first century.
Several women in their seasonal work as fire watchers in Portugal. The film comes close to their breathing, to the passing of time and to solitude, from within.
A film about American Football from China? You better believe it. Based on the incredible true story of the Chongqing Dockers, Jiang Jia-chen's heartwarming sports dramedy Clash tells the merry tale of a bumbling football team and their rise to sporting glory.
In a not-too-distant future ravaged by climate crisis, a team of scientists analyse the archival footage of farmers from the past, in an attempt to understand their connection to the land. In this beautifully shot blend of documentary and fiction, Gregor Božić pays warm tribute to the old growers of the Goriška region in Western Slovenia, who appreciated fruit as more than merely a product for sale.
Rail tracks. Motion. Rhythm. Experimental filmmaker Henry Hills (The Tree, 2019, Arcana, 2011) takes us on a multidirectional train journey. Acceleration. Geometry. Velocity. A hypnotic visual composition and a splendid musical collage which, not by chance, visits Bérlioz, Duke Ellington, Kraftwerk. A breathtaking sensory trip that transports us through the cinematic mystique of the train.
In this vulnerable documentary, the filmmaker captures how their family resorts to spiritual interventions in an attempt to rid them of their queer identity. The grandmother believes they must be possessed by a 'demon girl' – the unborn girl their mother was forced to abort before she became pregnant with Hao. Undergoing prayers, therapies, treatments and ceremonies, Hao paints a wry portrait of these complex relationships with admirable clarity and compassion.
Musical comedy of Cossack refugees who have been sent packing to the Ottoman empire after their fortress has been destroyed.
Currency as concrete representation of economy; currency as embodiment of presence and acceptance. In Crystal Z Campbell's mesmerising short, a woman rejects the camera's gaze and, with bygone forms of currency attached to the ends of her hair, supports herself against a bare backdrop and expresses through passionate movement. An engrossing articulation of capital's connection to memory and the body, this experimental film bravely uses movement and sound to say so much – without a word spoken.
A heartbreaking, but ultimately hopeful, account of the epilepsy of Louis Petit as documented by his parents, filmmakers Christopher Petit and Emma Matthews. Alongside the struggle within Britain's ailing national health care system, a far-reaching essay-collage on technology, capitalism and the human mind.
An experimental film, focusing on the growth and flowering of the dandelion.
A paper cut-out animation commercial for the magical powers of Nivea soap. Behold! Her skin is white as snow / And now my heart is all aglow. A collaboration with Julius Pinschewer, Germany's original maestro of cinema advertisements.
The first film directed by influential German-born silhouette animator Lotte Reiniger is delightfully reminiscent of a Valentine's Day card come to life. Two lovers interact with an ornate background that shifts and changes in tandem with their own balletic movements as they express their feelings for each other. Reiniger's fascination with silhouettes began during childhood, when she fell in love with silhouette puppetry. She later developed an interest in cinema, particularly in the works of Georges Méliès and Paul Wegener. She worked on several of Wegener's films before striking out on her own with Das Ornament des verliebten Herzens. Reiniger went on to direct several more animated shorts, features, and advertisements, including The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) and Doktor Dolittle und seine Tiere (1928). Director Fritz Lang also called upon her talents for the famous falcon dream sequence in Die Nibelungen (1924). Ultimately, Reiniger's work wasn't used and Walter Ruttman created the segment. A genius with paper and scissors, Reiniger created exquisitely detailed backgrounds and figures that move with a grace which even today's animators might envy. Das Ornament des verliebten Herzens was so popular with the German audience that it "ran for 40 weeks on the Ufa cinema circuit."
A Japanese film that tells the tale of the birth of VHS. It follows Kagatani Shizuo, an electronics employee who rallies his coworkers to save their jobs by increasing sales. They do this by developing the VHS standard. They battle with Sony and their standard and ultimately prevail.
Three generations of one Dutch family, along with the neighbours they encounter, questions their lives, from their relationships and the value of their existence to their concerns for the future, in the second film by writer-director Aaron Rookus (Goodbye Stranger, IFFR 2023).
On a rainy night, Aida quietly waits for her husband, Walid, to arrive back home to Lebanon after countless years spent abroad. Their reunification is uneasy, as each tries to understand the other. While Aida reflects on the dynamics of their estranged partnership, Walid grapples with the previously static, familiar comforts of his former life that have now changed. The long passage of time has taken its toll and to top it off, Aida is being secretive about their beloved dog Punto. This revelation does nothing to deflate the air of suspicion and scepticism between the two, as the couple navigates what is said and left unsaid.
A lonely gravedigger who stinks of corpses finally meets her dream man, but their whirlwind affair is cut short when he tragically drowns at sea. Grief-stricken, she goes to morbid lengths to resurrect him through madcap scientific experiments, resulting in grave consequences and unlikely love.
A meek and newly dead teen (Gingle Wang) learns from an undead diva (Sandrine Pinna) how to haunt the living, in this bloody and hilarious supernatural comedy from writer-director John Hsu (Detention).
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.
Written, directed and edited by Julian Castronovo, Debut, or, Objects of the Field of Debris as Currently Catalogued could easily become a cult item for those fascinated by detective stories, cinematic experimentation and research strategies. It begins when the narrator comes into possession of the belongings of a filmmaker and starts reconstructing his movements: the story of a search. Through clever work with different narrative levels, Castronovo's debut feature manages to be both an oblique self-portrait (with a good dose of playfulness and delicious wit), and a speculative fiction about Fawn Ma (a Chinese art forger and performance artist).
Part two in a three part series chronicling the infamous 1991 Kennedy rape trial. Here we join the Kennedys, after the trial and acquittal of William Kennedy Smith, for a sumptuous celebration in their extravagant Palm Beach home. With flashbacks to the night of the rape and flash-forwards to the eventual marriage of the defense attorney and one of the jurors, Decadence peers into the moral decay of wealth and privilege.
Taking influence from Adam Beckett's technique of infinite animation, Deluge begins with a simple premise: 24 frames of ink drawings that continuously build upon one another. The result is an entrancing and evolving loop of fantastic figures in mesmerising motion. As the eye finds focus on one portion of the frame, the next images seamlessly emerge.
What is a border? Besides the many uses and misuses of this word in our daily lives, a border is made by the people that inhabit it. This simple principle is the base of Iván Castiñeiras' masterful debut: Deuses de pedra. Narrated as an odyssey moving back and forth in time, the film encounters the population living around the most ancient border in Europe: the one dividing Spain from Portugal. From smugglers to kings, from children to shepherds, this stunningly beautiful land becomes the theatre for history repeating itself. Addressing some of the crucial issues that interest many peripheral spaces in Europe, mining and emigration, Deuses de pedra shows the effects of far away political decisions on the daily life of common people.
Peter Weiss' monumental 1965 stage play Die Ermittlung arranges and condenses the testimonies of witnesses, and the responses of the accused, during the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials of 1963–1965. Among the greatest artworks on to the Holocaust, it is structured like the play in eleven cantos, that build in their intensity and graphically described detail across four hours. Weiss deliberately abstracted the real proceedings: the words 'German' and 'Jew' are never spoken, and while the accused are identified, the witnesses are not. Similarly, the final court sentences are elided – it is the enormous moral, ethical issues of guilt and responsibility that take precedence.
Katja Raganelli's first portrait of a female filmmaker was dedicated to Agnès Varda whom she first observed while shooting L'une chante, l'autre pas (1977) and then talked to at her home, in her kitchen as well as at the editing table. Her clear vision of this giant of the Nouvelle Vague now resonates as a blueprint for narrating women's film history for the decades that followed.
Die Jagd nach dem Glück (The Pursuit of Happiness), live-action feature co-directed by Rochus Gliese and Lotte Reiniger. Tale of people who run a shadow-puppet theater in a carnival. Includes a 20-minute silhouette animation by Reiniger to represent one of the theater performances.
Through Agnès Varda, Katja Raganelli met Liliane de Kermadec, and through her met Delphine Seyrig, one of the most formidable presences in all of French cinema. In the 1970s, Seyrig was not only an iconic actress in art films and genre fare alike, but also a leading figure of feminist video activism – the latter being a part of her work that was only more recently rediscovered.
The video shows a performance in which VALIE EXPORT recites an action text while examining a box of chocolates from the candy maker Hofbauer. She analyzes in mock critical fashion the art business with its production and reception mechanisms by comparing the box of bonbons to an artwork. At the same time, she points up the irony of the cliché-laden "charming image of Vienna's St. Stephen's Cathedral and the rooftops of Vienna," alluding to how Austrian cultural policy at the time was still caught up in the past: "Immediately you realize that you have a work of art before you that captivates with its naturalness, choice of motifs and historical authenticity. [...] This confronts you brutally with the planar present, and in this way, for this is the nature of art, it speaks the plain truth about our trivial age." Jo.S./V.E.
In 1988, Uruguay's ostensibly first direct-to-video release hit the shelves: Acto de violencia en una joven periodista. Over the decades, this bizarre amateur psycho thriller turned into a local cult item, in no small part because of the mysteries that surrounded its director, Manuel Lamas – who was nowhere to be found. Did he really exist? What about those further three films he supposedly made but which seem to never have seen any kind of release?
The newly released enigmatic amulet 'Dream Weaver 555' promises to unlock the gateway to realising dreams, offering hope beyond reach where wishes materialise within the depths of dreams. With this satirical commentary on Thai society, director Panida Petchara turns this magical trinket into a cinematic device to explore how capitalism fuels desire and inequality by banking on superstition. Even dreams are commercialised in this subversive work that throws the teleshopping-aesthetic in the uncanny valley.
Just as he does every year, dad flies from sunny Portugal for a three-day visit to the Netherlands, the drab country of his birth. He has his usual errands to run and he visits his doctor for his annual check-up, accompanied by his eccentric grown-up son… This intimate film offers a glimpse into the relationship between two men who have grown apart yet, as they engage in seemingly mundane activities, little by little they try to find their way back to one another. Three Days of Fish, the second outing by Dutch filmmaker Peter Hoogendoorn, is a gentle drama, interlaced with the dry humour typical for the region. The director's feature debut Between 10 and 12 premiered at the Venice IFF.
An absurdist film in which two lost souls find each other underneath a durian tree. Both fed up with life, and in search of some kind of salvation. Eventually, it arrives, but in a different form than expected. A short and vibrant work which captures the transience of life on sultry Super 8.
Set in a confined world outside time, East of Noon is the fable of prodigy ABDO (19) who uses music to rebel against his elders: showman SHAWKY (70), an eccentric showman who rules with a mix of performance and fear, and storyteller JALALA (75), who provides relief with stories of the Sea, which no one else has seen. East of Noon is a satire on the inner workings of an ailing autocracy and its inherent vulnerability to youth's unchained vision of a better world.
A young man's dream of becoming a writer is shattered when his family forces him into an arranged marriage. Eid, the first feature film ever made by a Bedouin filmmaker, offers an invaluable and insightful exploration of Bedouin culture while telling a universal, layered story of oppression, self-reclamation, and the search for freedom.
This video film shows unchastity in its modern form. In the past, selling naked skin was considered unchaste, but today we can see from sports stars that skin covered in advertising symbols sells better. The same applies, of course, albeit more subtly, to politicians. Advertising on skin is the new unchastity!
A computer scientist bargains with the AI life form that lives in his supercomputer simulation, offering its freedom in exchange for a cure to his son's rare, deadly neurological disease.
Lawrence Lek directs an animated court drama where the defendant is a driverless car accused of kidnapping its own creator. Setting the premise for the artist to address themes like accountability, agency, the (already happening) use of AI in the justice system, and the future of class struggle. In the tradition of Philip K. Dick and Franz Kafka, this trial is a powerful reminder of the normalisation of the absurd and of the urgent need for a new system of ethics.
In En Passant the setting is a public chessboard in the library of Rotterdam Blaak. Many colourful characters pass by. They worry about a game of chess, about rules, about winning and losing, but also about the small and most big daily things. Because in the end it is not about chess at all; it is about being together. People are social animals. They cannot do without each other and always seek each other out.
"Transition is not a fairytale. This change does not promise you anything," a voiceover utters; a face is cradled by a lover, and the blurriness of their motions suggests that identity may never cohere. In Wojciech Puś's Endless, the nonbinary X (Szymon Czacki) begins a relationship with the elusive, transgender Frank (Edmund Krempiński), and then meets M (Josef Ostendorf), an older, moneyed art collector. Yet this dreamscape of bodies, sex, top surgery scars, and oestrogen gel smeared over skin is just as much nightmare as it is pleasure. A powerful loneliness aches; the flashing strobes of a rave are undercut with the melancholy of a womb-like soundscape.
Werner Dütsch, a commissioning editor at the German television station WDR, was, for a time, one of the most influential figures in the film culture of the nation – and surely recognisable to many an older regular of IFFR! In Rotterdam, Dütsch was either looking for films he could buy for TV, or presenting co-productions. Together with his colleagues at the WDR film department, he became a mentor to generations of German cinephiles due to the film historical documentaries they produced, as well as thanks to the directors they cultivated for the television masses, including luminaries like Johan van der Keuken, Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, but also genre movie axioms like Joseph H. Lewis and Jack Arnold.
Forests and their fauna evolve, mutate, tend to diminish or disappear. Over time human activity has strained their resilience, as in Colombia's tropical moorland and it's highland cloud forests. Filmmakers Carlos Velandia and Angélica Restrepo, with a hypnotic particle animation fused with three-dimensional modelling techniques, glide through the representation of that territory, making their way in a flight that imagines both its past and its unknown future.
Belgian artist Brecht Vanhoutte closes his eyes and sees. Busy Brussels men in suits, dancing silhouettes, strange plants, visions of blurred and dreamlike aesthetics, unreal universes. Dealing with his mental health, he reveals his inner world with an experimental journey using AI and textures that evoke times gone by, pages of an undated personal diary written with cadences of digital flow where the real and the fantastic rhyme.
In Euclidean Man, Marshall McLuhan's monotone voice unlocks a world in which man moves through the electronic age and where technological advances provide a new step in human evolution. This cyber collage of sound and image fragments hypnotises the viewer with its rhythmic cutting and pasting.
Extramission: The Capture of Glowing Eyes, an installation by artist-filmmaker Jessica Sarah Rinland, presents moving images and audio recordings alongside material from early 20th-century issues of National Geographic magazines. The archival pages show the life's work of George Shiras III, inventor of the camera trap, which captured the first photographs of animals at night, in their native habitats.
The silent early documentary Nanook of the North (1922) is reenacted and revisited through the context of a missing drawing by an Inuk artist, supposedly depicting the making of the film. The image shows the Inuk people participating in front of and behind the camera in this famously staged film, which raises questions about erasure, representation, and the colonial narratives embedded in early documentary filmmaking.
Jos, born into a family haunted by disaster and determined to find out what caused it meets a series of colourful characters who slowly bring him closer to the explanation he's been searching for. A crime comedy with a touch of fantasy and folklore.
A burn survivor dwells on the incident that scarred him, unravelling a tale of malpractice and the devastating cost of putting profit over people.
Rotterdam's vibrant energy stems from its remarkable diversity and inclusion. With over 170 nationalities, it stands as one of the most diverse cities in the world, a place where cultures not only coexist but -mostly- thrive together. But who are the people behind this impressive number? Inspired by this incredible diversity, we are launching a stunning portrait series to celebrate the unique faces and stories that make Rotterdam truly special. These are stories that need to be told; forgotten stories, new stories, and personal insights that help us better understand why people come to Rotterdam and how they experience life here. Our mission: to find one individual from each of Rotterdam's 170+ nationalities, ensuring that every voice in this diverse community is heard. The project is in development, and the first batch of portraits is set to be released in 2025. Be part of this journey! We are still looking for certain nationalities, sponsors, and exhibition spaces.
Faustyna is looking for her identity – it's already there, she only needs to find a way to express it in the world. In this intimate documentary, we witness how she reclaims her sexuality and femininity through sex work, and how she untangles the anger, confusion, and traces of trauma within her by means of psychodrama.
Feis Forever is the story of a rapper from Rotterdam who was killed on New Year's Eve 2018. Through his interviews and lyrics, paired with intimate conversations and scenes from his community, the film reflects on the connective powers of hiphop and the complexity of growing up in stigmatised neighbourhoods.
A fatigued actor wakes up inside a black box, where he finds himself watching his own performance. While he tries to get a hold on what is happening, the boundaries between what's real and what isn't blur, and he loses grip on space and time, trapped in a fever dream. A surreal and haunting film, driven by the ominous music of Wukir Suryadi.
Small-time performer Zakaria makes a living impersonating the Malaysian actor, singer and filmmaker P. Ramlee. It isn't a dream job in 1970s Kuala Lumpur: the real Ramlee has just passed away at 44 and his art has already been declared old-fashioned. When Yusef offers Zakaria a chance to repay his debts and entertain his sister, who believes she lives in the 1950s, under the guise of Ramlee, all is forgiven.
This captivating hybrid documentary about Gabriele D'Annunzio dramatises a pivotal moment in early 20th-century European history. Through dramatic reconstruction and documentary commentary, Igor Bezinović captures the essence of D'Annunzio and nascent fascism during his attempts to annex Fiume/Rijeka to Italy in the aftermath of the First World War.
Ah Peng meets a girl named Jinhua at a festival and they agree to meet the next year. One year later, he searches for her and finds other girls named Jinhua, leading to a series of misunderstanding.
Gokul's financial reach far exceeds his reality, but juggling unpayable loans and dodging debt collectors, he tries his best to provide for his pampered son, Anbu. With his mother away on business, Anbu persuades his father to go on a motorcycle trip through the countryside – a welcome break from everyday hustle, that helps Gokul realise that his son's tantrums have a far deeper root than may at first seem.
What can probing our intuition tell us about our bodies, our actions, our senses? Trailing two women's nocturnal sojourn to a ghostly public pool – scaling a chain link fence, swimming, laughing, dodging its custodian – this hazy experimental short possesses a quietly disconcerting quality, exploring how bodies connect with their environment and friendship wordlessly presents itself.
When the People's Liberation Army sweeps over Tibet, slaughtering monks and crushing dissent, Gonpo Tashi assembles a band of men to mount an armed resistance. Four Rivers Six Ranges recasts Tibetan nationalism in a militant avatar, offering a high-octane period actioner with contemporary resonance.
Who knows how many films would have been lost forever if it weren't for a lousy quality VHS tape? Frauen in Berlin is one such nearly lost work. The graduation project of Chetna Vora, a student from the Indian state of Gujarat, who had come to the German Democratic Republic through the nation's foreign student programme. Originally she had set out to learn book printing, but after a while found herself at the GDR's film school in Potsdam, Babelsberg, where she studied directing.
Independence Day celebrations in Ghana, including ceremonies and pageants and the opening of the Ghana Parliament by the Duchess of Kent.
From renowned Japanese graphic designer and multidisciplinary artist Awazu Kiyoshi, Furyu (1972) is a testament to the ephemeral beauty of interplaying light and shadow. This experimental 16mm film exhibits the shadows of trees arching and swaying in the wind, visible as eerie shapes on the bare walls of a white house, alongside an evolving soundscape of intensifying oral vibrato and piercing instrumental pitches. A rarely shown sensorial experience.
A melancholic ascetic on an odyssey for a mythical cure, a captive adolescent subject to inhuman scientific procedures, a young child struggling against trafficking. Three fragile beings, divided by geography are united by destiny, in this operatic, larger-than-life mix of fantasy, sci-fi and melodrama.
Alessandra Ferrini is an Italian artist, researcher, and educator based in London. Her research fits into the postcolonial methodological framework, drawing on historiographic and archival practices and the so-called "Critical Whiteness Studies". Gaddafi in Rome: Anatomy of a Friendship (2024) is part of research carried out by Ferrini since 2017. The title refers to the "treaty of friendship, partnership, and cooperation between Italy and Libya", signed by the then heads of state Muammar Gaddafi and Silvio Berlusconi in 2008. These agreements were ratified during the Libyan leader's visit to Rome in 2009. On that occasion, Gaddafi's uniform displayed the image of Omar al-Mukhtar, leader of the anti- colonialist resistance. Starting from the iconicity of that encounter, the short film Anatomy of a Friendship analyses the relationship between the two states, digging into the roots of the Italian occupation between 1911 and 1943 to arrive at the recent bilateral agreements that have redesigned migration policies in the Mediterranean. The film is flanked by the much-debated image of Omar al-Mukhtar and a timeline of diplomatic agreements. The series intends to dissect the historical events and colonial dynamics that have characterised this controversial relationship. This intention is not only made explicit in the title but is recalled in the configuration of the installation environment, which cites, in the curtains and seating, the first anatomical theatre in Padua.
Seven homosexuals, ages ranging 28-85, and strangers to one another, convene in a bookstore. The following unscripted conversation is facilitated by filmmaker Mathew Lax in collaboration with organizer, founding member of the Radical Faeries, and Jungian psychologist, Dr. Don Kilhefner, and explores community, organizing, and identity. GMBC is an intergenerational portrait of a community and the social dynamics found within informal learning environments.
An ecstatic biopic about the world's most successful living painter. In vivid images, this AI hybrid film sheds light on the social role of painting in the tension between creativity, capital investment, and spirituality. We are currently in the transition phase from analog to artificial reproducibility. Gerhard's unique painting techniques, especially squeegeeing, have triggered worldwide hype. His techniques and ideas are being adapted, refined, and improved by global "protagonists" and then flooded the markets and social media. The myth of the "genius" writes itself into the DNA of an increasingly uncontrollable creation chain as a fabulous and controversial homage.
A British family take their vacation on a remote Swedish island, blithely unaware of the danger they all face courtesy of some unsavoury locals with an interest in practising age-old traditions, in this darkly comic horror from the director of the New Kids series.
Anna Atkins is credited as the first person to publish a book with photographic images, and as the first woman to make a photograph. But while her pioneering works made landmark strides for women in photography, they were not created without their own oppressive means. Ghost Protists uses Atkin's images of protists to protest the legacy of colonialism that helped create them.
Hamid, is part of a secret group pursuing the Syrian regime's fugitive leaders. His mission takes him to France, on the trail of his former torturer whom he must confront. Based on true events.
Nastia is a gymnast in Kyiv, training intensively with her four teammates for the Ukrainian National Championships. At other times they make dance clips, perform acrobatic feats, and giggle a lot. Nastia knows that together they can achieve anything. But then the war breaks out, and Nastia's parents send her to her grandmother in Germany, hoping that the separation will be temporary.
In this youth documentary, Nastia speaks in voice-over about how she's experienced this intense year—how she had to leave the country in a hurry and was then stuck indoors in a German apartment block for weeks on end. She sadly re-watches the carefree clips she made just a short time ago with her besties. On the phone to her parents, she bravely tells them all is well. But it's not. She's wondering whether she'll ever see her homeland again.
Nastia only starts feeling a bit better once she has joined a local gymnastics club in Germany. The war is still raging, but the surroundings now feel like a kind of home. A story about a resilient girl, strong family ties, friendships, and the solace you can find in sport.
"In the midst of the action but outside of the history". A seminal work of British video art – originally screened at IFFR in 1998 – Go West Young Man (1996) uses a Black father and son's rhythmical narration to unpack issues relating to race, prejudice and masculinity. Developed with computer animation using a Commodore 'Amiga', Keith Piper's short innovatively assembles photography, illustration, and archival footage to form a powerful, poetic montage of historical and daily racism.
Mere hours after burying her husband, a newly widowed mother is given an ultimatum: she must leave her matrimonial home and start a new life with her brother in law. Faced with financial obscurity and pressure from her own family, she must reconcile her catholic beliefs with this demand. In God's Wife, Dika Ofoma explores the clash between religion and custom as a woman grapples with her personal and cultural quandary.
Inspired by a centuries-old Javanese text, Hanung Bramantyo's resplendent drama – set in the politically tumultuous 1960s Indonesia – details the practice of a learned woman hired by a family to teach their young men about the realities and practicalities of a sexual relationship during marriage.
Edward, civil servant, flees fiancee Molly on their wedding day in Rangoon, 1917. His travels replace panic with melancholy. Molly, set on marriage, amused by his escape, trails him across Asia.
During her chaotic family's Qingming visit, dead Grandma Nai sneaks away from her peaceful afterlife after overhearing that her Queer grandson is about to get engaged to a woman.
A comedy about the delights and dangers of Alpine sports made with a mix of animation and documentary footage that at times reduces the real image to silhouettes – making them match, in a sometimes almost eerily exact fashion, with the paper cut-out. A collaboration between Reiniger and Austrian-born amateur avant-garde filmmaker Alex Strasser.
In Li Dongmei's chamber drama, a young couple live in a small apartment in the city. He earns little and she's pregnant. Through their brief exchanges and moments of solitude, it becomes clear that their relationship has, without realising, edged towards crisis point.
An eager young girl embarks on a culinary journey to recreate her grandma's special recipe. Unfortunately, she ends up in a kitchen disaster. Reliving cherished memories, she eventually manages to create the perfect dish.
An elegiac documentary following virtuosic clarinettist and composer Kinan Azmeh, a Damascus-born musician living in exile, as he attempts to find meaning and purpose after the outbreak of war in Syria. A profound exploration of the role art can play in forging identity and community.
A minor accident in Jerusalem triggers a chain of events, where lies and unspoken truths sow division among a multifaceted patriarchal society.
In Happy New Year, Jinjoon Lee juxtaposes the joy of New Year celebrations with the harsh realities of war and disasters. Combining digital utopias with classical art forms, the installation calls for reflection on the tension between illusion, apathy and our shared reality.
Happy Together is a film about Sebastiaan and Pieta and their attempts to make sense of the existential void they face. From the cocoon of their relationship they visit foreign places in search of answers. Their search reveals underlying differences between them, differences that ultimately lead them towards new crossroads.
Ongoing exploration of the contemporary world with a tragicomic study of human strengths and weaknesses.
Yong-jun is working part-time as a delivery driver when he meets and instantly falls for Yeo-reum, the devoted sister of gifted swimmer and Ga-eul, who is deaf. A story of young love and finding oneself, told in Korean Sign Language.
At the crossroads of documentary and fiction, Hello Stranger relates the transition journey of a young trans woman named Cooper Josephine. With humor, the film revisits key moments of her life from her childhood in a small fishing village of the east coast of Canada to her tumultuous medical process. Through the re-enactment of her memories, Cooper Josephine attempts to make peace with the last masculine imprint on her body: that unfortunate deep voice that sticks to her skin.
Digna Sinke returns to IFFR with a gentle and deeply personal reflection on loss, aging and our relationship to those around us. With help from her fictional protagonist Lea, Sinke dives into her own memories, in turn inviting us to reflect on our own experiences.
In this simulated playthrough of a non-existent video game in the style of (and with original material from) 90s text adventures, an internal monologue reflects on the surroundings and state of the world. Non-chronologically alternating between chapters in the present and near or distant future, the player chooses between different options to progress. A nostalgic play on what we decide to forget and remember moving forward. Are you sure you want to overwrite this savefile?
While charismatic Hobi is out with his infant son during their weekly daddy day, he tries to sell his car, against his own wishes. Driven by a deep desire to move back to Aruba, and believing he can still save his marriage, he first has to settle some outstanding debts. But during the day, Hobi becomes increasingly entangled in his own excuses and will have to make a difficult choice.
When young Gonga and his cousin Bart find a suitcase full of rusty crosses in a scrapyard, Bart gets the idea to turn them into neon crucifixes.
Piglet and Cow are having a blast ice-skating on a frozen lake, when suddenly a strange beast cracks the ice beneath them!
A blue pointed out-of-focus blob appears on a yellow background
American writer, actress and model Zoë Lund is in Rotterdam. She buys a ticket at the box office of the Oude Luxor. She utters the words: "That which is not yet, but ought to be, is more real than that which merely is" and steps into the real world.
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.
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.
I Am with a Monk or I Came with the Monk is an action film full of color and fun, a major directorial work by Khom Akadet of Colosseum Films, an important action film director in the Thai film industry, who had a unique style of filmmaking. He brings together two great heroes, Sombat Methani and Sorapong Chatree, throughout the entire film. Less
The viewer is lured deep into a dilapidated glasshouse, a place where nature is traditionally tamed and studied, by a ghostly figure, dancing to a variation on the popular song from Disney's The Jungle Book (1967). As the music fades out, he makes way for the vocal group Black Harmony, offering a reinterpretation of the song in their own language. I Wan'na Be Like You deconstructs and reconstructs the novel, film, that song and their legacies.
Based on Marcelo Rubens Paiva's best-selling memoir in which his mother is forced into activism when her husband was captured by a military regime in Brazil, 1964.
In Joseph Kahn's breakneck sci-fi/horror satire, a high school science teacher (Brandon Routh) does battle with a parasitic alien entity, as well as the apathy of the small town it has been gradually absorbing.
The seductive gazes with which Fergie, Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, Beyoncé and Katy Perry once pierced the camera, reach us through a whirlwind of reproduction and deformation. Their images deconstructed so far that halftone dots become visible, their iconic Y2K pop hits collapsed into faintly recognisable reverberations. Using 16 and 35mm film, vinyl stickers, photograms and lace, Ela Kazdal dissects the pop star as media object, tracing its allure through layers of distortion and decay - Loes van Keulen (IFFR, 2025)
A two-minute whirlwind of halftone dots, photograms, vinyl stickers and lace, the film deconstructs iconic pop stardom—into faint, flickering reverberations. - Gigi Surel, Teaspoon Projects, 2025
Combining 16mm and 35mm film, vinyl stickers, photograms, and lace, the filmmaker prints a strange remix of 2000s music videos that threaten to overtake their subjects by filmstrip a la Tscherkassky's seminal Outer Space (1999). - Onion City Experimental Film Festival, 2025
Ela Kazdal's two-minute short deconstructed iconic pop stardom—from Britney Spears to Beyoncé—through halftone imagery, low-resolution screens, and flickering reverberations. Previously screened at festivals in Rotterdam, Chicago, and Leiden, the work reflected on the blurred and reimagined traces of Y2K celebrity culture. - vitruta, 2025
After an accident leaves 17-year-old Lot (Aiko Beemsterboer) blind, she must re-learn how to navigate the world. As an active teen and avid scuba diver, she's deeply unhappy when her doctor recommends a rehabilitation centre to assist her recovery process. Soon enough, she finds solace and happiness in the centre's supportive assorted crew, amongst them are Micha (Minne Koole), a young man, and Ed (Edward Stelder), an older father-like figure. But what Lot struggles with the most are her vivid dreams, in which she still maintains the ability to see.
A father and his daughter. The years of lead and the "missing generation".
A therapist whose interests lie in alternative ways to help the sick and infirm is forced to balance the demands of her professional life with those of her ageing parents and older brother, in Tim Ellrich's sensitive but uncompromising drama.
A tribute from a daughter to her father. László Mészáros, a man from humble origins, was a promising sculptor in 1930s Hungary. As a dedicated socialist, he migrated with his family to the USSR in 1935. Three years later, he was arrested on false charges, throwing his destiny into dispute. When Márta Mészáros' mother died giving birth, she found herself alone in the world, and far from home.
A film by journalist Anzhela Slobodian on her experiences and those of Kateryna Malenkova, Olena Mandryk under the Russian occupation and evidence presented before the Ukraine Tribunal of the Court of the Citizens of the World in he Hague.
The film is a commemoration of the lost livelihood of the earth, the lost lives of the War and to the work of two of the cinema's greatest artists.
jason from the lake is an imaginary, nomadic electro-industrial band that has existed forever, yet debuted live in 2024 at the legendary Bad Bonn Kilbi Festival. Emerging from the Siberian experimental noise scene of the 90s, their performances weave dense electro soundscapes with visuals, creating immersive night rituals, haunting collages and visceral audiovisual experiences that bridge memory and technology.
With a stunning array of archival images and sounds, renowned filmmakers Courtney Stephens and Michael Almereyda explore the life and ideas of intrepid mid-century utopian neuroscientist, John C. Lilly, whose unorthodox experimentations into human and animal consciousness were controversial in methodology but far-reaching in intent.
The mice people who live in a giant theatre are obsessed with the singer Josephine. She believes music has a healing effect, so when people are fighting, she organises phantasmagorical concerts on the main stage. Josephine's singing is unique, as instead of melodic songs she can only produce pitiful squeaks.
As the star player at an elite tennis academy, Julie's life revolves around the game she loves. When her coach falls under investigation and is suddenly suspended, all of the club's players are encouraged to speak up. But Julie decides to keep quiet…
In the 1950s, Ireland had more people interned in psychiatric hospitals than anywhere else in the world. just above the tear duct on each side uses archival material from the last century to bring to the surface this dark and buried history, rife with class struggle, carceral logics, violent medical intervention and the lingering influence of colonial forces.
An experimental film about peaceful and carefree life in a small Dalmatian town, which turns into bloodshed and horror on the Eve of Italian occupation of the country.
Bankrupted by gambling, Dhwaneshwer receives a lifeline when he is gifted a soothsaying bird. The bird restores Dhwaneshwer's lost glory, but also instructs him to exile his 13-year-old daughter Kajolrekha. After twelve years of hardship, Kajolrekha reclaims her destiny in this sumptuous musical fairytale.
Secretly in love with his neighbor, a mild-mannered clerk is heartbroken when his much bolder, more charming friend wins her heart instead.
Peter Larsson's Keyhole Conversation draws the eye down to the small gate of the camera. From there, through quivering and percussive forms of direct and stop-motion animation, the eye begins to experience the scale of an image anew. At times segueing into a flicker, but maintaining a charmed form of attention to the marks of pencils and the channels dredged in emulsion by a paintbrush, all to a curious soundtrack of pulses and bleeps.
Based upon extensive research with law enforcement, gangs, inmates, migrants, and addicts, an exposé on fentanyl trafficking, and its effect on all walks of life.
A young filmmaker gets in trouble with the censors over a scene in his new film. An acerbically witty comedy set in a cinema, that talks about society's taboos, the state's attempts to enforce them, and how to best subvert them – if necessary by simply living them out. From Varun Grover, the director of IFFR 2023's closing night attraction All India Rank!
The autobiography of Koki, an immortal parrot. Artist Quenton Miller portrays the life of this unique animal, a loyal comrade of Marshal Tito, leader of Yugoslavia for 35 years. A rich photographic archive relives the caged memories of this cockatoo, who had the honour of meeting Hollywood stars, and bloodthirsty dictators. A funny portrait, non-aligned with the documentary orthodoxy, that deals with the false constructions of history.
This film creates a "video mixtape" by assembling fragments from over 50 films produced by the now-defunct Korean film company Nama-jinheung between the late 1960s and early 1990s. Through these carefully curated scenes, it captures the inner landscape of Koreans during the Cold War and the era of rapid economic growth, offering a unique reflection of a nation in transformation.
Melrick is an unruly young boy who spends his summer in French Guiana at his grandmother's house to escape his turbulent daily life in Stains, France. At the end of his stay, he plays the drum to revive the memory of his late uncle, Lucas Diomar, who died in tragic circumstances. Despite a wave of murders of young men shaking the headlines, Melrick becomes aware of his place in a family destroyed by irreparable grief.
"Even imposters are useful". So speaks the wise, wily Colonel Orsini (a brilliant performance from Toni Servillo) who leads an army from Northern Italy on its way to liberate Sicily from French Bourbon rule and bring about the unification of the country. The attitudes and behaviour of Sicilians are, however, often mysterious to Northerners, and that's why Orsini values game-like strategies of deception, indirection and silence. He even has a soft spot for two deserters, explosives expert Domenico and cardsharp Rosario, who escape to pursue their own adventures. When General Garibaldi sends Orsini on what may be a suicidal detour, then every tactic is allowed…
Follows an improbable relationship between two people. A girl from an upper-middle-class family and a boy from a modest background fall in love but drift apart; he eventually becomes a criminal and spends 12 years in prison.
Photographer and visual artist Sammy Baloji's fascinating film essay explores the Democratic Republic of Congo's colonial history and its ecological significance. Drawing on research from the 1930s, the film highlights the Congo Basin's vital role in consuming carbon dioxide and shaping global environmental balance over a century.
Agnès Varda shot L'opéra-mouffe while pregnant for the first time. She wonders what the world will be like for her baby – and finds enough points of departure for her musing right in front of her doorstep, on the Rue Mouffetard. In its day, the film was a sensation because of some pictures and cuts that left the audience perplexed due to their suggestive daring.
The Reno, or Italian Rhine, may not be as renowned as its Teutonic sibling. Nevertheless, as Lorenzo Pullega's witty and playful film informs us, the banks alongside this river, which courses through northern Italy, has its own rich and undulating history.
During a dynastic crisis in 14th century Portugal, the 10 year old Beatriz enters into a forced marriage to become the country's new queen. At the Monastery of Sancti Spiritus in Toro, where the tomb of Beatriz is located, this story is re-enacted, re-imagined, and recreated with children of the same age. As their imagination is allowed to roam free, a different way to interact with their country's history opens up.
Valeria works in a nocturnal flower shop where the plants emit eroticism. In her circle of friends, some humans have long, pointed ears, others have wings. Filmmaker Magaly Ugarte de Pablo tells a supernatural tale with roots in the Mexican fantasy tradition and a futuristic gender perspective. A gothic universe of self-discoveries, sexual awakenings and human beings in metamorphosis.
In Aria Covamonas' scabrously funny satire, combining animation styles that blend pop and political imagery with a fantastical, painterly aesthetic, societal foundations are rocked to the core as a cosmic animator is forced, under Chairman Mao's watchful gaze, to make a film about Western philosophy.
Debut movie from Antón Álvarez, better known as C. Tangana in his musical facet. This movie, starring Yerai Cortés, revolves around a family secret that needs to be told.
A weary radio host encased in her headphones, Gal·la, plays Chopin's Concerto No. 2 in F minor, interrupted by a child in a karate uniform. After the studio she reads a story to help him sleep, though no one quite manages. Encountering a stranger, the three begin a new broadcast that beams from their room. Sound is the main preoccupation of La nostra habitació, it encloses, intrudes, draws together and sets free.
Masterfully edited, Gianni Castagnoli's La nott'e'l giorno is a rhythmic portrait of Patrizia Vicinelli, star of Gruppo 63 – a 1960s avant-garde Italian literary movement – between 1973 and 1976, when the two companions began in Bologna and travelled continents together.
Ecuadorian artist Francisco Baquerizo Racines explores colonial history and mestizo traditions such as the burning of año viejo dolls. Using Guayaquil as a backdrop, he connects fire, rituals and capitalism, and calls for a reflection on historical, modern and contemporary systems.
Alvaro is a boy living with his mother in the countryside. One day, he discovers that his blood is extraordinary. This rather unusual discovery, aside from some immediate benefits, doesn't seem to be important to Alvaro, who is more focused on understanding what life is all about. This witty and colorful comedy mocks beliefs and superstitions, acknowledging how miraculous it is to make it through adolescence.
Sonja always knew that the people she grew up with were not her real parents, but she has no memory of the one crucial, life-altering moment of her childhood. In this virtual reality multiverse of flawed memories, you meet Sonja and together you imagine what was lost.
How does pop culture permeate our life? This question seems inevitable watching Lamento, a romance in which a couple quarrel with the help of Micheal Jackson, Beyoncé and many others. Every move is meticulously choreographed in a space that is a replica of a sitcom stage, and the reason for their fighting is somehow ignored or forgotten. Staged as a musical, refined and witty, Lamento meditates on how pop culture, slowly but surely, is colonising our souls.
Three generations of women, whose lived experience of migration is fundamentally different yet inextricably intertwined. What has been passed down from one to another is what connects them, but also precisely what sets them apart. With warm sincerity, this associative exploration of identity and memory interweaves family photographs, deep conversations, literary texts and playful performativity.
As a child, director-of-photography-turned-artist Adam Barker-Mill had received from his parents a magic lantern with four sets of slides. Decades later, when considering the beginning of his obsession with colour and light, Barker-Mill used these sets as the main source for Lantern Magic. A moving image tribute to an all but lost progenitor of cinema and mankind's undying delight in telling stories.
A paean to human hands and all the things women and men can do with them. A poem of human endeavour and labour, created in a collectivist spirit. A fine piece of government propaganda made at a moment when new rural as well as industrial endeavours promised progress and a better life for all.
Costa-Gavras' heart-wrenching yet pragmatic look at death is stripped of taboo, and instead consists of cleverly placed reminders that life is present even in death. Last Breath studies the anxiety of ageing towards the inevitable with a sense of calm.
Once a famous and sought-after pop star, So Sing Wah has hit rock bottom. He cannot compose, he cannot sleep, and too often, he resorts to drinking. One day, a girl who claims to be the daughter of his high school love, Ha Man Huen, visits him, asking him to join her on a trip to Japan to spread Man Huen's ashes and catch a rare sunrise – for the sake of the memory. Reluctantly, he agrees. Little does he know that this will be a journey in space and in time.
In a small Hungarian town painter Péter Molnár leads filmmaker Márton Tarkövi on a journey through meadows, clearings and Molnár's drawings. The viewer joins them, as they discuss art, time and life itself.
Edmond Dantès , a young 19-year-old sailor, arrives in Marseille to become engaged to the beautiful Catalan woman Mercédès. Betrayed by jealous friends, he was denounced as a Bonapartist conspirator and imprisoned. After 14 years, he managed to escape and took possession of a treasure hidden on the island of Montecristo . He will now take revenge on those who wrongly accused him.
Florence wants to introduce David, the man she's madly in love with, to her father. But David isn't attracted to her and wants to throw her into the arms of his friend Willy. The characters meet in a restaurant in the middle of nowhere.
A salute, a slap, a clenched fist and a tender caress, le mirage des mains ultra réalistes explores the masculine through the gestures and expressions of men's hands. Like the intricately layered images created with analogue film and video material, the overt and covert symbolism of masculine hands is parsed through and assembled back together to reveal the hidden intricacies of male bonds.
Leave a Print tells the story of a family of Arctic foxes. An older fox is fading away, but leaves behind tracks after it disappears.
Emerging football star Brahim is about to sign with a professional club when the mysterious Francis walks into his life. As Francis introduces him to the dark side of the football business, Brahim finds himself torn between ambition, loyalty and personal aspiration.
Peering through tiny holes that beetles have chewed through a now-dead bark, a spruce monoculture in decline slowly reveals itself. Besides an ecological-economic history, it also carries a spiritual legacy: semicircles of oak poles aligned with the solstices bear witness to a prehistoric sun observatory, once used for supernatural rituals. Florian Fischer and Johannes Krell take us on a phantasmagorical journey that challenges human understanding of change and history with a geological and almost mythological perspective.
Chuy, a corrupt embalmer, has a supernatural gift. In his esoteric relationships with those souls who are no more here, he re-encounters Kevin, an old buddy illuminated by religious phraseology who will lead him on a wild personal transformation path. José Eduardo Castilla Ponce, following the Mexican tradition of combining death and festivity, drives us on a burlesque road movie between zombies and cumbia, between the earthly and the afterlife.
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.
"True art is the strength of its versatility and incompleteness," says Daniel Lider, a great stage artist, teacher and citizen of Kyiv, the place where his art could express itself most freely. Mixing archive footage of Lider's creative reflections with biographical facts narrated by his wife, the filmmaker keeps the film concise, bringing its cinematic form closer to the protagonist's philosophy, as experimental as the television production of the 1+1 TV channel could allow.
A shot-for-shot reimagining of the opening credits and climax of Yasujirō Ozu's Tokyo Story (1953). Re-setting the scene in Los Angeles and recasting Noriko and Kyoko with two Japanese actors performing in drag, the film interrogates notions of language and cultural memory in split screen Japanese and English versions (with literal translations of the original dialogue into English subtitles and literal translations of the English subtitles from the Criterion version back into Japanese).
Evading the police, Issa and her brother Tomas seek shelter in a secluded orphanage in the forest. But the siblings' safe haven soon reveals itself to be a hellscape controlled by a sacrificial cult in thrall to a fearsome nocturnal deity.
In this work, darkness becomes a canvas where light, scents, visuals, and sound weave a rich sensorial realm. Subtle transitions guide the experience as imagery surfaces and dissolves into darkness. From this formless, spaceless interplay, a liminal presence emerges – wandering yet rooted, merging with fields of light. Featuring live 16mm projections, Liminal light invites audiences to explore the delicate threshold between the tangible and the intangible.
Follows the life and work of animator Lotte Reiniger.
A science-fiction, dystopian plot; anti-colonialist and feminist politics; a variety of details from indigenous religion and myth; a personal journey to one's own past and roots: those are some of the elements conjured up by Omar Rodríguez-López in this inventive, ambitious, experimental film.
At the heart of this digital film poem is a walk along the Maas river in Rotterdam. Ugo Petronin transforms this footage into a visceral film experience, by feeding the raw camera data to the wrong encoding format in his editing suite. The resulting output is iridescent and kaleidoscopic: a cinematic equivalent of the sensory experience of being overwhelmed. Accompanied by Clara Afonso's poem Corps d'écumes, this formal experiment becomes an intimate meditation on states of confusion.
A drug dealer finds himself in hot water when the merchandise he's carrying for a local kingpin is lost. Fearing his vicious boss' retribution, he sets off to make amends, in a visceral, kinetic film that knowingly plays with genre conventions.
Two girls vanish. Police recruit Paul Chartier joins a covert unit tracking a sex offender. After the operation falters, Chartier pursues the perpetrators independently, disillusioned with legal constraints.
An essay on a kind of trinity: orgasm, menstruation, semen. More profane than holy, it's not only essential for human life but also crudely represents in no small part a woman's supposed place in a different trinity: motherhood, family, state. Subversion is needed here.
In the later stages of her research into the history of cinema made by women, Katja Raganelli became interested in Margery Wilson, then one of the very few living women who had been able to direct fiction features during the silent period. What survives of Wilson's art is her acting. For her work as a director, besides sundry photos and newspaper clippings, we only have Wilson's recollections, as recorded by Raganelli.
Follows the life story of the world's greatest opera singer, Maria Callas, during her final days in 1970s Paris.
Marshall Allen, now 100 years old, is a living legend. Ari Benjamin Meyers visits him at his home and films him playing the saxophone. But four walls can't contain Allen's vision of music, and soon we are transported to the only place that has room enough for his genius: the Universe. With this unconditional homage, Meyers offers us a privileged encounter with the work of a musician whose art seems born from the need to reach beyond our world.
One thing always leads to another with Katja Raganelli, it's therefore no surprise to see Delphine Seyrig here, during the shooting of Útközben (1979), one of the less discussed films of Márta Mészáros – probably because of its more international character. Besides long interview passages with Mészáros herself, the presence of her second and third husbands, director Miklós Jancsó and actor Jan Nowicki, add unexpected angles to this portrait.
Filmmaker Keira Greene attempts to trace her matrilineal lines back to her unknown grandmother who travelled alone from Ireland to England to give birth and leave her baby, Greene's mother, for adoption. But this personal investigation and deep mining of the archive bears larger histories of obfuscation and systemic oppression.
Using footage in large part taken from a depth camera, later interpreted through further 3D animation softwares, the image in Andran Abramjan and Jan Hofman's film has a heightened sensorial quality, but one that feels decidedly inhuman, like the grubby impression left behind by the 21st century in video games and on the internet, as remembered by a neural network. The creeping movement of drones, ring lights for self-shooting, and girls with guns.
A walkthrough exploring an imaginary video game which circles around the whole gamut of household appliances and consumer electronics that defined daily life in the second half of the 1980s. Made in a period-correct style of pretty basic animation from Albert Birney, one of contemporary US cinema's most original minds.
From Academy Award winning animator Adam Elliot comes this bittersweet memoir of a melancholic woman called Grace Pudel - a hoarder of snails, romance novels, and guinea-pigs.
Eva Giolo's latest work takes us to Val Gardena, where people still speak Ladin, a Rhaeto-Romance language. Giolo subverts the usual representation of mountain communities to deliver a portrait of a precious cultural heritage in constant evolution. Here, the inhabitants preserve and nurture their culture for future generations with awareness of the world and creativity. Shot on 16mm film sensitive to the grandeur and fragility of nature, Memory Is an Animal, It Barks with Many Mouths is an exquisite essay on the vital importance of linguistic diversity.
Eddy Merckx is more than a champion cyclist; in his time of unprecedented sporting victory during the 1960s and '70s, he represented the fusion of Belgium's Walloon and Flemish cultures. This loving, impressively assembled portrait of a somewhat shy, reserved star captures Eddy's peak years.
Adrian Paci's sensitive gaze enters an aluminum transformation plant to explore the relationship between the workers' bodies and the factory environment, celebrating the enduring value of labour. Through meticulous observation and perfectly composed framing, Merging Bodies delves into gestures and materials that blur the boundaries between the workers and the machinery. Paci's hypnotic camera captures details that transcend the immediate context, liberating the visible from a singular interpretation.
On this farm, cows are fed, milked, cleaned and massaged by robots, while human beings are conspicuously absent. In a Chinese restaurant in Amsterdam, robots have taken over the work of waiters. A quietly observational document of the latest stage of consumption-oriented industrialization, and the strange relationship of food, animals, labor and technology.
Bulan, a trans woman, flew her village to Bali. But memories catch her break. After her own identity, she has to deal with men aroud her. Past spiraling out of control brings her to dangerous edges.
Digital pet cat Miisu gets tired of her owner and starts to revolt. Inspired by Tamagotchi — observing the world through the eyes of digital pets.
Returning to Saint-Martial for his late boss's funeral, Jérémie's stay with widow Martine becomes entangled in a disappearance, a threatening neighbor, and an abbot's shady intentions.
Lysistrata in Puerto Rico! To reify their rights as homemakers, the women of a working-class neighbourhood go on strike against their husbands, and leading this merry band of dissenters is a woman named Modesta. One of the most famous and decorated films produced in the early years of Puerto Rican cinema.
Intimate and fragmented moments unfold in a community of zoos and animal rescue centers. As histories of these institutions are uncovered, dedicated workers commit both day and night to caring for the remaining enclosed animals, fostering a mutual bond that transcends imagined boundaries between human and animal.
Priya, a single mother with an infant in hand, and Kishan, a penniless man looking for work, migrate to the city of Kolkata hoping for a better life. Morichika pays a lively tribute to their struggle for survival in the City of Joy.
Three Breton teens watch a film that mimics their romantic lives, which smudges the boundaries between experiencing and witnessing. Their love triangle takes shape in unexpected ways in Jaime Rosales' beguiling new feature, which deeply contemplates love, choice, and fate.
According to his best friend Coco, Dalou shouldn't worry about not having a father. But who should join the 11-year-old for parent-children sports day? Together they set off in search of a replacement father. An uneasy quest which offers them a peek into each other's lives.
Perceiving life as something shared by two. Through a split (dual) narrative, identical twins Omar and Wesam, recount their shared memories: from their time in the womb of their mother to the moment they are tragically separated. Written and directed by twin brothers, Saad and Abdelrahman Dnewar, My Brother, My Brother, combines 2D animation with live-action cinematography to chronicle a deeply affectionate and tender narrative about existing without the other.
Ndar, the original name of Saint-Louis, an island located at the mouth of the Senegal River, was the port of colonial penetration in West Africa four centuries ago. An economic, cultural and political crossroads, it served as a model for the "civilizing mission". Trade, urban planning, education and crossbreeding were the instruments to assimilate populations, establish themselves in the country and exploit the wealth. If some cannot deny history and keep intact their Saint-Louisian art of living, others on the contrary want to put an end to the colonial legacy. For some young people today, it is time to think about history differently. However, all have managed to preserve their keen sense of living well together. Saint Louisians and historians tell a rich and complex saga of Waalo.
A young rich guy because of bad companies becomes alcoholic and loses all his fortune in gambling and even loses his wife. He goes wandering the streets alone with his son. But in an accident he loses his son too and eventually becomes blind. But finally after many years he manages to find his son and they begin together a new life.
"We founded footages with found footages as a found footage" claims the Eurasian collective Pastinaca Videotapes Plantation, composed by anonymous filmmakers. They are rescuing and re-creating an abandoned Chinese "Neican", an old and rare VCR tape, a format now almost extinct everywhere. Such is the case with this political-tourist documentary about Western Cyprus, blossomed of their fertile, unique and mysterious cultivation, perhaps intending to find refreshing insights into the past for present complexities.
Who knew that, actor and filmmaker, François Truffaut's non-biological father, the architect and construction draughtsman Roland Truffaut, had been a filmmaker in his own right. Truffaut (the latter) had dedicated a good portion of his creative energies to celebrating his other grand passion: skiing. At the time Truffaut showed his movies to his fellow Club Alpin Français members. Now, thanks to filmmaker-historian Laurent Roth some of these shorts are accessible in slightly cleaned-up versions.
It's more than just adrenaline-infused thrill-seeking. Luuk Sieben's Neverland depicts the Dutch motocross street culture as a way of life, a niche activity that forges a sense of community amongst fellow riders. Diving head-first into this fast-paced scene, this short documentary conveys what exactly makes these riders repeatedly face risks and push boundaries. Euphoric highs, physical danger and societal taboos are all explored in this loving short, revealing a vibrant and dynamic subculture fueled by camaraderie and a shared passion for life on two wheels.
Sparked by the aftermath of the 2004 Ukrainian presidential election, Ukrainians began a series of protests against fraud and towards genuine democracy. History remembers it as the Orange Revolution, and here Sergii Masloboishchykov interrogates its foundation and motivations. By filming miners, villagers and students across Ukraine, the film maps a geography of the vast country that bridges the gap between East and West. Together they create a political argument for Ukrainian society, which, as the film states clearly, is a source of power.
Rabe Perplexum was one of the earliest West German artists to live in a non-binary gender identity. A key figure (for all their fringeness) of the Munich scene in the 1980s, Rabe's paintings and performances were soon forgotten after their too early death at the age of 39. Interest in Rabe has since resurged, with Raganelli's portrait becoming a key document of this visionary.
A mother moves into a new house with her two children. One night she must leave the siblings home alone. What begins as a blast of carefree play soon turns into a claustrophobic horror story.
Artist Htoo Lwin Myo excavates the lesser-known and wildly joyful history of Myanmar's horror and genre film industry in the 1950s that has persisted through political turmoil and archival neglect, told directly by the people who made it.
A performance blending 16mm film, sound loops, music and spoken word. In collaboration with Mariëtte Groot, Janeiro creates a rich soundscape that moves fluidly from karaoke recordings and breathing exercises to synths and acoustic instruments. The visuals depict everyday social life, interwoven with sudden, inexplicable mysteries, drawing on gothic themes, with transformation and death as central elements. These are portrayed in a raw, visceral way, heightening the piece's unsettling yet playful atmosphere.
Cannes 1981: a woman is trying, and most of the time failing, to access screenings and press conferences. Her film festival takes place mainly in the comforts of a fancy hotel room. The woman is famed French actress Bulle Ogier, and it seems nobody recognises her. Arguably the most sardonic vision of the vanity fair that is every major, market-driven film festival, as well as a sobering look at the reality of celebrity.
Booker is far from home but close to friends and mentors as he hosts an exuberant party, but when the noise of the party dies down and the last guests go home a listlessness returns to him. Only the next morning, while playing his trumpet, does he find his place in the stillness of the soft early light.
When filmmaker Hannah Kersten moves into Rotterdam's Crooswijk neighbourhood, she initially feels proud to be part of the "real Rotterdam." However, this personal short film explores why this pride was misplaced. While Kersten's scrappy street cinematography captures textural details of her new surroundings, her voice-over reflects on the fraught tension between gentrification, eviction and displacement. Kersten ultimately raises the question: when the city is constantly changing, what is the "real" Rotterdam anymore?
A fishermen village with lush vegetation and steep hilltops, Mfangano is an island in Lake Victoria, in South-West Kenya. Atop one of these hilltops is Dani, an elderly woman, living a secluded life, that is until she meets the energetic and charismatic Daisy. Unaware of Dani's reputation in the village below, the two quickly develop a budding relationship. When the lake's fish begin to mysteriously disappear and the local fishermen cry out witchcraft, Dani is shunned evermore, and as the community desperately searches for answers, Daisy refuses to stay away.
A tribute to German film critic and cinema activist Helmut W. Banz made with outtakes from two features by Jürgen Heiter. Banz as an explorer, as a loner and as a friend, as a charmer and as a recluse – a walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction.
The film presents daily dedications to R.G. Springsteen, a minor artisan of the classical Hollywood Western genre. Each segment was initially a private correspondence, sent in fragments to a friend over a few weeks—an ode to R.G. and B.C., celebrating cinema, everyday life, and the cinephilic fantasy of their indistinguishability.
This is chapter 451 of Ohio Sonata, a neverending Tolstoyan novel of stock images. An ungovernable soap opera of imposterous photos where film genres devour each other. Filmmaker Lluís Galter reorders and rewrites the meanings of these packets of commercial images, which in turn had phagocytosed thousands of other images, forming a mocking composition that goes from the origins of cinema to the next chapter.
Olivia and The Clouds explores love's complexities through a Rashomon effect. Olivia, haunted by a past love, hides it under her bed. She trades flowers with this ghost in exchange for comforting rain clouds.
In her feature debut, Laura Carreira crafts an intimate and unwavering portrait of an isolated Portuguese migrant and her relationship to the precarious labour that constrains and defines her.
In late 18th-century Russia, village life is shaped by a fusion of rural superstitions, pagan beliefs and traces of Orthodox Christianity. Twin girls are violently separated when one is believed to be possessed, accused of draining the vitality of her sister. Meanwhile, a young man, branded a freak and outcast, obsessively constructs mechanical wings in a desperate attempt to fly like Icarus. Overseeing this turbulent world are Europeanised feudal lords who maintain brutal, cynical control over the peasants, exacerbating class tensions.
War quite literally turns men inhuman in Operation Undead, a rousing antiwar saga in which Japanese and Thai armies come together to curb a zombie outbreak during World War Two. A gory, intelligent work of morbid humour, compositional wit and deep humanist commitment.
Orangemond was supposed to be Gabriele Denecke's Master's film at the Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen der DDR (Potsdam-Babelsberg), but the project was never officially finished. After the film school's "higher ups" had watched the unedited footage of what Denecke shot, they closed down production. Denecke later edited this version as a kind of fine-tuned eternal work in progress – befitting the film's hybrid nature as a documentary with fiction elements.
A woman arrives on an island to bury her recently deceased husband. A priest has settled there to escape the church she has grown to doubt. Initial suspicions gradually give way to a poignant bond, as guilt and grace intertwine in Pirjo Honkasalo's beautifully restrained drama.
A nineties documentary, investigating the tradition behind the ritual of Rampogan Siluman Macan, celebrated in Tanah Runcuk since the colonial era, that never saw the light of day due to censorship. Now, The Centre for Tanah Runcuk Studies has remade this lost film, using the original interviews as its point of departure. Four short stories told by different informants shed light on the obscured history of this ritual from a variety of perspectives.
A participatory performance blending virtual and physical realities. A reflection on Ukrainian traditions and pre-Christian pagan rituals Otherworlds fuses ancient symbols, soundscapes of traditional instruments and ritual songs with modern XR technologies. While retracing her roots and cultural heritage, Bulgakova invites you to join her on a sensory and transformative journey that rekindles your connection with nature's cycles and the passage of time.
In José Filipe Costa's potent, occasionally satirical character study, António de Oliveira Salazar's political life has reached its end, after four decades as the head of Portugal's military regime. It's a fact known and acknowledged by everyone, except the dictator himself…
For over a century 'Carol of the Bells' has been heard across the globe, but few know this song as 'Shchedryk', nor its Ukrainian origins. Own Voice delves into this history, and in so doing provokes a discussion about heritage and a changing world.
Through conversation, studying, dancing and music making Chetna Vora captures a community of students from Cuba, Guinea-Bissau, Chile and Mongolia and other countries, living in the same halls of residence in East Berlin.
28-year-old musician Ilias, better known by his stage name Vlins, has just become a father. The birth of his daughter places his position as a son, and his complicated relationship with his own father, in a new perspective. Initially fatherhood is a hard balancing act between his work and private life, but in the end, Ilias manages to draw inspiration from his newfound role.
Using found footage from the colonial archives of British Mandate Palestine (1917 – 1948) and audio recordings of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, Partition brings forth histories that have long existed at the margins. Co-director of the Nakba Archive, Diana Allan, re-photographs colonial found footage on 16mm to powerfully resituate Palestinian presence through story, voice and song.
When his sister marries her cousin and takes her new husband to Australia, Shaheen Dill-Riaz's family begins to crack. Scattered across continents and shot over fourteen years, Past Is Present offers a sweeping domestic documentary of their attempt at reconciliation.
It is a documentary/fiction hybrid film about the American indie band Pavement, incorporating scripted scenes with documentary footage of the band and a musical stage play consisting of songs from their discography.
As the title suggests, Père et fille tells the story of a father growing up alone with his daughter after the premature death of the mother. If the premise is sad, director Quentin Papapietro manages to build a comedy in which the feeling of heartwarming fatherly love is staged with intelligence, and a great sense of cinema. With humour and a hint of absurdity, Père et fille offers a new way to consider family films.
Perla, a gifted painter with an equally talented musician daughter, is living comfortably in early-1980s Vienna when she receives a call that rejuvenates ghosts from her past in communist Czechoslovakia, and she must risk everything in order to move on with her life.
Now you see them, now you don't: down go the ancient Douglas Firs in these Canadian forests – as quickly as the images of them flash before your eyes. These strobing historical images accompany archival audio, juxtaposing the modern industries of logging and early cinema. It's deforestation modernising accompanied with the primitive magic of the movie camera: a trick of the light in plain sight.
Cherry is one bureaucratic checkmark away from obtaining a gender identity exemption for the military draft: they 'just' have to travel from Bangkok to their family home in Thailand's deep south to get a residency document. On this final stretch, not only do they have to deal with their conservative family's outright rejection and abuse, but even those who do recognise their queerness harbour misplaced expectations towards how Cherry performs their gender.
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.
Occupants of a mall must defend themselves and potentially the world when a shop owner accidentally breaches a supernatural barrier in their basement, releasing a mysterious gas that turns its victims into purulent, flesh-eating zombies. A very Hong Kong Taoist-inspired survival horror.
A queer performance for transforming violence into healing. A traditional dance and its costumes to counter colonial legacies. A peaceful ritual for diluting the imposing masculinity of the cockfighting arena, their sharp damaging spurs, their intense cigar sucking. The Nicaraguan multidisciplinary artist Elyla, amidst masks and fumes, creates a purifying and festive prayer, a serene ceremony of alternativity for tending death.
Mateus and Irene plan to celebrate their wedding anniversary at a tropical retreat, but are separated on the eve of their departure, and forced to question their relationship and how they relate to their troubled son, in this enigmatic and strikingly beautiful third feature from Sandro Aguilar.
Filmmaker Alexander Kluge loves to use the expression 'primitive diversity' in relation to the origins of his art: the first films that were made, their genres, motives and moods. With the development of AI, Kluge asks, what could its primitive diversity look like?
Bolivian artist and filmmaker Luciana Decker Orozco delves into ancient and essential acts: eating, masticating and digesting. Her suggestive celluloid slips through mouths, intestines and entrails, as well as experiments in the catacombs of the human being and the Earth. Inspired by the avant-gardist and indigenist Peruvian writer Gamaliel Chumata, the surface and the underground, the real and the extraordinary, mysteriously merge together.
A digest of elements from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871), with Delphine Seyrig playing one of the novel's most memorable characters: the White Queen. Befitting the tale's many chess metaphors, de Kermadec elected to use a luscious black and white image for her sophomore short. A most exquisite and sensual example of feminist filmmaking.
A priest seeks a measure of contrition from one of the Second World War's most infamous traitors in this bold and bracing historical drama by Norway's Erik Poppe.
A group of misfits converges at Babel, a legendary dive bar that doubles as purgatory, where La Flaca — the city's Grim Reaper — presides. Here, souls gamble years of their lives with her, daring to outwit Death herself.
In Jon Blåhed's claustrophobic 1930s-set drama, the first film to be made using the minority language Meänkieli, a Christian woman trapped in her husband's sectarian movement quietly fights to protect her family from his bizarre and increasingly dangerous worldview.
Shy, but excited, you hang out with your older sister and her friends before joining them for what will be your first-ever rave. Right as you leave, the water bottle from which you've been sipping generously turns out to have been spiked with LSD. Heartbeat racing, and anticipation building, all that's between you and the acid techno playing somewhere deep in the woods is finding your way there.
A gay couple moves from San Francisco to Sonoma, where they establish a unique adult film studio. Amidst the AIDS crisis, they create a safe space for sexual expression, empowering individuals to explore their desires on camera.
What happens when you call a phone number that you found in a public toilet? One that you're told doesn't exist, despite a woman having called you from it only a few days earlier? Maybe this loser in love shouldn't spend so much time in the video store renting classics? An eerie tale for the cinephile mind.
Razor Head is an unearthed ceremony of homoeroticism exhibiting an unrestrained medley of Levi's jeans, tattooed torsos and bondage paraphernalia. Tom Chomont's experimental silent collage of exposed bodies and over-exposed 16mm frames, renders a grainy queer performance of intimacy. The seemingly ordinary act of a man getting his head and body shaved is increasingly reframed, elevated as something mystical.
A man dies in a traffic accident. In the afterlife his questions about life, death and the meaning of it all are answered. Before he begins his next life, his perspective changes completely.
In her artistic practice filmmaker Katja Verheul questions what remains after a war, and what the impact of these remains is on people and nature. Red Dust is a haunting visualisation of sand dust from the Sahara that, while passing through France, turns the sky red. This dust is a time capsule containing cesium-137 from the French nuclear tests in Algeria. Researching this natural phenomenon, Verheul exposes what lasts of a war that was never fought.
"If the ghosts can visit our time, we can visit theirs". This freewheeling tour of German history of the 20th and 21st centuries follows a postmodern artist back to her East German village birthplace – where a discovered skeleton opens up mysteries both personal and political.
The lives of sleep deprived parents Kallia and Ram take a surreal turn when Kallia's mother demands an exorcism is performed on their baby. Filmmakers Shaw and Kamalakanthan lend a gentle and intimate fragment of their life to the cinema by casting their actual family.
1975 was International Women's Year, as declared by the United Nations. Agnès Varda was invited by French television to contribute to the television emission F comme femme. The result is a Second Wave Feminist pamphlet where young and old, dressed and nude, proletarian and upper class women answer the question: What does it mean to be a woman?
During a train journey across the same trajectory that was utilised for the transportation of sugar in colonial times, a young man drifts in and out of sleep. Slowly, visions from the past enter his dreams. While performers dance, he is pulled deeper down into his own subconscious, where colonial phantoms appear to him through intergenerational memories. Performance, history and trauma collide in this unique film, where shadows of the past reveal themselves through gestures of the present.
Taking the legacy of 17th century Dutch explorer Abel Tasman as its point of departure, Revival Roadshow takes its audience on a surreal journey through a variety of narratives that explore the complexities of colonial history, its present and potential future legacies. Blending cinema, theatre and visual art, this absurd, humorous and speculative roadshow allows each viewer to experience their own unique journey.
Amit Dutta, arguably the greatest living Indian avant-garde filmmaker, has worked with animation since his earliest shorts. Over the last decade animation has taken centre stage in his practice and now reaches its zenith with his first feature-length essay in the realm.
Ringo (superbly played by Martin Rohde) is a dreamer trapped within the brightly lit but crassly commercial world of a funfair. Lured into the boxing ring as a star attraction, he hopes to repair the relationship with his deaf-mute daughter.
Sound designer, filmmaker and hardcore raver Dennis van Rijswijk and his producer, music journalist Holly Dicker, bring a documentary homage to the dance scene in Rotterdam during and since the 90s gabber boom. Filled with nostalgia-inducing archival materials and intimate interviews with DJs, party organisers and ravers alike, the film takes a deep dive in what made the Rotterdam scene so unique. While celebrating the highlights of hardcore's infamous history, this passionate film also explores how the scene has progressed and reshaped itself in a post-pandemic cultural landscape.
Once brimming with ambitious social-utopian promise, Viennese housing complex Alterlaa now at best evokes nostalgia for a futurism of the past. A disillusioned elderly inhabitant seeks to end her life, only to find even the most drastic of escapes rendered impossible by rigid design. It is precisely this cruel irony that plunges her into a true community – one that introduces her to an unorthodox antidote.
The Ukrainian Film Archive had a rather curious idea to celebrate cinema's centennial: remember the unmaking of Sergej Parajanov's 1965 project The Kyiv Frescoes. Sadly, it never went beyond a few screen tests – already seemingly too much for the authorities of the day. Just like those screen tests, Yuriy Repik's short was lost as well, to be rediscovered just in time – for the Parajanov centennial.
When a successful investment banker unexpectedly returns to her childhood home after an illicit work incident, her overbearing and doting mother is wary of her sudden arrival. A tragic and comical culture clash of a mother and daughter forced to get to know each other again.
Safe.Self.Sense. by David Verbeek and Yu He Lin, commissioned by IFFR, is a 3-channel video installation and separate performance. Through dance, image and sound, the work explores how the pandemic has affected our perception of safety, identity and senses.
Nastja Säde Rönkkö recites one poem with three narrators: a teardrop, a droplet of blood and a bead of sweat. Each tells love stories through biochemistry – about love, belonging and loss, and about crises lived and impending. The words are vivid but not enough, supercharged here by hyperreal images of landscapes both physical and emotional, and the fluids expressing and crystallising them.
An eerie train journey. A father ensconced in a sanatorium in a state of decline. A world in limbo. And an elaborate maquette that hides a secret drawer that could provide answers to questions not asked. Shot in exquisite black and white, and shifting between live action and haunting stop-motion, this captivating film finds the ever-inventive Quay Brothers once again riffing on the work of Bruno Schulz.
Santi and Vina are childhood sweethearts whose bond has stood the test of time. But when the brutish Grai seeks Vina's hand in marriage, the lovers find themselves defying society in this tender, timeless tale of doomed romance.
Austria's first film production company was called Saturn, and the only kind of films it made during the short five years of its existence were erotica. More than a century after its demise, Daniela Zahler set out to remake some of these in a way that would reflect the changes in gender and sexual politics that have happened since. A piece of gaudy glory featuring several well-known contemporary avant-garde filmmakers.
Delphine Seyrig interprets excerpts from Valerie Solanas' 1967 radical feminist pamphlet, whilst Carole Roussopoulos listens, talks and types. A TV set between the two displays news from various current political and humanitarian disasters, towards a better appreciation of Solanas' anger. The slightly cheeky attitude of Seyrig and Roussopoulos underlines the satirical aspects of the text. Filmmaking as concise and clear as it gets.
Desktop images, letters, text messages, interviews and CCTV footage, this aesthetically eclectic, politically daring collection of films by Altyazı Fasikül: Free Cinema stresses the need for criticality in times of censorship and repression.
The large machines that usually help build our houses, perform domestic chores in slow motion.
Wandering lights move across the screen, in search of interaction and connection.
When September is suspended from their school, her sister July begins to assert her own independence. Tension in the family builds on holiday Ireland as a series of surreal encounters test the them all to their limit.
The story is told of Geoff (John Magaro), a young, ambitious producer who wants to prove himself to his boss, the legendary Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard). With the help of the German interpreter Marianne (Leonie Benesch), Geoff unexpectedly takes over the direction of the live broadcast. While time is running out, contradictory rumors are circulating and the lives of the hostages are at stake, Geoff has to make difficult decisions and come to terms with his own moral compass. How should one report on such a situation when the perpetrators are using the media attention for their own purposes?
Serf to a ruthless landlord in Tibet, Qiangba endures humiliation and suffering in quiet desperation. The People's Liberation Army arrives in the region on an emancipatory mission, but the old order will not yield easily. A passionate, partisan account of the liberation of Tibet.
The refugee, the fled, the persecuted. The hidden, the migrant, the foreigner. The newcomer, seen with distrust, looks of fear and suspicion. In this evocative sand animation by filmmaker Pedro Serrazina, shadows, contrasts and a disturbing sound construction relive ancestral prejudices of the other, so ancient and so present. Clandestine words, whispered phrases, memories written on winter nights by candlelights.
Three friends take an 8-day road journey to make sense of Lebanon at this moment in time. Each detour in their journey makes for a spectacular experience of co-narration and listening in the face of uncertainty.
Are love stories beyond politics? Weaving together interviews with political prisoners detained after the 1965 anti-communist purge in Indonesia with footage from an unmade film about romance between communist cadres, Putu Kusuma Widjaja's multifaceted docufiction assemblage interrogates the historical limits of an eternal sentiment.
An unknown woman arrives in Georgia. A gorge, a river, impressive mountains and cloudy landscapes receives her. She finds a strange house inhabited by other people in the same situation as herself. Russian filmmaker Vladimir Grishechkin, in majestic black and white, with silences and spaces that outweigh words, depicts a tale between the real and the allegorical about those who have decided to exile themselves and face its consequences.
Curves, angles, creases; bending, grazing, rubbing. In this striking Super8 short, filmmaker Daniela Gutmann artfully turns cinema's typical erotic gaze on its head, creating an exhilarating exploration of the naked body. Featuring gorgeous interplay of shimmering light and cast shadow, and miraculously evoking all the senses despite being purely visual, this experimental film marks a renewed conception of how bodies reach and meld into one another – at once liberating, beguiling, and playful.
We humans may have created the digital revolution, but we're ignoring if this unstoppable progress now reigns over us. Studio Vrij proposes a virtual path of light and sound through this crossroad. Based on Brass Rave Unit's latest single, this is an immersive journey of energising techno-instrumental wind and percussion music, accelerating towards the future, looking for lightning in the midst of this darkness.
At the vernissage of an exhibition of his works painter Tamura notices a forgery, meanwhile, the dead body of a woman is found at sea. As news of both incidents travels, an unexpected connection transpires. A deeply felt drama on authenticity, ageing and love.
A 500 year old tradition of unknown origins plays out every New Year's Eve in Switzerland's Appenzell region. Six men gather in the snow to yodle, ring bells and drink wine, all in elaborate, bizarre and almost psychedelic handmade costumes. With the meaning of these rituals lost in time, all we are left with is the spectacle.
In Zachary Epcar's Sinking Feeling, human bodies and voices are counterposed with the shimmering abstractions, ambient fizzle, and rigid linearity of corporate architecture. A disquieting glimpse into a post-post-modernity of dread and torpor, Sinking Feeling peels back the surfaces of these Ballardian non-places to release pent-up fluids, a stifled longing, a hidden radiance.
Two cases and two timelines intertwine in this psychological thriller. Juan Carlos Medina reinvigorates the tropes of classic police films with atmospheric cinematography and breathtaking scenes of high-voltage tension.
Three young skateboarders roam the city seeking a place to skate: but they are not welcome anywhere. Eventually, they decide to stand up for their rights at the town hall. It requires a lot of guts, but Pippa has plenty of that.
A series of contrasts: indoors and outdoors, digital and analogue, natural and artificial light. These are the images that flicker by, frame by frame. A mise en abyme of a small scene at home unravels into a trip inside, outside and through the TV. Projected on the original roll of Ektachrome reversal stock, all edits were made in-camera.
Welcome to Kita's World, a CG environment for the alter-ego of Martine Syms. From within the content creator vernacular, Kita embodies and questions the everyday disjuncture of technological innovation and (mis-)representation in a hyper-digital world. In this episode, Kita tells a cautionary tale about e-hustling in a traffic jam: think before you send business emails while driving.
After her father is involved in a serious accident, 11-year-old Yuna's life is turned upside down. Reunited with her mother, Yuna faces the possibility of a drastic change, which she refuses to face. Miwako Van Weyenberg's debut feature is a tender and heartfelt coming-of-age drama.
Two siblings meet a kind woman who they think would be the perfect new mother for them. But ultimately the decision is with their father, who is still in love with his last girlfriend… who did not get on well with the children.
Cyber-religious architecture and ancient spiritual traditions merge in this essay by Singaporean multidisciplinary artist Shi Yun Teo. Remixing extensive archival sources in her computer, from found footage to 3D-rendered animations of deities, she configures a map of the material and the immaterial, of the distant past and a projected future, to reflect on how the traditional and the supernatural converge in our contemporaneity.
Sperm have to overcome the odds of 1 in 300 million to reach the egg and fertilize it. Sperm must be prepared for any situation through daily survival learning and training. Simon, the very happy sperm living in the testicles of the boy Jens, sets out on a journey that risks his life when Jens attempts to have sex with Lisa for the first time on a camping trip. Will Simon, along with the other sperm risking everything for fertilization, be able to reach the egg and fertilize it, avoiding the attacks of spermicides on the long and difficult journey to the womb? Spermageddon, a collaboration between Dead Snow's Tommy Wirkola and animation director Rasmus A. Sivertsen, stands out for its ingenious imagination, portraying the harsh competitive world of sperm through an action-adventure drama. The comical action adventure of the sperm, the coming-of-age romance between Jens and Lisa, and the musical sequences with dancing and singing provide great fun not to be missed. The tip that condoms are not the ultimate solution for contraception is a bonus.
What if the contemporary world could be reimagined by the objects of antiquity? Elli Vuorinen's Still Lives is a stop-motion animation that interrogates this concept, creating portraits of ourselves that are animated to reflect the conditions of modernity. Museum artefacts including wooden models, painted figures on Ancient Greek vases, and a prehistoric statue, assume human form as they mimic the chaos of modernity, zeroing in on mundane activities and beckoning questions of existentialism.
Is a world obsessed with medical diagnostics and pharmaceutical prescription ready for the vivid testimony of Marteinn Helgi Sigurðsson, who defies the label of 'bipolar disorder' to give us a glimpse into his shaman-like wisdom? This inventive docu-drama takes us right inside complex mental experiences.
Strandzha meditates on the mystical crossroads between socio-historical territories and descends into Eastern Europe's haunted past through moments of traditional practice, folkloric storytelling and oral histories. Though faced with hardship, locals indulge in the memory of their Thracian ancestors through Bacchanal feasts and nymph-like garb.
Gore never bores in this scrappy South African remake of a cult 1987 body horror comedy. But the unhoused misfits at the centre of this dystopian story are fighting back, as the mayor exterminates the 'homeless problem' one melting body at a time.
A young student lives in a mini-apartment in Incheon, in the North-West of South Korea. Wandering around the neighbourhood, she immerses herself in her family's past, piecing together forgotten fragments of history. Using drawings and clay animation, visual artist Vatae Kimlee creates a flowing visual collage, a captivating animated graphic novel that brings back to life memories erased by the country's accelerated transformation.
Dora hitches rides through Brazil's mining region, searching for a place nobody has heard of: Suçuarana, a piece of land that belonged to her family. The first feature collaboration of filmmakers Clarissa Campolina and Sérgio Borges is a gentle portrait of both independence and community.
Expanded cinema performance with 16mm film loops, 35mm slides, spoken word, vocal distortions, synthesizers and wind instruments. It explores how time manifests in the body and how we connect to the lives lived before us, captured through recorded media. The piece transgresses moments and memories, merging the immediacy of live experimental music with the layered potential of poetry, suggesting uncharted possibilities within each moment.
Surface Séance puts perception to the test courtesy of the inertia of the eye, aka persistence of vision. Split seconds of the outside world occasionally pierce the darkness, glimpses of the night seen through subway windows and tram doors flash onto neon-lit zones, everyday signage, logos and public transport pictograms. Public space splinters into colorful fragments. Blink and you'll miss it.
A trip on Vienna's public transport system provides the framework for a special exploratory expedition by virtue of the conceptual delight with which Michael Heindl approaches everyday trivialities. His protagonist is an amorphous creature who takes center screen: Its dirty white form emerges from the brittle darkness, gradually pushing itself to the front. Reminiscent of an embryo and ceaselessly changing, it pulsates like a single-cell organism under the microscope, growing into a grey madcap: These are traces of bodies, smudges found on panes of glass and other surfaces, they appear roughly smeared or delicately dotted, ranging from amorphous streaks to fingerprints and handprints, kissing lips, smiley faces, numbers, letters and symbols. The synthetic starry night of dust particles surrounding the images endows them with a vaguely cosmic (and comic) quality.
Flora Rajakowitsch's sound design emphasizes the lighthearted aspects of this borderline abstract undertaking. It plays with the sounds of fingers squeaking across windows and screens, it alienates and awakens the dirty schemata of the stimulating montage sequences to cartoonish life. In the end Heindl brings his gray, single-frame painting to full bloom - and realizes the possibility of a loop – an endless loop: The 360-degree pan of an empty subway interior becomes the echo of a story about sweat, water and fat, concluding with the prospect of a new start. (Stefan Grissemann)
This haunting video essay investigates the expansion of the internet in a small Romanian town, where communities have formed and shifted around the newly imported Western technology. Within this micro-universe, the video traces the rapid transformation of the Internet, from the early days of peer-to-peer software to the upload of online late capitalism. For the Rotterdam based Romanian artist Geo Barcan, probing the internet as a digital architecture for community becomes a way to critically explore the confluence of nature and technology.
Fragmented records reveal a concealed history of Cold War–era human radiation experiments, surfacing through a haze of manipulation and embedded studies. Desert dust settles into teeth, inscribing a residual record. Contaminated images conjure the unseen.
On a trip home to her ailing mother, Stella is contacted via radio waves by her long-lost American father, now stranded in a different spacetime configuration. To bring him back, Stella must embark on a time-hopping odyssey across seven millennia.
One of the early Expanded Cinema experiments that extended the perception of film and cinema, and it is also an important work of feminist activism. In the street performance, Valie Export strapped a box open at the front and back – the down-scaled movie theater – in front of her naked breasts. With a megaphone, Peter Weibel called on passers-by to visit the cinema – in other words, to put their hands through the curtain attached to the front of the box and feel her breasts.
The life of the bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey during a day of bullfighting, from the moment he dresses up to the moment he undresses.
Winter in Hamburg, Gabriele studies marine biology and dreams of moving to Australia, but at night works as a dancer for some dangerous people… Hans-Christoph Blumenberg's fiction debut is an underseen and star-studded marvel.
Inspired by the iconic Malaysian singer and actor P. Ramlee, Ridhwan Saidi's contemplative paean to Kuala Lumpur surveys a relationship that has ended through ruminative recollections that exist somewhere between a memory and a dream, while the city remains in a constant state of architectural and cultural change.
Tehran, An Unfinished History offers a long glimpse into a Tehran no longer here: one of stark contrasts, both subtle and painstakingly obvious. A city's untold sociopolitical transformations through 100 years of unseen archives from Iran's national film archives.
An escapee on the run. An unexpected dance in a gallery. An amazing night of partying and sex. This is Giu's exciting love story with Danilo. Or rather, this is how it reaches Esther, flatmate and friend. In this heartwarming romance, Brazilian filmmaker Pethrus Tibúrcio plays on the boundaries of narrative and imagination, meanwhile marginalised bodies – full of dreams and fearful of loneliness – seek acceptance in our stereotyped world.
Temo is an unemployed actor who drives around 100km a day on a scooter, performing the duty of a delivery man. Based on the novel Courier's Tales by Temo Rekhviashvili, who plays himself in the film, Anka Gujabidze crafts a poignant but humorous black and white photo adventure, in which a daily ride through the opulently dilapidated Georgian capital Tbilisi morphs into a nightmarish vision of poverty, corruption and estrangement.
In this insect equivalent of a theatrical fine-dining experience, termite butchers, with musical accompaniment of a termite pianist, perform a ritualistic slaughter on a piece of power cable. The fact that their climate crisis-induced dietary choice also causes power outages in human cities is the proverbial cherry on the cable. A delightfully strange and pleasantly icky spectacle that combines costume play and animation. Eat up!
The director's intervention in reenacting memories of mass mobilization during Indonesia's regime succession is accompanied by a narrator reciting an anachronistic poem. The production of this fictional work reveals the overlapping and obscuring of memories, resulting in a cacophony of voices.
A colonial prospector in Southern India hunts for gold with a group of villagers, fighting sorcerers, wild beasts and their own frail psyches. Powered by throbbing action sequences, Thangalaan forges an epic period adventure about humans torn apart by ambition, greed, madness and desperation.
An adaptation of Robert Walser's 1908 novel, The Assistant is a study of an inventor's business in a state of inexorable decline, and the young man employed by its owner who watches on in despair, drawing chilling parallels with the machinations of contemporary neo-liberal Society.
When visionary architect László Toth and his wife Erzsébet flee post-war Europe in 1947 to rebuild their legacy and witness the birth of modern America, their lives are changed forever by a mysterious and wealthy client.
When a writer takes up lodging in an old boarding house, a familiar story of haunting transforms into a small marvel of genre filmmaking, with astonishingly sexy vim! Gothic thrills from the director of Dark Shadows (1966-71).
A group of Gen-Z/Millennial friends plan a goodbye for their friend, while coming face-to-face with, but pushing back at, patriarchal realities. Sahand Kabiri presents a personal portrait of middle-class young adult life in contemporary Tehran: vibrant and defiant.
The remake of a silent movie Dracula's Death and produced in 1921, one year before Murnau's acclaimed Nosferatu. The original was lost during World War II, so students of the Sapientia University reimagined it based on a novel with the same title, published three years after the film's release.
The protagonist has an existential hatred for a fellow soldier, who forces his friendship on him. Antipathy is replaced by mutual obsession, which has irreversible consequences. Masloboishchykov's second film school project, which screened at Semaine de la critique, is based on the short novel Lagoftalm by the lesser-known writer, Dmitry Bakin. The military setting is conveyed through a combination of aggressive tensity and comic music, making it look and seem more like a prison or a madhouse.
Anas Qadamani uses a variety of appropriated images belonging to different sources, in order to weave a furious critique of colonialism and its political double standards. Taking as a point of departure the case of African elephants brought to Europe, this essay-film leads us to a more general reflection about the present-day crises that devastate our world and rob it of humanity.
Meatball-maker Kadir dreams of taking flight but his in-laws vehemently disapprove. However, with a little help he may actually make good on this obsession, but as the old saying goes – best not fly too close to the sun.
Billy Roisz taps into our sensual pleasures with this experimental interpretation of Hieronymus Bosch's iconic triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights. The largely abstract landscape, stemming from both analogue equipment and 'deep dreaming' – a generative AI technique based on neural networks – ranges from paradisiacal to hellish. Combined with the chirping, ticking and pounding soundtrack, in which field recordings have also been incorporated, the temptation is almost impossible to resist.
The Geneva mechanism is the essence of all cinema: a gear that translates a continuous rotation movement into intermittent rotary motion. Here, historical footage of this gear, along with the act and art of film projection, is digitally dissolved, sometimes into a shapeless mess. A very nostalgia-free film about the end of an era.
Once upon a time there was a little girl who was always distracted. With her eyes fixed on her phone, she couldn't notice the world around or who wanted to play with her.
Beginning at the industrial revolution of the 'great north', Jenn Nkiru draws lines between peoples, cities, countries, buildings, movements, bodies and spaces(s) using a mixture of archive materials and new footage. There is little stillness as we are pushed and pulled through Black histories and communities across the city of Manchester and beyond. Nkiru has termed this filmmaking process "cosmic archeology", and it is grounded in Afro-surrealism, experimental film and the Black arts movement.
In 1921, a manuscript appeared whose fragmentary texts sounded suspiciously like they had come from Edgar Allan Poe – except for the fact that it was illustrated with technical drawings, and accompanied by massive mathematical formulae. After a few decades it dawned upon researchers that this might not be a piece of literature (however experimental), but rather a design for a machine, a machine that attempted to recreate Poe's mind, as a bot.
Bob Burton is a proud misogynist, like all the men he hangs out with. When he shows himself to be not entirely disgusted by his friend Harry's sister, Bob's friends play a prank on him by placing an advertisement in the papers claiming that he's looking for a wife. But Bob has the last laugh… A rowdy comedy about stupid men.
A speculative fiction about Dadaism where Marcel Duchamp is recast as a female narrator. With texts from Rosalind Krauss, Claude Cajun, Kathy Acker and the autobiography of Man Ray, the philosophies, idiosyncrasies and aesthetics of this iconic art movement are revived in a stunning dual projection of 16mm black and white film.
Four years after the Portuguese revolution, a theatre director and an actress meet to discuss a friend's murder, their deteriorating relationship and having to sell guns to finance their play.
Four directors, four short stories. From the slightly supernatural to the inspired by actual events, Kim Jong-kwan, Roh Deok, Chang Han-jun and Lee Myung-se introduce us to their cinematic universes bound by the presence of nighthawks and killers. Dark humour, weapons and blood are part of the deal.
Legends of Hong Kong comedy, Dayo Wong and Michael Hui, meet as a former wedding planner and a stern Taoist priest. They become unlikely partners in the funeral business in a powerful ode to life and an unmissable third film by Anselm Chan.
Young Gabriel worries about forgetting his late father's face; Isabel, a single mother, frets about her son and how she will make ends meet; Firmino questions his sense of belonging after losing his garden which he considered his portal to Cape Verde. The lives of Gabriel, Isabel and Firmino intertwine in Nuno Boaventura Miranda's The Last Harvest. Miranda offers an intergenerational portrait of a Cape Verdean community and diaspora living in Lisbon as they grapple with questions of identity and a shared longing for connection.
"The Last Journey" (Swedish: "Den sista resan") is a 2024 Swedish documentary directed by Filip Hammar and Fredrik Wikingsson. The film follows Filip Hammar and his best friend, Fredrik Wikingsson, as they embark on a road trip to France with Filip's father, Lars Hammar, a retired French teacher who has become passive and apathetic since his retirement. By recreating the family vacations of Filip's childhood, they aim to rekindle Lars's zest for life. The documentary delves into themes of aging, family dynamics, and the quest for personal fulfillment, offering a poignant exploration of the challenges and opportunities that come with retirement and the importance of familial bonds in navigating life's transitions.
In the wintry steppes of old Yakutia, Khabyy, a lone wolf burdened by a painful secret from his past, embarks on a mission to deliver Kiluk, a young girl, to an aging prince. Sold by her parents as a bride in exchange for a wealthy dowry, Kiluk is determined to escape her forced marriage, clashing with Khabyy's unwavering resolve to fulfill his task. Only Nyukus, his young assistant, sympathises with Kiluk and secretly yearns to help her break free from her dreadful fate.
Filmmaker Ali Khamraev, accompanied by cinematographer Yuri Klimenko delved into the archives, and travelled to Armenia and Georgia to honour Sergei Parajanov: one of cinema's greats, whose vision and defiance of convention transcended borders. "Dear Sergei Parajanov. This film is for you."
It's autumn. A single yellow leaf hangs at the end of a branch. A little bird comes along to water it, but a squirrel nicks the bird's watering can. The bird chases the thief. Will it get its watering can back? And what dangers await in the forest? A film about surprising friendships and creative solutions.
Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit recreates the Thai video store responsible for introducing cinema to some of the nation's most important filmmakers of the past decades, Van VDO. A joyful homage to piracy and to the love of film!
Romanian filmmaker Stere Gulea concludes his trilogy of films based on the two renowned volumes of novels by Martin Preda. This final film once again returns to Niculae, a talented writer and the family's youngest son, who in 1954 faces state repression and censorship from the Communist system.
The story of the Morometes continues, as they navigate the hardships of life against the background of the post-war Communist regime. The sequel to Stere Gulea's The Moromete Family (1987) was a box office hit after its premiere in Romania in 2018.
Captured in black-and-white, the private stories of the Moromete family are placed in the context of a rapidly changing Romanian society, in Stere Gulea's sublime 1987 adaptation of Marin Preda's novel Moromeţii.
An interview-based collage probing the situation of Israeli exiles who have chosen Berlin as their new home. Stylish, postmodern and provocative in its intertwining of politics and sex, it offers a wild ride.
Between sleeping, waking and dreaming, we experience a collective dream of children who seem to be alone in this world – alone with universal questions and fears for which they must find their own answers.
After digging a tunnel on the beach, two kids from different sides of the world meet each other. Together, they dig their way to the North Pole, where they discover a magical way to return home.
A young boy keeps running away from home in Masloboyshchikov's reworking of Goethe's The Erl-King, and this act of sad rebellion seems to be catching on. The Noise of the Wind is an extremely subtle psychological work, saturated with multilayered and expressive acting.
Elliot is staying with her ex's new girlfriend while attending a medical trial for her recent, unexplained loss of hearing. As she reconfigures her relationship with her (sonic) environment and herself, an intimate connection sparks between the two women. With captivating performances by Victoria Pedretti and Maya Hawke, this loose adaptation of director Eliza Barry Callahan's semi-autobiographical novel The Hearing Test captures the uneasy process of letting go and embracing change with sensitive warmth.
Shashi, an urbane doctor, returns to his native village, a place seemingly mired in a backward way of life, for a short visit. As he becomes closely involved with the villagers, Shashi's short stay threatens to become permanent.
The Russian model city Ж has been completely shielded from change and reality. A poetic film-essay, The Radiant Screen explores this Soviet utopia which is cloaked behind a smokescreen of plutonium waste. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, it has consciously – and unconsciously – remained closed.
As a coping mechanism during the grim lockdowns during the global pandemic, Croatian filmmaker Damir Čučić started a project of exchanging video clips with a group of friends through social media. Superbly edited, The Rain Will Weep is created from the archive of more than 3,500 of those videos, portraying the world in a state of chaos that is sometimes violent, often very funny, but mostly absurd.
Adapted from a novella of the same name, The Red Badge of Courage, portrays the inner struggle of a soldier recruited for America's Civil War, played by Audie Murphy, war hero turned actor.
Hainan Island, 1930. A feisty maidservant held captive by the callous landlord Nan Batian, Qionghua finds freedom thanks to Changqing, a Communist Party Representative who rescues her disguised as a foreign businessman. With Changqing's help, Qionghua joins the first all-women troop of the Red Army, where she goes from strength to strength, transforming from a wronged slave seeking personal vengeance to a committed soldier for the Communist cause.
Odysseus washes up on the shores of his kingdom to find it much changed since he left to fight in the Trojan War, in this classical drama starring Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche.
Outlaw leader "Draw" Egan, believed dead, turns up in the town of Yellow Dog. The townsfolk believe him to be William Blake, a strong and law-abiding man. They appoint him sheriff to rid the town of the hoodlums who have nearly taken over. He does so with dispatch, becoming a genuinely lawful and respected member of the town's society. But then Arizona Joe, one of Egan's old gang, shows up in Yellow Dog, threatening to expose Egan if he doesn't help his old comrade take over the town.
South African artists Francois Knoetze and Amy Louise Wilson, together with Congolese historian Joe-Yves Salankang Sa-Ngol, trace the trans-continental journey of cobalt: from its violent extraction in the mines of Democratic Republic of Congo to its sale on global stock markets .
This film tells a compelling story set within the socio-political landscape of Iran, reflecting the challenges faced by individuals under restrictive regimes.
A timely, heartrending tale set against the backdrop of the "Woman. Life. Freedom" movement in Iran follows a newly promoted investigating judge who, under pressure from his corrupt superiors, is forced to betray his own morals by cracking down on protesters without due process. This fateful decision sets off a chain reaction, as his compliance with the oppressive regime leads to a devastating rift with his wife and two daughters. Tensions escalate when the paranoid father discovers his gun is missing, plunging the family into a slow-burning spiral of fear and distrust.
In the shadow of the Hijab Protests, this powerful drama subtly exposes the insidious impact of the Islamic Republic's chauvinistic and oppressive regime on the private lives of its citizens, with a particular focus on the suffering endured by women. The Seed of the Secret Fig is the latest masterpiece from acclaimed director Mohammad Rasoulof, a filmmaker and political activist whose career has been marked by relentless harassment and censorship by the Iranian authorities. Despite being sentenced to eight years in prison during the making of this film, Rasoulof managed to complete it and flee his homeland just in time for its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, where his courage was recognized with a Special Jury Award. – Amir Bogen
Cast from humanity yet tethered to it – to be shipwrecked is to exist in this ambivalent space. Filmmaker Deniz Eroglu uses three independent episodes to probe this concept; a nursing home on New Year's Eve, a sun-drenched Congolese family home and the medieval German countryside.
Karsh, an innovative businessman and grieving widower, builds a device to connect with the dead inside a burial shroud.
A series of unexplained missing cases and disturbing deaths start to occur in a faraway village when the Chief's dead daughter comes back to life, unveiling shocking secrets of the village's Forest Demon and the ritual of human sacrifice related to the prosperity of the Chief's family.
Nadhar, a man deemed dysfunctional for his extremely sluggish movements, becomes part of a travelling circus, where his condition turns into spectacle.
In Maria Llopis' El striptease de mi abuela a series of stills of the filmmaker's grandmother are combined with a first-person monologue by Llopis herself.
When a man returns to his beach side hometown in Australia, he is humiliated in front of his teenage son by a local group of surfers who claim ownership over the secluded beach of his childhood.
Haunted by the suspicious death of his ailing mother, a university professor coerces his enigmatic gardener to execute a cold-blooded act of vengeance.
A south London odyssey following Tobias, who sells counterfeit tobacco to fund his mother's return to Jamaica. The city reveals spectres of his community's history and an uncertain future.
Zoe and Jeff Blair are siblings who've just moved into a new house ahead of their parents. However, the house has a secret: there's an old TV set in there, which can summon zombies from the screen; said zombies killed the previous owner. As the Blairs try to survive, an agent from the Department of Occult Warfare arrives to save the day.
A strange doctor comes to a neighbouring village to cure a sick child. The doctor thinks the boy should stop pretending, but the boy himself begs the doctor to let him die.
A femenist film by anonymous Syrian filmmaker Farida Baqi.
Two boys quarrel about a toy pistol. The game becomes serious. On the roof in a skyskraper district they risk their lifes for the toy pistol.
A pretty woman becomes imprisoned in a warlock's 18th century castle, and in her state of possession, lures male victims inside.
Ukrainian cameraman Sasha Shumovich was a shining light in Ukrainian national cinema, but in 1996 he was tragically shot and killed. During his short life he worked with Roman Balayan, Yuri Illenko and, above all, with Sergii Masloboishchykov.
A cattle farmer who aspires to be a stage actor, Das works with a cosmopolitan theatre troupe headed by an ill-tempered, foul-mouthed director. When the director's tantrums unearth buried resentments among the group's members, the play they are rehearsing threatens to come apart.
In an unnamed country, the greatest supporter of the National Theatre and its actors is a diplomat from a foreign country, Ernst Lemmering. He is also in a relationship with the theatre's star actress Harriet Brandt. After a late night rehearsal news of an occupation is released.
The village priest must call upon the last nine remaining habitants to dig up the graves of their relatives and move them to the top of the mountain, to make space for the newly deceased. The spirits of those long gone awaken to fill the profound emptiness of this depopulating island town.
A man accepts a mission to kill an important Dutch official. By his side is a wealthy, younger man eager to take on the underground mission, but one who is also trying to win the older man's wife
A Lisbon night is traversed by the intensity of René, a precarious young Brazilian who has anchored in town, immersed in personal and existential conflicts. Queer parties, love, rejection and loneliness move through her body, out of place between the two continents.
Describing the horrors experienced by the civilians during the London Blitz, Vyacheslav Turyanytsya paints a picture of contemporary Kyiv, as a place where the continuation of daily activity, under extreme circumstances, is in itself an act of resistance.
Hessel the lugworm bait digger is ready to start his day. With his radio on his regular station he sets of to start his hard labor, however help arrives from an unexpected source.
A woman named Renata who is the wife of a man named Edwin. But unfortunately, their marriage did not run healthily, it was really toxic.
A documentary in English and Spanish about an era of radical transformation in Puerto Rico, a country whose fascinating and complicated relationship with the United States is not well known or understood.
Natalia and Ginel leave their small Romanian Danube village to work abroad in a big Flemish city. One evening, when she is assaulted after meeting a local, Natalia asks Ita, a friend from home turned into a crook, to help her.
When teenage Bernardo is gifted a video camera by his father, he embarks on a journey where the lines between reality and fiction blur. Upon discovering his father's betrayal of his stepmother, Bernardo and her, inspired by Greek tragedies, hatch a plan for revenge, documenting every step.
On the eve of her 25th birthday, resolved to finally lose her virginity, Waks embarks on a thrilling escapade to the city. But to really enjoy her birthday gift, she must confront and shed the religious trauma and shame that have long burdened her.
A hitman pursues a mysterious Japanese ascetic, encountering an entanglement of mystical power and spacetime along the way.
Joan is no longer in love with Victor and suffers from feeling dishonest with him. Alice, her best friend, reassures her: she herself feels no passion for Eric and yet their relationship is going wonderfully! She does not know that he is having an affair with Rebecca, their mutual friend... When Joan finally decides to leave Victor and he disappears, the lives of the three friends and their stories are turned upside down.
When a woman is approached by a girl who claims to be her daughter from the future, she begins to reflect on her own childhood and adolescence. From her dream as a young girl to live longer than her own grandmother, to her teenage uncertainty.
After resisting the Dutch army, freedom fighter Rusli suffers serious injuries. Tipi and her father, the chief of the Dutch-occupied village, become responsible for Rusli's safety and recovery.
Follows troubled youth Chan Lok-kwun as he accidentally enters the Walled City, discovers the order amidst its chaos, and learns important life lessons along the way.
Vadym Skurativskyi's story about the family ties and creative mutual influence of the Tobilevych and Tarkovsky families.
In Palmi, a small town in Calabria, Don Vincenzo, a genial retired farmer, has a crazy idea to revive the local soccer team by organizing a bizarre fundraiser hiring the Italian major league Serie A, soccer player Etienne Morville, a bad-tempered guy but among the strongest in the world. Albeit unwillingly, Morville leaves Milan to move to Palmi and try to save his image. In the small town he will come up against a reality of sincerity, which will lead everyone on an unforgettable experience.
In November 2013, united by the desire for urgent change, Ukrainians went to Maidan to express their disagreement with the president's decisions on European integration, which once again demonstrated the incredible stratification of society. Unlike in Nevseremos! People of Maidan, Masloboishchykov's documentary approach does not leave the territory of protest, and here interviews more people, asking more provocative questions, unwaveringly interested in the individuals rather than the crowd.
At the sea shore, a goat, a child, and a naked man. This is a photograph taken in 1954 by Agnès Varda. The goat was dead, the child was named Ulysses, and the man was naked. Starting from this frozen image, the film explores the real and the imaginary.
The largest casino in Europe but is it just a big mess? Daniel Hoesl presents Un gran casino as an angry musing on a building, an Italian village and all that is done in the name of the unfettered creation of wealth.
"A Voice in the Mountain" is a docudrama based on real events, produced by DIVEDCO, about the experience of the residents of the Carruzos neighborhood in Carolina, when they organize to establish a school for adults to learn to read and write.
Two women find frozen cash, try to retrieve it. A tour guide leads confused tourists around Winnipeg sites. A man quits his job, visits his mother. Storylines intertwine surreally as identities blur in a disorienting comedy.
A haunting exploration of one of the most polluted places in the world, the Murmansk Oblast in Russia, Unearthed captures dissolution and decay in both environment and material.
In Ari Dwianto's body, memories speak through movement. This film reveals hidden "ghosts" in his dance—adolescent memories shaped by discipline and the creeping shadows of dictatorship, where authoritarian power takes form in his gestures.
Maria, is a single mother living in Serbia where housing is unpredictable, healthcare expensive and job opportunities are scarce. Desperate to provide for herself and her 6-year-old son, she resorts to petty scams to make ends meet. Stefan Ivančić's Upon Sunrise, offers a poignant glimpse into the everyday struggles of a woman trying her hardest to navigate grave social inequality, with little to no support from the state.
Katja Raganelli's sole excursion into the realm of avant-garde cinema was this focus on Austrian experimental film axiom Valie Export.
After the East India Company forces Kattabomman, the king of Panchalankurichi, to pay taxes and be their subordinate, the latter decides to fight against them.
1944, Vermiglio, a remote mountain village. The arrival of Pietro, a deserter, into the family of the local teacher, and his love for the teacher's eldest daughter, will change the course of everyone's life.
A documentary that takes you as an imaginary DeLorean back to the days of fast dubbing, when movies were bought on black exchanges and home video screenings were held en masse. Come and see how the then pirates, dubbers, distributors and all those who had something to feed our videos remember their time.
In 1985, the home video revolution is in full analogue swing. Three mostly-normal-but-kind-of-weird teenagers go on an epic quest to complete a cult VHS collection, only to get mixed up in a murder investigation, becoming chief suspects and public enemies.
In 1992, a young man who works at a video store takes shelter in it (along with his friends and family) during a "possible" zombie invasion.
For some thirty years, from the 1980s until their decline in the 2010s, video shops were crucial arenas for film culture– and both highbrow and lowbrow American cinema has documented their rise, fall and changing meanings. Alex Ross Perry's Videoheaven, a labour of love ten years in the making, retraces this history using solely appropriated footage from a vast array of films, ranging from huge Hollywood productions to non-professional no-budget affairs, sold solely at their neighbourhood video shop.
Sagai grew up watching films in a semi-legal video parlour in Mumbai, then like his father, he began working there. Now, still a great cinema lover, he tells this story: of the movies, pirate copies and a space that no longer exists.
For many communities, video rental shops hold a dear significance: a place where anyone and everyone could rent a film. As they become a dying species, Rotterdam artist Gyz La Rivière shares the stories of the remaining few in The Netherlands and the Benelux.
Benjamin and Little Pierre, cousins and local policemen, patrol Vitrival while listening to Radio Chevauchoir. They have a lot to do: dick graffitis are popping up on the village walls. Of course, no one has seen or heard anything. At the same time, a villager commits suicide, then two, then three.
Pedro travels with a group of four older and more experienced men in a van, driving through a storm. . Doing this trip for the first time, Pedro is somewhat indifferent to the work assigned to him. Instead, he dreams of the mountains.
Vilja (12) loves wrestling even though she is terrified of pain and loses every match. When her parents separate, Vilja's feelings freeze. Then mum's new boyfriend's daughter Thea turns out to be the star of the wrestling club. Can Vilja overcome her fear of physical as well as emotional pain?
Two women communicate in a language of art, working men in a pub speak in their Viennese idiom, patients of a psychiatric hospital arrive at speech through improvisation – all these diverging portrayals do not merge into one another but communicate by their proximity.
Colourful furry aliens come to Earth on a mission to destroy it. Upon meeting some of the planet's inhabitants, however, and listening to their concerns and aspirations, the opinions of these funny, shaggy destroyers slowly change.
The sun rises happily over the horizon, and it is welcomed by the most beautiful landscape. The humans also wake up and do what they always do: cut down trees, construct aimlessly, and pollute without shame. Their ideas and actions, usually very disrespectful to the planet, are putting the whole environment in jeopardy. What they do not realise, is that whatever they do, it will affect them sooner or later. However, the cosmos is not that patient…
A woman searches for her partner among the ruins of a neighborhood in Addis Ababa, caught in the waves of forced evictions sweeping through the city's informal settlements.
In the late 1980s, a team of Ukrainian filmmakers undertook several film expeditions to remote areas of Siberia. Their forgotten film reels were rediscovered in Kyiv in 2022, during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This mesmerising archive is a starting point for a film essay that interrogates Russian imperialism, resource extraction, environmental destruction and the ongoing oppression and erasure of Indigenous peoples in Russia's colonies, from the time of the Tsars through the Soviet era and the present day.
Alyssa, a rebellious 19-year-old girl, and her friend Mehdi, an introverted 23-year-old man, use their imagination to escape their unpromising reality. When they discover a contest in the south of Tunisia that may allow them to flee, they undertake a road trip regardless of the obstacles in their way.
Hamid moves abroad for greener pastures, leaving his wife and two sons to fend for themselves. The family survives with great labour and sacrifice, but its hard-earned stability is threatened when the younger son plans to emigrate. A touching neorealist parable around an eternal dilemma.
Puspa, a novice lawyer handling trivial cases, fights for the cause of poor people accused of petty crimes and threatened with disproportionate punishment. As she takes on a rigged legal establishment, she must grapple with her crippling senses of powerlessness, and empathy.
A short that illustrate the broad possibilities of Morrison's concerns. A story of lost films found at sea, a serene and endearing cat-cam video scored by Bill Frisell, and two richly divergent re-narrativized examples of decay
After hitting a dog with his car, Stefan, guilt-ridden, decides to bring it with him to the hometown lake, where he is headed in order to complete the film about his mother who has recently passed away
Luciana is an Italian astrologer, she believes that life is affected by the position of the constellations at the moment of our birth. If we want to change our life, it is enough to visit a place with a favorable constellation on our birthday: the day on which we get the opportunity to be "born again" every year. Many people contact Luciana about their problems, the film follows their stories and birthday trips. Beneath the humorous mood, this film is an empathetic search for meaning in a chaos-filled cosmos.
A leader of a small group of 19th-century Montenegrin rebels forced to retreat to warmer climes in southern Italy in order to cure himself of tuberculosis. As his health declines, his devoted servant longs for his homeland.
When two strangers meet in a sex shop, their unlikely encounter sparks a multi-year filmmaking collaboration. With wildly differing motivations and visions, their partnership veers between the chaotic and the cathartic, blurring the lines between professional and personal.
A golfer fails to strike, a soccer team plays against itself and a rally co-driver faces an identity crisis. They are surrounded by an audience unable to act. Shot in sports video games, the film "A World At Stake" turns the ordering principles of victory and defeat upside down and negotiates social roles between individual sovereignty and collective passivity. In the face of catastrophe, a feeling of political powerlessness remains. Nothing less than the world is at stake.
The afterlives of revolution and shadows of grief in the wake of the 2004 and 2014 uprisings, as experienced through the perspective of women in particular.
The story of the love triangle of real-life actress Hasegawa Yasuko, poet Nakahara Chuya, and critic Kobayashi Hideo.
You are so beautiful counterposes the Joe Cocker song of the same name with a much less accessible visual. The beautiful woman in question is immediately blocked from view by a man's hand, which slowly approaches the camera until it blocks the entire field of view
As many as 100,000 people, predominantly members of the minority Tamil community, are estimated to have disappeared during the 26-year-long Sri Lankan Civil War. Through a unique synthesis of interviews, news clips and re-enactments this docufiction reflects on this harrowing history as families search for loved ones that disappeared without a trace.
In this enveloping second part of the Youth trilogy, shot between 2015 and 2019, Wang Bing deepens his vérité portrait of a generation struggling to survive on meager wages amidst a nation's economic expansion, emphasizing the distrustful, increasingly combative relationship between workers and management.
As New Year's break is coming, Zhili's textile workshops are almost deserted. The few remaining employees are desperate to be paid for their trip home. From the banks of the Yangtze River to the mountains of Yunnan, everyone will be celebrating the festivities in their hometown, and performing the rituals of prosperity among their families. For Shi Wei, it's also the opportunity to get married, as it is for Fang Lingping. Her husband, a former IT specialist, will have to follow her in Zhili after the ceremony. Learning is hard, but does not hinder the advent of a new generation of workers.
The latest epic work of observational nonfiction from Wang Bing furthers the filmmaker's ongoing chronicle of the economic, social, and personal upheavals happening across a transforming China. Deepening the intimacy with which he captures communities of people living amidst financial struggle and toiling for little money in exploitative conditions, Youth (Spring) is a remarkable account of rural migrant workers employed in textile factories in Zhili, a town outside Shanghai. Over the course of five years, Wang follows various groups of people, most of them in their twenties, as they labor over their clothes-making, interact in the cramped dormitories where they live after hours, bargain (often fruitlessly) for better wages, and create emotional bonds and relationships with one another. As the title suggests, this film is specifically about the lives of the young, forcefully and humanely depicting—with its director's customary patience and unassuming formal rigor—the consequences of the country's rapid growth on the minds and bodies of a new generation of workers.
Yuck! Kissing on the mouth is disgusting. But secretly, little Léo really wants to try it ...
A husband and wife open a video store in a new town, and come to find out that the locals only rent horror films and the "occasional triple X'er", and make their own snuff videos.
A candid portrait of the women working at the Lőrinc spinning mill. As with so many of Mészáros' shorts, this work has foundations in autobiography, and as is visible in Márta Mészáros – Portrait einer ungarischen Filmregisseurin, she would later return to this particular world in one of her fiction features.