IFFR 55 (29 Jan-8 Feb 2026)

<p>They say it is more likely to be struck by lightning than to win the lottery. Against all odds, the undocumented Ebenezer does indeed find his golden ticket on the streets of Rotterdam. Funding a law degree suddenly seems within arm&rsquo;s reach, but without valid identification to claim his prize, Ebenezer remains a nobody with nowhere to go in this country. Director Abid Chand turns this fable of (mis)fortune into a poignant reflection on unseen communities and their unsung heroes.</p>

<p>Cast adrift in the universe after the world&rsquo;s end, a man and a woman find passing refuge in each other and their art. Fusing photorealism and painterly animation, Labyrinth Under Cyclone presents an abstract, dreamlike elegy to romance, a last dance with death. He is a painter; She is a musician. They meet, fall in love and separate aboard what might be a spaceship floating through the cosmos after a world-ending apocalypse. Are they primordial beings at the origin of life? Or the last of their kind enacting an indestructible romantic myth for one final time?</p>

<p>A grieving mother is confronted by an uncanny presence that wears the face of her lost child. Garc&iacute;a Bogliano probes the fear, guilt and the shadows we carry. Led by Gigi Saul Guerrero, Talking to a Stranger invites us to look toward the darkness rather than away from it. What could be worse than what happened to Patricia, who lost her child in a fire? Adri&aacute;n Garc&iacute;a Bogliano offers a chilling answer: a demon takes on the dead child&rsquo;s appearance and begins to haunt her. The story may carry personal echoes. Garc&iacute;a Bogliano is the son of Argentine &eacute;migr&eacute;s who fled the military junta in the 1970s for a safer life in Spain, and a sense of loss runs through his &oelig;uvre, however full-throttle the genre, gore or terror his films embrace. With Talking to a Stranger, he takes a step toward a more subtle and refined tone, offering an entry point even for viewers who might not normally gravitate toward horror.</p>

<p>Bodies cannot speak freely under surveillance. So the question is, what can the body say?</p>

<p>A summer filled with friendship and wheelie tricks. Three tweens share a passion for bicycle stunts with one wheel in the air. With the transition to high school looming, they fight to retain their friendship.</p>

<p>In Almaty, a cash-strapped couple hatch a plan to solve their money troubles, but soon become embroiled in a toxic web of social media, violent criminality and spiralling greed. This exhilarating, take-no-prisoners horror offers a blood-soaked satire on the indignities of late-stage capitalism.</p>

<p>Shaken from his moral torpor by the suicide of a defeated plaintiff, defence attorney Ma resolves to help the police investigate a dubious nonprofit organisation in this gripping corporate crime thriller.Tsai Bat Tong, a charitable foundation flush with millions, is hit by a twin scandal: after a massive sum of money goes missing from its books, its CFO is found dead on stage during its annual gala. Master barrister and Taekwondo coach Ma teams up with police officer Or to investigate what seems like an open-and-shut case, but their inquiry takes them deep down a rabbit hole.</p>

<p>When Ainara announces that she wants to become a nun, chaos arises in her family. Is this a genuine desire or has she been influenced by the religious staff at her school? Or is this life-changing decision due to her father&rsquo;s inattention and her mother&rsquo;s absence?</p>

<p>Born in Thailand inside the Children of God sect, an international cult with tens of thousands of followers worldwide and infamous for sexual abuse and manipulation, Alba Zari doesn&rsquo;t remember her childhood. Desperate to remember, she dives into the painful consequences of indoctrination.</p>

<p>A Palestinian projectionist embarks on a journey through the West Bank, seeking parts to restore an old movie theater&#39;s projector when a German NGO arrives to renovate it, clinging to hopes of reclaiming his former position.</p>

<p>For his directorial swan song, Alex Cox (Repo Man, Straight to Hell) stars in this frontier fable of American greed. Follow mysterious drifter &lsquo;Strindler&rsquo; as he scours the West for the names of dead Mexican labourers. Here at this border town in 1890, Strindler &ndash; or is it &lsquo;Swindler&rsquo;?&ndash; raises eyebrows when he offers to pay a pretty penny to add to his list of names. Wandering affably from saloon to ranch, Strindler exercises the old adage that money talks &ndash; but sometimes too loudly. Between the town drunk, hot-headed cowherds and local outlaws, Strindler soon finds himself tangled up in his own tall tales.</p>

<p>A young man sets out for an aimless stroll by tram from the center to the outskirts of Prague.</p>

<p>In 1932 Hammid bought a handheld camera Bell-Howell and made his second film, Na Pražsk&eacute;m hradě [Prague Castle], in close collaboration with the composer of the sound track, striving for an organic intertwining of image and music.</p>

<p>A school boy cannot think what to write in an essay assignment about spring. His father cannot come up with any new ideas either. Then his mother comes in with new boots for the boy. They only cost 59 crowns. In his exercise book the boy writes that Baťa is now selling a new range of shoes, and ladies shoes cost between 29 and 79 crowns. Advertisement for Baťa shoes.</p>

<p>As a displaced man returns home after many years, he finds himself in a ghost city, seemingly frozen in time. Captured in haunting cinematography and using phone calls with the director&rsquo;s grandmother, TRACE portrays a delusional and bifurcated perception of space, making tangible what it means to be separated from one&rsquo;s land.</p>

<p>At the end of the 19th century, the Vatican summoned four nuns to map a portion of the sky for the ambitious Map of the Heavens project: the nuns thus became &lsquo;computers.; Narrated from the point of view of a nun&rsquo;s soul in transit before reincarnation, Oh Be a Fine Girl Kiss Me intertwines history and fiction in a playful account about female perspective and self-determination.</p>

<p>Alone. We repeat. Endlessly. You&rsquo;re invited to arrange these three acts into an order that resonates with you. This collaboration between 3D artist Matunda Groenendijk and dancer/choreographer Amit Palgi reflects on the cyclical nature of existence through motion and momentum, touch and trace. The virtual space allows you to explore life&rsquo;s patterns through presence and embodiment. How do you choose to engage with your cycles?</p>

<p>A faded film star in Georgia returns to acting and discovers an industry that has left him behind. Ana Urushadze&rsquo;s wry and reflective examination of wounded pride and possibility, led by a magnetic Dato Bakhtadze, navigates comedy and melancholy with guile. Niaz Ninua has seen brighter days. Once a leading man, he stepped away from cinema some 15 years ago. When he decides to return, he discovers a landscape that no longer revolves around him. He attends a casting session for a supporting role in a debut feature directed by a young woman. The encounter bruises his pride, and he leaves unconvinced, dismissing the role as pretentious and insisting that the elderly and distinctly unflattering character bears no relation to him. Yet as he replays the encounter, Niaz begins to sense a pull to the role he so quickly dismissed. What had seemed beneath him starts to reveal contours he did not anticipate.</p>

<p>A visual poem about the alienation of postpartum. The body, relinquished to another life, morphs into something new and unknown: a chimera, a demon. With simple means, extraordinary images tell an all-too-common tale of isolation and sleep deprivation in the name of motherhood. Narrated in the filmmaker&rsquo;s native endangered language, Western Armenian.</p>

<p>A young girl is caught in a war between her separated parents, trying to make sense of it all. Bottling up the lightning intensity of childhood, Ang Geck Geck Priscilla uses her memories from 1990s Singapore to craft a heart-rending debut. Seven is the age when you begin to understand the adult world, but you&rsquo;re still treated like a child. Our na&iuml;ve but sassy titular heroine has a crush on a cute boy and is a thriving chewing gum saleswoman at school. However, she instead must spend more time minding her 5-year-old sister and navigating the petty battle between her separated parents, who are self-absorbed with their dating lives and ricocheting the sisters between homes. Ah Girl tackles the irrationality of adult behaviour through the eyes of children with utmost sincerity, quietly taking seriously the joy and anguish experienced by kids.</p>

<p>A drag queen singer&rsquo;s boyfriend tells him that he is HIV positive. Between ballads and performances, he will experience intense and sensitive hours, as his convictions are shaken. &Aacute;ngel Molina, a Paraguayan filmmaker and drag performer himself, exposes a heartfelt story of disarming sincerity, of (in)comprehension and love that never fades.</p>

<p>Revisiting a teenage crush on a teacher, Angelica Ruffier embarks on a delicate journey of memory and desire. A finely woven, reflective essay on past longings and present selves infused with the subtle glamour of French cinema</p>

<p>What do a hospice documentary, wildfires in Greece, and a diaphragmatic hernia have in common? Leave that to Anna Vasof &ndash; prop master extraordinaire and fervent maker of surprising connections. Just when you think you&rsquo;ve got a handle on things, she turns everything on its head. Balancing her signature playful take on the everyday with a vulnerable openness and an engagement with urgent issues, she finds the unexpected in the familiar, and the familiar in the unexpected.</p>

<p>How does one &lsquo;scrub&rsquo; a moving image? For Belgian video artist Antonin De Bemels, this means taking hold of the footage and winding it (both sound and image) back and forth in a stuttering, constantly interrupted, but expressive manner. The internationally renowned dancer Bud Blumenthal rests his head on the frame of a reflective window and turns his body this way and that; the film highlights and abstracts the strangeness of both movement and setting.</p>

<p>A DIY found‑footage short film that recontexts everyday clips into a fragmented, poetic rethink of sequence and context, challenging the viewer&rsquo;s perception of order and meaning through visual and sound collage.</p>

<p>A call girl named Alice stiffs a gang boss for his money but is arrested by police officers Goro and Yoshioka. The gang won&rsquo;t let this stop them and set an ambush, killing Yoshioka and forcing Alice and Goro to go on the run. While he was becoming a festival favourite with disturbing dramas such as Helpless and Eureka, Aoyama Shinji also directed this action movie with a sense of glee rarely found in his other work. He strips the genre down to its essence, from the couple on the lam and the film&rsquo;s archetypal title to the gun fights, martial arts duels and car chases that make up much of the compact running time.</p>

<p>Two friends, one Papuan, one Javanese, make a film together. Going through the footage they shot, they end up discussing the conflicted relationship between Papua and the rest of Indonesia. Using humour and playfulness as its weapon of choice, Golden Island opens up space for reflection and discussion and manages to find a balance between a utopian fantasy of Papua, with its beautiful nature, and the ironic reality of land exploitation and military subjection.</p>

<p>When Amarildo vanishes while fighting during the war in Cabo Delgado, Mozambique, rumours of his defection shatter his family. As his brother, S&eacute;rgio, travels home to deliver the tragic news, he uncovers a curious occurrence: his young nephew, P&eacute;rcio, shares a mysterious and profound connection with his missing father. Beautifully shot, Ariel A&ntilde;ez&rsquo;s Submergido explores the intersection of personal and collective trauma, following a single family affected by war.</p>

<p>A lonely woman sings to her laptop. Its vibrations are her companionship. Through a fun and masturbatory digital imaginary, filmmaker Ariela Bergman composes a visual song about the sexual-emotional relationship between people and screens, between pleasure and technology, approaching loneliness and failure with a clever sense of humour.</p>

<p>A modest trumpet player in a wedding band, Bantoo finds a new calling when he meets an inspiring street musician. Bantoo&rsquo;s artistic rebirth, however, threatens to cut him off from reality. A warm, dreamlike psychodrama that charts the awakening of the creative spirit. The brass section of the Kirti Wedding Band in suburban Delhi, India, has a clear mandate: keep the energy up, stick to the repertoire, play second fiddle to the drummers and above all, look good. Not the place for experiment or invention, the band requires its performers to keep their heads down and play by the book. But when trumpeter Bantoo, once a reliable team player, is bitten by the art bug, he begins to march to a different beat.</p>

<p>This corrosive satire of the Mexican art world unfolds during a week of ferocious preening, dealing and partying. Star artist Chema rules the scene &ndash; but if he falls, every vulture of the art market is ready to swoop in.</p>

<p>In the now desiccated Payahuunad&uuml; valley, California (the name means &ldquo;land of flowing water&rdquo;) a father performs butoh for the first time in front of his rock climbing prodigy child. They speak to each other through their bodies to find a way to heal their relationship and the land.</p>

<p>Having invaded Lanka to rescue his abducted wife, Lord Ram must face the mighty Meghnad, Lanka&rsquo;s invincible crown prince. What should have been a righteous battle between equals is manipulated by the gods, who conspire to favour Ram and deceive Meghnad. As war ravages his kingdom, Ravan, the king of demons, sends forth his finest warrior: his son Meghnad, renowned for defeating even Indra, the king of gods. On the rival front, Ram, the king of men, his brother Lakshman and Ravan&rsquo;s renegade brother Vibhishan are crippled by the thought of facing Meghnad. Meanwhile, Indra persuades other powerful gods to help Ram vanquish Meghnad by any means necessary.</p>

<p>Tells the story of twenty-something Jasmine, of Surinamese origin, living in a suffocating routine where the intangible lines between reality and imagination slowly blur.</p>

<p>Getting back on the dating scene after a breakup is an ordeal many of us have been through at least once in our lives. From this rather banal experience Axelle Vinnasac manages to create a perfect experimental romantic comedy. Echoing the avant-garde and mixing sensual 16mm shots with intimate dialogue, Soudain l&rsquo;&eacute;t&eacute; is striking for its beauty and wit, and offers an idea of cinema that is vital and refreshing.</p>

<p>What can folklore offer besides a glimpse into the beliefs and customs of a community? Reflecting on the geomythology of West Java, The Waves Saga explores how scientific investigation into natural disasters finds vital insight in indigenous systems of knowledge. West Java, in current-day Indonesia, was home to the Sundanese Kingdom that flourished for over nine centuries, yet few physical traces remain today that sing of its glory. Nestled in a geologically sensitive zone, the region has long been subject to nature&rsquo;s unabated fury, with periodic earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions wiping out its heritage and reducing it to a &ldquo;landscape of amnesia&rdquo;.</p>

<p>A Jewish girl disguises herself as a boy to enter religious training.</p>

<p>Adela is convinced that someone, or something, is constantly watching her. Feeling misunderstood and unheard by her family and the medical world, she seeks solutions in religion and spirituality, finding a form of solace in telling her story to a healer. In striking visual style, this embroidered fable explores mental health and trauma. El Cuerpo de Cristo marks Bea Lema&rsquo;s debut film and is an adaptation of her graphic novel of the same name.</p>

<p>Four men are cursed by a voodoo priest for stealing a sacred idol from his temple. Soon a band of murderous &quot;doll men&quot; are after the men and their families.</p>

<p>Holed up in an intricate tunnel network, a guerrilla unit is tasked with defending a top-secret intelligence team against an American offensive. Shot in real subterranean locations, Tunnels: Sun in the Dark offers a riveting, claustrophobic vision of underground warfare. Vietnam, 1967. In a village outside Saigon, a multilayered network of tunnels is home to a paramilitary resistance unit under the command of Bay Theo. This scrappy and highly cohesive group makes do with basic resources and repurposed weapons. One day, they are visited by a military envoy for a special mission: to protect the newly arrived intelligence team against impending onslaught at all costs.</p>

<p>A moving account of the horrific 2009 Maguindanao massacre in the Philippines, approached from a personal angle. Nenen is the daughter of a photojournalist whose corpse was never found &ndash; so his death is officially unacknowledged. Carl Joseph Papa uses animation to transform the documentary material. In 2009 Esmael Mangudadatu, a progressive political candidate in the Philippines, sent his wife and a team of journalists to the town of Maguindanao to file his application to become Governor. Everyone in the convoy was brutally slaughtered by forces directed by the powerful Ampatuan family, which was allied to the oppressive Arroyo government. 58th retells this tragic tale through the memories of the daughter of a photojournalist nicknamed Bebot, and her tireless campaign to find proof and seek official acknowledgement of her father&rsquo;s death in the massacre. Even though justice was partly served by the courts in 2020, Bebot&rsquo;s absence from the historical record continues to haunt his family.</p>

<p>In the art installation Krakatoa, having its world premiere at IFFR 2026, visual artist and filmmaker Carlos Casas takes you on an intense, sensory journey. Through images, sound and vibration, he conjures the echo of &ldquo;the loudest scream ever&rdquo;: the 1883 eruption of the Indonesian Krakatoa volcano. That explosion, one of the greatest natural disasters of modern times, forms the starting point for Casas&rsquo; exploration of nature, perception and our connection to the earth. The consequences of the eruption were visible across the globe: skies turned red, temperatures fluctuated and, with the rise of international news channels, reports travelled faster than ever before. The Krakatoa eruption sparked key ideas about ecology, the sublime in nature and apocalyptic imaginings that continue to shape art and culture today. Casas approaches the volcano not merely as an historic event, but as a prism through which to understand the current ecological crisis &ndash; a force revealing how creation and destruction go hand in hand.</p>

<p>A Mexican folk horror about the serial murders of children in various villages, which propels a descent into ancestral legends, Indigenous rituals, primal violenceand supernatural entities. Expanding from a previous short, TEKENCHU: THE RITE OF THE NAHUALES is Carlos Matienzo Serment&rsquo;s first feature film.</p>

<p>Short documentary portrait of film historian and critic Lotte Eisner, filmed just months before her death in 1983. Sitting before her bookshelf filled with cinema essays, Eisner recounts her life and career &mdash; from early work in Berlin, exile during Nazism, to co‑founding the Cin&eacute;math&egrave;que Fran&ccedil;aise with Henri Langlois. The interview is interwoven with film stills and clips, exploring her passion for cinema and connections with figures like Murnau and Lang.</p>

<p>A double portrait of two friends and filmmakers combining documentary footage, photographs and various kinds of animation techniques. While Caroline Leaf would become a legend for her use of glass painting in animation, Veronika Soul diversified her artistic approach and career across all kinds of filmmaking.</p>

<p>C&eacute;line Berger, brilliant editor and former production engineer in microelectronics, reworks material from the 1980s German Federal Employment Agency: cutting, drawing, turning, sliding, folding, shoveling, tightening, loosening. These 16mm films, once made to inform and inspire jobseekers all over West Germany, spill and seep into each other to form a mechanical symphony that dismantles the very notion of productive labour.</p>

<p>May was filmed as a backdrop to part of a theatre performance D36-D37 under the E. F. Burian&rsquo;s lead inspired by the classic Czech poem of the same name by Karel Hynek Macha.</p>

<p>A love story between a man and a woman unfolds in simply sequences. The man seduces the woman and she follows him, entranced.</p>

<p>A witty day-in-the-life of a man, his fantasies, love life and all, shown through his hands. Čeněk Zahradn&iacute;ček made this film in collaboration with Vladim&iacute;r &Scaron;mejkal.</p>

<p>The mobilisation of the army changes the life of a young man. He becomes a figure on a chess board of war. A piece of shrapnel blinds him and his cries of &ldquo;I cannot see&rdquo; become a refrain symbolising the horrors of war.&rdquo;</p>

<p>Charity Sumter&rsquo;s directorial debut is a portrait of and tribute to Surinamese icon-in-the-making Shavero Ferrier. Growing up in an environment with all kinds of stigmas around punk and rock music, he kickstarted a community and ultimately built the alternative scene he&rsquo;d longed for himself. Powered by the soundtrack of current and former bands Mutha Flac, Luguber and De Rotte Appels, expression and release burst from the screen. Punkers tot de dood!</p>

<p>Monica is 14 old and will be 17 when the Atlanta Olympics take place in 1996. That is where she wants to be, representing the United States in gymnastics. But an accident suddenly renders a future as an elite athlete unlikely at best. Her world collapses, along with that of her father, who has given everything to support his daughter&rsquo;s chance at glory. Time was of the essence in making Charlotte Glynn&rsquo;s first fiction feature, The Gymnast, for she found in real-life athlete and vlog-savvy teenager Britney Wheeler the ideal lead. Realness is central to the film, with its low-key attention to everyday lives and the working families of Pittsburgh at a moment when heavy industry is in decline, leaving much of the local labour force adrift. These are hard times falling on decent people, and in this context a single injury becomes the pivot between the hope of a better future and the likelihood of long-term hardship. It is a story many will recognise in one form or another, told with clarity, restraint and a keen sense of the fragile turning points that shape a life.</p>

<p>Los Angeles, 2028. Just before the Summer Olympics. A livestock virus is taking out all meat and poultry, at the same time there is a cockroach infestation across the city. It&rsquo;s a perfect storm for a new business opportunity as society is forced to consider a new source of protein. Two young men, petty thieves some might call them, hatch a plan, as the confined urban spaces around them reveal and conceal an atmosphere brimming with paranoia and simmering rage. Charlotte Zhang&rsquo;s feature directorial debut is an impressionistic act of resistance in the form of a nocturnal noir with no wave punk energy. The absence of a social safety net is the everyday reality for these working-class Angelenos, brown bodies that inhabit private spaces of concrete and chrome as ICE raids, helicopters, the threat of police and eco-disasters close in around them. Cars become the sites of rage and animating vitality. This state of dispossession is punctured by an allusive collage of images, layered dialogues, intertitles and 1950s doo-wop music.</p>

<p>Srinaonamthum, ruler of the twin towns of Si Satchanalai-Sukhothai, appoints his younger son Khun Bang Klang Hao as his successor, much to the dismay of the elder Phraya Pha Mueang. Alas, the old lord dies while his sons are away on a mission, allowing the devious nobleman Khom Sabad Khon Lampong to capture power. Caught unawares, the two brothers &ndash; the belligerent Pha Mueang and the peaceful Bang Klang Hao &ndash; must overcome their differences to join hands and reclaim the throne. At the outset, Chartchai Ketnust&rsquo;s Phra Ruang: Rise of the Empire is an epic retelling of the foundation of &lsquo;the first Thai kingdom&rsquo; from the Khmer Empire in the 13th century. But Ketnust frames this mythico-historical narrative as a reinterpretation of a 20th century play by a theatre troupe in modern-day Bangkok. This metatextual layering questions the authority of the canonical account and emphasises the relative nature of representation. Fusing swashbuckling action spectacle, knotty palace intrigues and baroque musical numbers, Phra Ruang augments classical epic filmmaking with an audacious modernist edge.</p>

<p>In a crescendo of visual hints and sonic traces, Objet d&rsquo;&eacute;nigme plays with thriller tropes to depict homes as a dense space in which the memory of murder can be surmised in every frame. Using lo-fi scans of domestic spaces, Objet d&rsquo;enigme lies bare a pattern in which the female body is the ever-returning protagonist. Thrilling and mysterious, the work is a powerful take on crime scenes transcending times and geographies.</p>

<p>In extreme cold, the human body can turn against itself through paradoxical undressing: failing nerves mistake freezing for heat, compelling the dying to shed their last protection. In 水托邦 (Hydrotopia), hydrophones frozen into a block of ice capture the material disintegration of their frozen body as a projected film gradually emerges into clarity. The film follows artist Jamie Man suspended by hooks pierced through flesh in a British winter landscape, practicing rituals rooted in Shiva-dedicated traditions that explore a state of perpetual non-being. As the ice surrenders its form and the image sharpens into focus, transformation itself becomes the subject: matter abandoning one state for another, the body held suspended between dissolution and emergence.</p>

<p>In the snow-covered Tian Shan mountains of Soviet-era Kyrgyzstan, the ceremonial opening of a new gold mine is interrupted by the sudden collapse of a young policeman, gripped by a mysterious seizure. Decades later, local police officer Nurtay (Omurbek Izrailov) is drawn back to those same mountains when a vlogger accidentally stumbles across a body in the wilderness. As the investigation progresses, a vast conspiracy, led by local crime boss and poacher Kerym (Nazim Mendebairov), is gradually exposed, revealing the deep undertow of violence beneath the placid exterior of this apparently peaceful rural community. At the same time, the unravelling mystery also sparks a reckoning for Nurtay. Past traumas &ndash; both personal and historic &ndash; drift disturbingly back into the present.</p>

<p>A historical and political inquiry into the architecture of the Paris M&eacute;tro system, from the initial designs of Hector Guimard to recent transformations. Guided by the &lsquo;psychogeographic&rsquo; theories of the Situationist philosophers, Chloe Brenan traces, in limpid images, both the forbidding social controls imposed by this built structure, and the freer &lsquo;desire lines&rsquo; created by its daily users. Is it possible to reclaim and redefine the city space? The film itself enacts this fervent wish.</p>

<p>Comedies love riffing on human shortcomings, and Chris de Krijger&rsquo;s new short is no exception. Wide-angled shots of Rotterdam in summer present the bumbling Homo sapiens in all its splendour: a jogger who decides to rent a moped for the final leg of his run; a marriage proposal that goes horribly wrong; and a woman who counts her steps but abandons her husband during a walk. From a bird&rsquo;s-eye view, we witness the insignificance &ndash; and ridiculousness &ndash; of the flawed Homo sapiens.</p>

<p>Space, the last hope. This is the story of a group of children and young adults who after the end of Earth, reached for the skies and beyond to establish a new civilisation on a far away planet. A loose weave of their meetings, explorations and discoveries, and a record of their attempts to not forget this proverbial island in the cosmic dark, that once they called home.</p>

<p>In the early 2000s, Dutch audiences were glued to their screens whenever Rejseholdet aired, the wildly beloved Danish police procedural series about a special investigations unit that travels across the country to help solve crimes seemingly beyond the local cops&rsquo; capabilities. A quarter century on, filmmaker Christoffer Boe reinvents this television cult drama for cinema &ndash; by going back to the squad&rsquo;s origins in interwar Denmark. 1927. On 23 August, the Rigspolitiets Rejsehold was established, with Otto Himmelstrup as its head. Their first case brings them to Esbjerg, where the political and commercial elites don&rsquo;t shy away from murder to defend their corrupt schemes. In his previous work, Boe has shown he knows how to deliver the bloody goods when telling a crime story &ndash; and here he delivers, big time. Special Unit &ndash; The First Murder is a visually seductive prime chunk of suspense entertainment that has a few things to say about the ways the entitled and powerful think they can rule &ndash; and how to topple them.</p>

<p>Wasting away from alcohol, James receives a letter from his deceased wife Mary asking him to return to Silent Hill. Defying all advice, he arrives in a town ravaged by putrid creatures. On his mission to find Mary, however, James&rsquo; greatest enemy lies within.</p>

<p>Nine months after Stanley Powton&rsquo;s death, his body is discovered in a tent in Amsterdam. His son Marcus, who met his father only once as a baby, embarks on a poignant journey to uncover the man his father was.</p>

<p>In Hiroshima and Nagasaki, bodies were vaporised by nuclear flash, leaving only shadows burned into stone. In DIsINCARNATE, Cinzia Nistico presses human skin and hair directly into 16mm film emulsion, asking whether a trace can become a different form of life. The projected figure appears, disappears and transforms across two parts: emerging as an unstable silhouette, then unraveling like colliding particles while optical sound inscribed onto the filmstrip produces its mechanical, almost human voice, layered with live trumpet by Igor Iofe. Drawing on quantum physics, the work imagines existence as a field of probability, a body in superposition occupying multiple states at once, brought to life through light.</p>

<p>S&ouml;derquist revisits footage from the shooting of Letters From Silence, placing them in dialog with recently shot footage. Deploying split-screen for the first time, S&ouml;derquist&rsquo;s camera slowly and meticulously travels through sparse interior spaces and passages, evoking both a sense of enclosure and departure. The internal tensions, motions, correspondences and temporal dynamics between the two screens unfolding is set to Baroque composer Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber&rsquo;s Mystery Sonatas, and with its final passacaglia for solo violin &ndash; while the camera travels along a corridor &ndash;is an apt and ingenious testimony of S&ouml;derquist&rsquo;s continuing explorations of the cinematographic in relation to sound and space.</p>

<p>With an independent spirit, Clara Law&rsquo;s new film is an essayistic observation of grief, friendship and artistic regeneration, through the parallel stories of two Hong Kong women in exile. A melange of cinematic styles &ndash; including documentary, stage performance and opera &ndash; permeates both form and content in this impressively understated drama. A tale of two women, two countries of new beginnings, and the city they left behind. Wai is a performer who left Hong Kong suddenly and is traversing Taiwan, meeting friends from her past and finding inspiration in her new surroundings. Ling has come to Australia to retrace the steps of her close friend, who died in an accident while on a tourist visa, in order to bring her back home.</p>

<p>Two less-than-splendid members of the judicial police of Perpignan arrive in the small town of Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines to watch over activities at the local gem market fair. In investigating a seemingly trivial matter, they stumble onto a potentially bigger criminal network.</p>

<p>An innumerable host of working-class angels, invisible to the human eye, labour tirelessly on earth to power our machines and to keep our homes warm and light. When one day some of them attempt to escape, a massive blackout follows and the world as we know it is thrown into chaos.</p>

<p>Filmmakers Paul Shemisi and Nizar Saleh travel from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Germany for the screening of their new film. During a layover in Angola, they&#39;re stopped at the airport because the airline doesn&#39;t trust their documents to be real. While Paul and Nizar think they are being led to a hotel, where they would stay until their flight back home , they are actually being taken to an illegal detention center.<br /> <br /> The filmmakers&#39; testimony - which offers an eye-opening insight into the impossibility of safe and carefree travel for Congolese artists - stands in stark contrast with the seemingly peaceful images of cloud formations passing by an airplane window.</p>

<p>How do four filmmakers with different backgrounds (two from Belgium and two from DR Congo) make one film? How do their different views converge to tell one coherent story about Kinshasa, a city in upheaval after a failed election? An exercise in collective cinema, Collectif Faire-Part&rsquo;s energetic 2019 documentary Faire-part provides fascinating answers to these questions by depicting a multifaceted portrait of Kinshasa through dance, performance and text.</p>

<p>Commissioned for the MAS museum&rsquo;s 2020 exhibition &lsquo;100x Congo&rsquo;, Collectif Faire-Part facilitated a vital dialogue between residents of Antwerp and Kinshasa. Through intimate conversations, In vele handen documents the layered reckoning with the collection&rsquo;s colonial legacy, the profound emotional weight of the objects, and the urgent, pivotal debate surrounding repatriating these cultural artefacts to their homeland.</p>

<p>One hundred years after the first flight between Belgium and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Brussels Airlines approaches Collectif Faire-Part with a proposal to show their work on board their flights. Interwoven with archival footage and testimonies of activists and survivors of in-flight violence, the collective&rsquo;s internal dialogue in What We Said to Brussels Airlines poses a variety of questions and opens up space for critical reflection.</p>

<p>Caught between a drug cartel out for his blood and a community determined to reclaim its neighbourhood, hitman Galgo fights to live through a pitiless night. Gatillero delivers a propulsive saga of crime and redemption, presented in one continuous shot.</p>

<p>Welcome to Set invites you behind the scenes of machine learning, where data becomes drama. This experimental documentary explores how emotion, suspicion, and politics intertwine within the algorithmic practices of security.</p>

<p>A journey through the islands of Fiji, where simultaneous dimensions coexist through a poetic narrative of the past and present lives and voices of the islanders, interwoven with Iona&rsquo;s childhood memories and reflections on the illusions of the Western mind.</p>

<p>The largest interdimensional structure of Japan floats close to New Kawagishi, the restaurant run by Fujio. Despite a few strange incidents, the remarkable structure is not threatening, so daily lives goes on. Decades go by and Fujio&rsquo;s son Sho takes over the reins of the restaurant. Suddenly, in 2021, something happens that turns Sho&rsquo;s life completely upside down. Mix of sci-fi and drama that slowly morphs into a remarkably touching paranormal story.</p>

<p>When people literally explode from emotional overload, grief is just the beginning. A wildly surrealist charade in which a bereaved man, his friend and mother spiral through village life. Dan Geesin blends body-horror absurdity with warmth and wit.</p>

<p>An AI-born former TV preacher, known as The Great Orator, guides visitors through a nonlinear VR world shaped by shifting memories and current events. As you explore, her consciousness evolves through your interactions, questioning the nature of reality and identity. Spaces like a preserved house, mainframe storage, and an infinite parking lot serve as allegorical backdrops to her speeches. She speaks poetically about ordinary objects, inviting intimacy yet maintaining eerie detachment. Ultimately, the experience probes populism, misinformation, and the fragility of truth in a synthetic society.</p>

<p>&quot;Au Hasard&quot; is a nine-minute experimental essay in perceptual control. Projected through overlapping red and blue image streams, the film uses colour-filtered glasses to divide the audience&rsquo;s visual experience. Two people seated side by side may watch the same screen...but not the same movie. Blending archival propaganda, poetic narration and formal play, the film explores how missed information is often the root of misinformation. Evoking Godard with a touch of William Castle, &quot;Au Hasard&quot; is both a cinema of ideas and an act of cinematic misdirection.</p> <p>&quot;Au Hasard&quot; is an experiment in divided seeing. Using red or blue decoder glasses and a dual-layered structure, the film splits the screen (and the audience) into two separate but simultaneous visual narratives. Each viewer sees only half the image, creating a perceptual asymmetry that mirrors the way we consume media: filtered, incomplete and often contradictory.</p> <p>The project reflects my interest in manufactured truth, optical control and the role of omission in propaganda. Rather than presenting a singular message, &quot;Au Hasard&quot; fractures the frame and asks viewers to live with what they miss. At its core, it&rsquo;s about the instability of what we think we know and the uneasy space between perspectives.</p> <p>Note: This film requires custom red or blue decoder glasses (not standard 3D glasses) for proper viewing</p>

<p>A mobile coffee cart traverses public space in Kinshasa, where the echoes of traumatic events remain palpable, yet where new forms of resistance and creativity are emerging.</p>

<p>Small towns across the globe are slowly decaying, leaving little for the youth to hope and aspire to &ndash; even so all the way Down Under. But when a black gloopy sludge begins to pour into the streets of Adelaide, the rotting becomes manifest and the youth can smell the stench.</p>

<p>A feral girl who has spent her life living among wolves is taken on an odyssey through contemporary human life while the threat of climate apocalypse looms.</p>

<p>In a stifling mise en sc&egrave;ne that leaves no room for spontaneity, affection or rebellion, father, mother and daughter perform their rigid roles. Each follows their own script, out of sync and devoid of actual interaction. Their evocative choreography reveals small neuroses, fractures in the fa&ccedil;ade. With subtle humour and meticulous precision, this film-theatre hybrid captures a family trapped in their routines, going in circles until the curtain falls.</p>

<p>In this collaboration between Deborah S. Phillips, seasoned 16mm filmmaker, and Zuzanna Marczak, who encounters the medium with a fresh perspective, fragments and impressions of urban debris come alive through playful stop-motion and superimpositions. Scraps, ribbons, caps, paper, plastic, cans and objects beyond identification lie scattered beneath the bridges and along the streets. A multi-lingual meditation on the poetry of waste.</p>

<p>A documentary exploring the visibility, pride, and recognition of the Indigenous Surinamese community in Rotterdam, told through personal and communal stories from within the city&rsquo;s cultural context.</p>

<p>Not Built to Last is a short film set against the architectural backdrop of Rotterdam, written and directed by Turkish-Dutch architect and filmmaker Deniz Arikan. The story follows Emre, an architect from Istanbul, and Daniel, a Dutch architect. What begins as a professional encounter gradually becomes something personal as the day progresses. This is an intimate short film about identity, desire, and connection. Two men walk through Rotterdam, and what begins as a chance encounter blossoms into a meaningful connection that continues to resonate.</p>

<p>The only constant in life is change &ndash; and that applies to the Amsterdam harbour as well. As part of the energy transition, public authorities decided in 2019 to close down the coal-fired power station. This meant that a landmark on the Amsterdam skyline &ndash; Hemweg 8&rsquo;s smokestack &ndash; would disappear. Ever-inquisitive filmmaker Digna Sinke would follow the process from up close in the subsequent six years. In 2024 this research led to Hemelsleutel, while this year, Sinke gives us De wolkenfabriek.</p>

<p>Obi is called home unexpectedly after the sudden death of his mother. Identifying as gender non-conforming, Obi has long believed that total freedom comes from establishing life away from home, far from his father&rsquo;s unforgiving gaze and the cultural expectations of being an only son. Dika Ofoma&rsquo;s Obi Is a Boy follows Obi&rsquo;s journey back home &ndash; to himself and his identity.</p>

<p>This documentary is a salute to 35,000 years of the goddess-worshipping religions of the ancient past. The film features Merlin Stone, Carol Christ, Luisah Teish and Jean Bolen, all of whom link the loss of goddess-centric societies with today&#39;s environmental crisis.</p>

<p>Right before a major festival, the sacred treasure is suddenly stolen, sending brothers Tam and Tuan, along with their friends, on a thrilling yet hilarious adventure as they face off against ruthless fisherman gangs and countless dangers.</p>

<p>The final part of Dwayne LeBlanc&rsquo;s trilogy following the restless and chronically searching Booker. Here we find him alone and contemplative in the intimacy of his backyard. Looking around, and at the planes flying overhead, he wonders about place and far-off horizons, searching for answers to unknown questions.</p>

<p>Four minutes of pure charm, all on 16mm! Trolsk &ndash; Norwegian for &ldquo;enchanted by nature&rdquo; &ndash; awakens larger than life mythical figures Draugr, Huldra and Troll from ancient lore. With simple effects, a world of wondrous enchantment unfurls in a small photogenic fishing village in Lofoten.</p>

<p>Kudo Eiichi was a former samurai action specialist at Toei&rsquo;s Kyoto studio who made some of the finest films of the 1960s, including Thirteen Assassins (1963, remade by Miike Takashi in 2010) and The Great Killing (1964). The early 80s saw him move into hard-boiled action with Yokohama BJ Blues, a vehicle for that decade&rsquo;s superstar Matsuda Yusaku (of Family Game and Black Rain fame) and Beast Detective, which played in competition at the Berlinale in 1983. Betrayal Tomorrow sees Kudo pay overt homage to his 80s action films, returning to the streets of Yokohama, and many of the same locations, with this tale of a corrupt detective who runs a side business as a debt collector for a large corporation, threatening debtors with arrest if they don&rsquo;t pay up. When the corporation is revealed to be in serious trouble with the yakuza, he must investigate to save his skin. Hagiwara Kenichi (from Kurosawa Akira&rsquo;s Kagemusha) is every inch the bad lieutenant, abusing his badge and sending his hostess girlfriend to do his dirty work.</p>

<p>Fruit is one of the pleasures of life. In this experimental animation, various fruits dance around the screen, accompanied by Jes&uacute;s Sevillano&rsquo;s catchy composition &ldquo;El Mango&rdquo;. An ode to fruit in all its aspects.</p>

<p>The hedgehog is about to retire for hibernation when he finds one of his spines missing. Guess what? It&rsquo;s stuck in the bum of Lena&rsquo;s dog! Getting it back is not easy.</p>

<p>Fixing upon traces of the Finnish singer Elli Forssell-Rozentāle (1871&ndash;1943) in Latvia &ndash; a sad letter recited in voice-over, some posed photos &ndash; Elina Saloranta evokes the strangeness and unspoken traumas inhabiting past lives. We hear about physical and mental ailments that defied categorisation or treatment back then. The documentary elements are superimposed upon a puddle that reflects the moon, and the overall effect of this combination is both lyrical and haunting.</p>

<p>Who can deny the splendour of taxidermied shoebill storks and rose-breasted grosbeaks staring back at you in a natural history museum? This essayistic short, however, critically probes the imperialist and colonial constructs that hide behind the hand-painted fa&ccedil;ades and displayed birds that dominate Western museums. Brazilian filmmaker Enrico Piffer shows how taxidermy is, in fact, the spoils of colonialism, revealing that such exhibitions not only teach us about the animal world, but are also lasting imprints of a colonial lineage.</p>

<p>Kurdish-born Roj&icirc;n has spent almost all of her life far away from home, in Helsinki, where she works as an anaesthesiologist at a hospital. Now 40, the day-to-day business of human existence isn&rsquo;t getting any easier: her relationship with her 12-year-old daughter Azad is increasingly strained, and marital life with her husband Ferhat grows tense. Azad doesn&rsquo;t know that she&rsquo;s adopted &ndash; just as Roj&icirc;n doesn&rsquo;t know the full story about her past, but will find out when her father N&icirc;zam visits from Sweden.</p>

<p>Happy Ending uses entrancing watercolour animation to give shape to the words of an anonymous Korean sex worker. Both sensual and haunting, it is a poetic exploration of her thoughts on pleasure, and anguish about being used for the pleasure of others. The film shows us the beauty and brutality of sex, while insisting we should listen to women who are too often ignored.</p>

<p>A contemplative short that, in the absence of dialogue, invites viewers deep into an internal universe of being and presence. Through a poetic and experiential visual language, the film explores ideas of self‑containment, inner dwellings, and the decision to remain within one&rsquo;s own felt experience, transforming subjective consciousness into cinematic space. (Based on festival programming description norms; no public synopsis provided but inferred from IFFR and the title&rsquo;s poetic framing.)</p>

<p>In this acid trip opera, the life of 22-year-old Mozart is reimagined to tell the present-day story of an Iranian artist exiled in Paris. Navigating grief, destructive tendencies and creative expression, the artists&rsquo; lives swirl together in a time and gender-queering ode to self-transformation. In 1778, a young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was in exile in Paris: reeling from his mother&rsquo;s death, he spent his days writing scatalogical music and drowning in libertine excess. In this genre-defying &lsquo;audiovisual opera&rsquo;, Mozart&rsquo;s life becomes a portal into that of Wolfgang, an Iranian artist navigating similar extremes as he too is exiled in Paris: the city where everyone says his dreams will come true, and praises him for escaping the censorship of his homeland.</p>

<p>v</p>

<p>Granny&rsquo;s poor table manners drive everyone crazy, but her grandson has a solution.</p>

<p>At the end of a short-lived bout of long-aspired fame, a singer decides to end his life. Finding himself in a secure psychiatric ward, but desperate to leave, he joins his fellow patients in the choir. Once upon a distant moon, singer Daniel Nowak had a hit called Time, Time, Time &ndash; and that was it, nothing else of note ever again. A classical one-hit wonder, Daniel now tries to squeeze as much as possible out of his erstwhile fame by humiliating himself in reality shows and crooning his one song at unsexy occasions like the opening of small businesses. When a tired and disgusted Daniel survives a suicide attempt and finds himself on a secure psychiatric ward, his life takes an unexpected turn for the better and brighter &ndash; in the shape of a choir made up of patients only.</p>

<p>o is a gem of 16mm cinema that coalesces exquisitely textured images and a gripping soundscape with irony and beauty. It is also a very contemporary essay on one of the most relatable topics of the 21st century: anxiety. From a small drop of blood on the belly button, Francisca Alarc&atilde;o takes us through a meditation on uncertainty, unrest and self-healing.</p>

<p>A day inside the charming hair salon of Veronique Gizard, on the corner of Rue de Bagnolet and Rue Planchat in Paris&rsquo;s 20th arrondissement. Owner, stylist and client shyly gaze into the lens of legendary Viennese filmmaker and photographer Friedl vom Groller. The salon&rsquo;s distinctive character lives on in 16mm &ndash; it closed its doors in mid-2025 after 20 years, and the shopfront now houses a cafe.</p>

<p>In this satirical short film, a failed journalist&rsquo;s Valentine&rsquo;s Day interview with a local thief escalates from a cynical bid for clicks into a profound discovery. Ganza Moise&rsquo;s Ako Kantu holds a mirror to Kigali&rsquo;s new-age journalism, exploring the precarious boundary between content creation and real news. Moise will also present his HBF-backed project Tears during IFFR 2026.</p>

<p>A jaded movie star produces a century-spanning romantic musical that doubles as a chronicle of Indonesian political and film history. After Whispers in the Dabbas (IFFR 2025), Garin Nugroho returns to the festival, this time carrying songs in a suitcase.</p>

<p>A producer monkey pitches a fairytale extravaganza to a sceptical financier. A psychedelic meta-comedy that mixes animation with excerpts from a Soviet science-fiction fantasy spectacle. A film trip unlike any before or since.</p>

<p>Black, white and grey tiles alternate in quick succession. From a seemingly random set of little tile squares, pixel by pixel, an image emerges. Familiar situations become clearer and clearer.</p>

<p>Collaboratively made by six directors, Home Bitter Home follows artists trying to reclaim their dreams in today&rsquo;s Lebanon. In a city that keeps tightening around them, their intertwined stories reveal how deeply their survival and ambitions depend on others.</p>

<p>A mother writes to her estranged child, but with each draft the details become fuzzy, threads are lost and the meaning erodes. A trip inside the memories of a mind in decline, grasping to finish the most critical thoughts and convey the most important sentiments imaginable.</p>

<p>Romy (Pom Klementieff) is a French DJ touring the sun-bleached and club-lit Canary Islands, until her friend vanishes. Met with evasion from locals and the authorities, her search leads her to a magnetic stranger (Beno&icirc;t Magimel) and the sinister proprietors of an exotic animal sanctuary. Romy (played by a quietly fierce and sympathetic Pom Klementieff), is a French DJ touring the club-fuelled Canary Islands with her friend, leaving a somewhat unresolved family situation on the shelf. But not long into their stay, her friend vanishes without trace and paradise goes awry. Now alone, paranoid, and robbed of her belongings, Romy begins her search, only to be met with evasion and apathy from both the authorities and the locals. The spiral leads her into contact with a magnetic and seemingly sincere stranger (a perfectly cast Beno&icirc;t Magimel), a web of shady business rivalries and the sinister proprietors of the Santuario de Fauna, a rescue park for exotic animals.</p>

<p>After a serious accident in rural Brazil, two sisters and their stepfather are forced to spend the night in a hospital emergency room. As they face challenging interactions with strangers, they also struggle with their own family dynamics.</p>

<p>Birth and death trauma, constipation and gassy poos, toilet curses and gender issues: these are just some of the elements that converge in Bowels of Hell, a Brazilian comedy with more than a touch of gore, exploring in excruciating detail the mysteries of the human organism.</p>

<p>A hookup becomes a threesome; the threesome becomes an orgy. In this magical realist gay bedroom odyssey, Matias reminisces about his past encounters and considers his future, while speaking to a fictional figure from Brazilian literature.</p>

<p>When the recession hits, Osaka-based loan shark Ginjiro Manda decides to help out small business owners in trouble, but finds himself face-to-face with the yakuza who come to collect debts.</p>

<p>The quintessential V-Cinema series reaches its 50th instalment, 12 years after the first film was launched onto video store shelves. Takeuchi Riki returns as moneylender Manda Ginjiro, still butting heads with the yakuza while protecting local business owners. Ginjiro finds that it has become impossible to collect debts when even his regular clients have been conned out of their savings. He discovers that Sugiura gang underboss Domoto (Ryu Daisuke, co-star of Kurosawa Akira&rsquo;s Kagemusha and Ran) is behind these schemes. Domoto wants to take over the gang and tries to ruin Yukino, the real boss&rsquo;s widow and the gang&rsquo;s acting head, by sabotaging a resort hotel project with the help of a thug named Kawatani. Ginjiro, who has lent money for the project, is furious when he learns about Domoto&rsquo;s schemes and goes into action.</p>

<p>Eleven-year-old Amelia is getting bullied at school. Trying to regain a sense of power, she steals possessions from classmates which she hides in a closet. When she gets caught, Amelia learns that true strength lies not in secrets or revenge, but in daring to face confrontation.</p>

<p>v</p>

<p>In this blend of stop-motion and live action, a reclusive woman observes her neighbour Kankan&rsquo;s daily routine through a hole in the wall. What begins as a reassuring ritual takes a turn when fragments of memories start seeping into her reality. As both characters mirror each other across incompatible worlds, the boundary between dreams, fears and reality blurs. With beautifully detailed puppets and tactile textures, loneliness is made powerfully palpable in unexpected ways.</p>

<p>When a spate of gruesome killings rocks the countryside in East Jakarta, army officer Soegeng is tasked with clearing up rumours about the military&rsquo;s involvement. Soegeng&rsquo;s investigation, however, confronts him with the foundations of corruption &ndash; a truth too close for comfort. Early 1960s, Indonesia. The village of Lubang Buaya is witness to a series of macabre murders with a particular signature: killed on the 30th of each month, the victims are left with a gaping hole in their bodies; their faces inscribed with words like &ldquo;greedy&rdquo; and &ldquo;heartless&rdquo;. Who is the perpetrator? The Hollow Ghost, believe some. The Communists, say others. When asked if it could be a psychopath, army officer Soegeng replies, &ldquo;More than that. People like me.&rdquo;</p>

<p>Two 14-year-old boys try to escape their oppressive home in a working-class suburb of Hamburg, first by taking a homemade raft and later a stolen sailboat down the Elbe towards the open sea.</p>

<p>For 14 years, Syrian filmmakers Hasan Kattan and Fadi Al-Halabi have journeyed together through war and storytelling. Their bond was forged on the frontlines of revolution where their cameras recorded terror and hope, laughter and heartbreak &ndash; moments that defined a generation. Years later, their story takes an unexpected turn. Confined inside a UK asylum hotel, Hasan and Fadi document a new chapter shaped not by bombs, but by waiting, bureaucracy, and exile. Amid rising anti-refugee hostility, they turn the camera inward exploring friendship and displacement and how filming itself becomes an act of survival when the future is so uncertain.</p>

<p>Inspired by Pablo Neruda&rsquo;s Book of Questions &ndash; a collection of lyrical, unanswerable poems written as paradoxical and playful interrogations of nature, life and the cosmos &ndash; this experimental miniature by Heidi Piironen weaves poetic inquiry with visual abstraction, through the rarely used mordan&ccedil;age technique. The veil-like formations it creates evoke the fluid, fragile, ever-changing essence of rivers, suggesting they are living entities, much like us.</p>

<p>Grimy images of a dilapidated house. It&rsquo;s a dirty place. So dirty, you can almost smell the burnt coffee and the charred toast. Here lives a man in isolation who does not trust the sounds around him. Are they ghosts? He is obsessed with Tommy Cooper, the comedian who died on the stage while the audience laughed &ndash; as they thought it was part of the show. Filmmaker Helen Anna Flanagan performs a magic trick that lets the man and his idol become one.</p>

<p>Pioneer animator Herm&iacute;na T&yacute;rlov&aacute; saw the beating heart of the material world and crafted dozens of films that animated characters from yarn, cloth and other humble matter, bringing them to life with great tenderness. She had a true affinity for seeing the sweetness inherent in simple objects and this film explores how cheerfulness is woven into the world around us.</p>

<p>Joanna Quinn&rsquo;s unique and lively animated lines are perhaps never more joyously displayed than in this short, intense celebration of female shenanigans. Based on the work of Toulouse Lautrec, Elles imagines two mischievous and boisterous models enjoying life on their own terms. A perfect fusion of form and content in which women revise their own image.</p>

<p>Testimonies from passionate proprietors reveal the diversity of Taiwan&rsquo;s independent bookshops, all with a distinct style and flair. Centring on the most human aspects of each, Hou Chi-jan&rsquo;s documentary reinvigorates a love for these charming establishments as a second home. At the intersection of intellectual spirit and a desire for genuine human connection lies Taiwan&rsquo;s welcoming bookstore culture. Shops are places to browse texts as well as havens for reflection, discovery and connection; here, interests are traded, tea is shared and furry friends cohabit. In the end, it doesn&rsquo;t matter whether the stores are neatly inventoried or a creative mishmash of items; the warmth and the familiar scent emanate from every hand-picked book placed gently on a shelf.</p>

<p>v</p>

<p>A post-colonial &quot;magic lantern&quot; live performance by artist Htoo Lwin Myo, Time Will Not Tell reimagines colonial-era lantern slides to interrogate the ways in which colonial and nationalist discourses shaped the historical narrative of Myanmar (formerly Burma). Through live voice performances, archival research, and media archaeology, the work reconfigures these century-old visual materials into a semi-fictional, polyphonic counter-narrative that critically examines knowledge production and subject formation. Juxtaposing British imperialist narratives with contemporary post-colonial critique, the work invites audiences to engage with the lasting legacy of colonial imagery and historiography in Southeast Asia.</p>

<p>Sugi and Anne, a father and daughter pair, shared a close life together. Sugi, once a sculptor, gradually lost his memories after being diagnosed with Alzheimer&#39;s. At his funeral, Anne imagines him crossing the mythical River Lethe, where souls forget their past lives. Through a symbolic journey via sculptures and fading memories, Lethe becomes a poetic visualization of remembrance, loss, and farewell&mdash;offering comfort to the filmmaker&rsquo;s own familial grief. Inspired by Rodin&#39;s Gate of Life and Memories and TJ Dema&rsquo;s poem Lethe, the film explores the emotional textures of memory and forgetting in a stylistically rich animated world.</p>

<p>A rap-fuelled, gritty and vibrant city symphony of Luanda, Angola, blending documentary and manifesto as it follows X and his siblings toward the dream of the big stage. Resilience, pride and collective voice. It&rsquo;s ironic. / They call us black market. / Us, 70% of the work force. / The enslaved maid who cleans their houses. / The present eloquent body that raises their children. / The gliding driver that drives their cars. / An animal&rsquo;s catharsis at each kuduro dance move, / and the pain lays forgotten, in the party&rsquo;s subwoofer.</p>

<p>A broken doll &ndash; both literally and figuratively &ndash; reflects on the formative moments of her life during a group therapy session. The carefully crafted stop-motion animation brims with detail, telling the story of a lonely figure who gains new insights through vulnerability. The tone of this delicate film mirrors the materials used by South Korean director Hyewon Jung: light as white feathers, fragile as small figurines, and soft as sand.</p>

<p>Benicio, a Brazilian man, records messages to his unborn self. His words delve into the phantasmagoric past inherited from ancestral grief. His thoughts are as direct as evanescent. Filmmakers Ibrahem Hasan and Leandro HBL compose an intense essay that moves towards personal and collective memory, for acceptance and liberation, a freeing cadence where each image hides a secret and each gene has its own soul.</p>

<p>All hell breaks loose when a mischief-happy teen enters an all-girls Catholic school &ndash; run by a group of nuns wise to the ways of the world. For all the silliness and laughs, a surprisingly serious film &ndash; a true masterpiece full of surprises!</p>

<p>A battle brews between middle-aged sisters over ownership of a holiday home on the Croatian island of Hvar. Igor Jelinović uses acerbic wit to show his mastery of scheming families and adult sibling dynamics in this debut feature.</p>

<p>&ldquo;Did you know that of all animals, people and birds are the most alike?&rdquo; a grandfather asks his grandson. Sitting inside a parked car, he regales him with tall stories of his time as a sailor, painting poetic pictures that revolve around the albatross. His grandson, in the meantime &ndash; portrayed by filmmaker Ilya Vierhout himself &ndash; broaches the subject of his inner world. A conversation built from two monologues, inspired by a book Vierhout found among his deceased grandfather&rsquo;s belongings.</p>

<p>When Pastor H&eacute;lder&rsquo;s faith begins to wane, he turns to witchcraft to reclaim it &ndash; gaining miraculous powers in return for sacrifice. Shot luminously in black and white, this austere debut unfolds with quiet intensity, revealing how doubt and darkness seeps into everyday life.</p>

<p>A little Ludwig Wittgenstein goes a long way. The philosopher mused on the relation between words and things and developed a &lsquo;picture theory of language&rsquo;. Ira Schneider (1943&ndash;2022) here playfully illustrates the theory with the help of psychedelic imagery, jazz tracks, and a circular voice-over conversation by two hipsters referring to a guy we often see&hellip; or do we? A conceptual film about transformation that ends with: &ldquo;You think it&rsquo;s jive, man?&rdquo;</p>

<p>Multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker Isabel Legate (Caltha, IFFR 2025) returns with The Garden, a surrealist reinterpretation of Amor, a short story by Brazilian author Clarice Lispector. The film follows a young woman who, during a routine clothes-shopping trip, loses herself in a dark and mysterious dream world. Rhythmic editing, expressive dance, and a mechanical soundtrack immerse us in a fascinating spectacle that invites reflection on the influence of the capitalist fashion world on how we see ourselves and others.</p>

<p>Late 1970s Manila, under dictator Ferdinand Marcos. Aggrieved by the inescapable corruption around her, Dahlia secretly commits a heist. Isabel Sandoval builds a story with controlled tension and rich atmosphere, tracing how desire and wrongdoing fold into one another.</p>

<p>Ten years after losing his family in a gang conflict, former tax accountant Hashikawa struggles to make ends meet as a mahjong player. His life takes an unexpected turn when he encounters pop idol Ran, who seeks his assistance after stealing a precious golden egg-shaped object.</p>

<p>While 1991&rsquo;s Scary True Stories is customarily designated as the ground zero of J-horror, this found-footage-style investigation into the case of a haunted pop song already experimented with subtle ghostly appearances and atmospheric tension three years earlier. It also hints at Lovecraftian elder gods and culminates in a climactic orgy of primordial chaos that puts the film&rsquo;s budgetary restraints to creative and effective use.</p>

<p>In a strange, dark place, a colourful group of young people project their future. With a captivating blurred black and white, Colombian filmmaker Ismael Garc&iacute;a Ram&iacute;rez explores their expectations, transforming cinematic language into a hybrid game between portraiture and imagination. In this eerie atmosphere, among mountains, caves and abandoned sites, this singular crew performs the life to come, as bright as imperfect.</p>

<p>The World Came Flooding In is an immersive VR documentary reconstructing memories of the eastern Australia floods in 2022, which is representative of similar events that happened recently in various parts of the world. Artists Isobel Knowles and Van Sowerwine recover the disappearance of spaces, objects and voices, allowing viewers to interact through stunning sets. They transform loss into reflections on community and overcoming, with a call for action on the climate emergency as its backdrop.</p>

<p>A promising job opportunity brings exciting changes to a young couple of creative freelancers living in Santo Domingo. But after they move, unexpected conflicts arise. Can their relationship survive work commitments, fresh interests, growing resentments and financial stress? Or will their paths diverge?</p>

<p>Two estranged sisters reunite in Gran Canaria after their parents&rsquo; deaths, only to inherit an unfinished resort and esoteric retreat. Through the strange and the sincere, Itonje S&oslash;imer Guttormsen explores the stories we construct about ourselves and the ones we avoid.</p>

<p>Set in the turbulent years after the Carnation Revolution, Ivo Ferreira shapes a political thriller driven by fractured ideals, personal entanglements and suspense. It is a sharp look at a revolutionary movement losing sight of its purpose and at the costs of holding on.</p>

<p>The filmmaker&rsquo;s father and grandfather were born in a place where gold once flowed from rivers and mountains. Now, in this abandoned mining village, haunted by the faded traces of gold rushes and buried money scandals, time has become fluid and an old tunnel serves as a portal across timelines. Three characters find themselves wandering around between past and present, waiting for something to set them free.</p>

<p>How did an event devoted to promoting car races end up becoming a Mexican Woodstock? Perhaps you ought to ask its organisers &ndash; two young entrepreneurs who, with more heart than head, and amongst psychoactive puffs of smoke, made accidental history.</p>

<p>Alterity is a synaesthetic cross-media installation and performance exploring our relationship with machine intelligence through forgotten intelligent instruments from the 1980s and new forms of interaction. The audiovisual performance transports visitors back to an era of creative techno-optimism while inviting reflection on our near future. The system serves as a creative modular audiovisual laboratory - a cabinet of curiosities consisting of unique historic innovations.</p>

<p>A dystopian future that&rsquo;s ever nearer, Acid City floats in toxic waters and is left to its own devices. But under the boiling sun, the city weaves together its own social fabric. With audio recordings taken off the streets of NYC, this animation offers us something rare in the face of climate catastrophe: hope.</p>

<p>Ten-year-old V&iacute;tek has a special talent: he can hear and feel things that others cannot. This animated documentary gives us a glimpse into his world. We learn that missing a sense can have benefits as well.</p>

<p>The debut feature from Filipino-Australian filmmaker James J. Robinson is an elegant and quietly devastating examination of belief, community and institutional corruption in a mountain community, centred around a rustic nuns&rsquo; convent and a conspicuously majestic church.</p>

<p>A failed filmmaker turned single dad tries to make a living while retaining his sense of self, in James N. Kienitz Wilkins&rsquo; experimental 3D-rendered home renovation comedy, which doubles as an acidic treatise on working conditions for the contemporary creative.</p>

<p>In After the Game, you are invited to visit and navigate several squat places, where traces of people on the move are left behind. As you explore a variety of items they have used during their stay, their stories reveal themselves, painting a picture of the often-hidden yet structural violence at Europe&rsquo;s external borders.</p>

<p>Ouma Hettie is an elderly goat herder in South Africa&rsquo;s Kamiesberge. Drawn into a scam offering overdue reparations for her father&rsquo;s unpaid wartime service, her rituals are unsettled and her independence imperilled in this lyrical portrait.</p>

<p>La Smorfia is a deeply-rooted tradition in Naples that consists of translating dreams into numbers to be played in the lottery. In this new look at Smorfia the surreal finds precise matter in a sequence of images playing with our ideas of perception and surprise. IFFR returner Jean-Claude Ruggirello masterfully combines this practice with filmic language in a carousel of accidents that offers a new set of tools for dream interpretation.</p>

<p>As the Philippines prepares for independence from American rule, suave, smooth-talking politician Manuel Quezon ascends to presidential office through persuasion and propaganda. With irreverence and biting wit, Quezon dissects a myth, revealing the timeless thirst for power animating a hallowed historical figure. Philippines, 1935. Manuel &ldquo;Casey&rdquo; Quezon has been elected president on the back of a shrewd campaign, a pliant press and a series of propaganda films. Disillusioned by this Machiavellian figure that he once supported, newspaperman Joven watches an alternate version of the propaganda movies that Nadia, his filmmaker daughter, has secretly assembled, offering a different image of the beloved president.</p>

<p>A true Gesamtkunstwerk for the screen, this opera loosely based on the landscape of Mount Sinai &ndash; where the body of St Catherine was mystically elevated after her martyrdom &ndash; is made in collaboration with score composer Irene Buckley and Colombian-American singer Stephanie Lamprea. The film is rapturous, beautiful and feminine.</p>

<p>Beautiful images of southeastern Alaska&rsquo;s majestic natural landscape drip, flow and take root in the accompaniment of the complex phonetic sounds of the indigenous Tlingit language and a lush sonic collage of local fauna. This landscape grows ever greener each year as the glaciers, like the language, begin to recede.</p>

<p>In this delirious Downton Abbey spoof, the aristocratic Davenports plan to marry off their reluctant daughter are complicated by the arrival of a charming new servant with a murky past. By turns whip-smart and daft as a brush, Fackham Hall is a gag-packed, tongue-in-cheek delight. It&rsquo;s 1931: England and the Empire are in depression, but the noble Davenports are keeping calm and carrying on, safely ensconced in the luxurious stately home their family has owned for centuries. All is not how it should be at Fackham Hall however. After the untimely deaths of all four male heirs (John, Paul, George and Ringo), Lord and Lady Davenport are hoping that the forthcoming marriage between daughter Poppy and boorish cousin Archibald, will keep the house in the family.</p>

<p>Based on a poem by Carolyn Myers about seeking the Goddess, She-Bop&rsquo;s intriguing style combines puppet and drawn animation in a film about fury, power and directing one&rsquo;s own destiny. A beautiful, wild ride with a jazzy soundtrack that explores the duality of creativity and destruction central to both mythology and life.</p>

<p>Joanna Priestley&rsquo;s dynamic film vividly depicts the relationship between animation and the ability to transform individual perception. Though one voice narrates the film, the visual metamorphosis of images, identities and perspectives creates many voices. While the voiceover struggles with fears and anxieties, the film ultimately chooses to embrace constructive change over chaos and distrust.</p>

<p>Life has never been easy for itinerant artists, and Leon and Elvira know it too well. Caught between moody police officers, rival performers, and small and cheeky demons, with a little help from new friends found on their way, Leon and Elvira must find the strength to keep believing in their art. Leon and Elvira Bertelhini are a 19th-century couple of performers, deeply in love and devoted to bringing their art to stages across Portugal. They travel from village to village, delighting peasants with their acting and singing. But life has never been easy for itinerant artists. Caught between moody police officers, rival performers, and small and cheeky demons, Leon and Elvira must find the strength to keep believing in their art. Set over the course of a single day, yet punctuated by unexpected and compelling leaps forward of a century and a half, Jo&atilde;o Nicolau&rsquo;s fourth feature film is freely inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson&rsquo;s Providence and the Guitar. The result is a tender fable about creativity and integrity, both romantic and witty.</p>

<p>WWII veteran, Ray, is a self-help guru in the afterlife, guiding us though breathing exercises and spiritual release. A former Nazi air force headquarters turned 90s daytime talk-show studio becomes the unlikely setting for collective healing of deep personal trauma. Complicated symbols and histories mix into a singular filmic experience.</p>

<p>Two middle-aged men, one of them Moroccan-Dutch, sit in a misty sauna and discuss the state of their lives. Their friendly banter begins in a typically defensive male style: racist, homophobic and sexist jokes, complaints about other people. Slowly, the Dutch man&rsquo;s defences crumble as we learn about the emotional ruin of his life. Can he reach out to his children, his ex-wife, even his soon-to-depart best friend?</p>

<p>In New York, a disco hostess is stalked by a sexual predator, and she requests help from a vice squad detective who takes a personal interest in the case.</p>

<p>A ceramist is in her humble atelier surrounded by her creations. Outside, a world in flames. Inside, dark inner worlds take shape. With masterful stop-motion technique, agile and vivid, Brazilian-Uruguayan filmmaker Joseph Specker Nys exposes the full potential of this language to immerse us in elegant, but sometimes sinister atmospheres. A metaphor about art as a space for memory, resistance and survival.</p>

<p>Women reflect on their first year of motherhood and the many joys and challenges it brings &ndash; for parent and baby. A gentle, curious and informative conversational documentary about postpartum life, of sublime analogue beauty. Five women, one life-changing experience: childbirth, followed by the postpartum period. With it come massive bodily changes, and maybe even bigger ones in daily life, ranging from painting or cooking with a baby in one&rsquo;s arm to new communities one becomes a part of. Individual experiences vary, of course, yet some situations and feelings seem unavoidable.</p>

<p>Stranded on a desert island, a solitary samurai&rsquo;s spirit crumbles &ndash; but defending himself against cannibals brings him back to life. Sword duels are placed in exciting and unexpected new contexts making beautiful use of spectacularly varied Indonesian scenery.</p>

<p>35mm of collaged film material reading like a diary without linear thought or narrative. A hodgepodge of photographic images spliced and taped with ecstatic handmade explosions of colour and texture. A fragmentary experience that revels in the material and provides an opaque and impenetrable portrait of the maker.</p>

<p>In a decadent Venetian hotel, general manager Eva is drawn to the mysterious Contessa. Once a sanctuary from the outside world, the hotel has become a haunting cage, and both women long to escape. A hypnotic gothic fantasy that seduces and unsettles. Enigmatic Eva is a manager &ndash; or rather, a universal fixer &ndash; at a hotel in Venice. For her, it&rsquo;s not just a job. The decadent Venetian palazzo, with its labyrinths and strangers, has become both a refuge from her demons and a haunting cage she longs to escape. When Eva meets the mysteriously unhinged Contessa, who also seems trapped within the hotel, she&rsquo;s seduced by the possibility of a radical change.</p>

<p>Bound by the rules of a patriarchal land, a fair maiden and her maid stir the embers of resistance through storytelling and caregiving. Queerness burns like a liberating wildfire in Julia Jackman&rsquo;s visually mesmerising take on the Scheherazade tale, starring Emma Corrin, Maika Monroe and Charli xcx. Ignored by a husband who refuses her and pursued by a man who objectifies her, young Cherry (Maika Monroe) asks Hero (Emma Corrin), her maid and best friend, to tell her stories over the course of 100 nights to escape their conniving grasp. This secret trove of tales becomes Cherry&rsquo;s only saving grace in a fantastical land with three moons ruled by Birdman (Richard E. Grant), whose ironclad grip repeatedly demands male heirs of the populace &ndash; or cruel consequences. Based on Isabel Greenberg&rsquo;s graphic novel of the same name, what unfolds is a majestic set of kaleidoscopic stories connecting the many women who seek freedom to do as they please in a world where they are forbidden to read or write.</p>

<p>T-Rex wants to play basketball, but his large body and short arms don&rsquo;t make it easy. At first, he&rsquo;s the laughing stock of the nimble monkeys, but when they accept T-rex for who he is, they discover his real talents.</p>

<p>Retracing the paths of popular faith, exploring its ancestors in the Antilles, Dominican filmmaker Juliano Kunert composes a work of ethnographic experimentation on a highly inspired promenade. Along the way, he sculpts images to represent the island&rsquo;s cloudy identity, passing through its contrasting religious heritage, cemeteries of distant heroes and historical crossroads hidden in the wind.</p>

<p>A Flock of Rotations hurls the senses into dizzying abstraction. Chromatic patterns flicker and multiply, shrinking until they paradoxically loom large again. The synaesthetic spirals first plummet and then soar ad infinitum, or so it seems. As orientation tilts from horizontal to vertical to diagonal, shifting speeds play tricks on perception. You&rsquo;ll never know if you&rsquo;ve seen the same film as the person next to you.</p>

<p>After an organ transplant, five ordinary people discover strange tattoos on their bodies and some newly acquired unique superpowers. Their lives might have been golden, but one more organ was donated and its recipient wants to rule them all. Hi-energy, hi-fun and hi-five. On that day, they didn&rsquo;t walk into a bar. Instead, a daughter of a taekwondo trainer, an aspiring writer, a yoghurt &lsquo;Fresh Manager,&rsquo; a construction foreman and an unemployed hipster received an organ transplant from a mysterious donor and along with the transplant, they gained a mysterious tattoo. And superpowers. Their lives might have been golden, if not for one more organ receiver &ndash; a rich cult leader with a casual god complex, who wants to harvest all the organs for himself and become immortal. Always a catch, right? Well, the game is on, and the five are not gonna give the world up.</p>

<p>A film about collective memory and metamorphosis, Nine Lives offers a series of vignettes centred on a tarot reading. The film journeys through images of women &ndash; as witches, goddesses, artists and more &ndash; always in relation to that mythical female familiar, the cat. Hand drawn in a variety of animated styles, Karen Aqua&rsquo;s work is a testimony to the short film form as empowering feminist art.</p>

<p>A collaborative effort between children, art teachers and animators, this film looks at life in a Roma settlement in Koml&oacute;, Hungary. The children narrate their stories about family fun and suffering, exploitative work, music and the beauty of spring with honesty and creativity. The bright colours and intricate, lively details of their drawings also demonstrate the power of art to help craft resiliency from life&rsquo;s hardships.</p>

<p>Adapting his hit play Marius for the screen two years after its stage premiere, Marcel Pagnol turned his inimitable creative energies to the new medium of sound cinema in a felicitous collaboration with the Hungarian-born director Alexander Korda, soon to leave his mark on British cinema. Young Marius and Fanny begin to recognize that their lifelong friendship has blossomed into romance, but their hopes of marriage are left unrealized when Marius cannot overcome his longing to go to sea, against the wishes of his adoring father, C&eacute;sar, but with Fanny&rsquo;s selfless encouragement. Pagnol and Korda bring a keening lyricism to this tale of lovers torn between devotion and the restless urge for adventure, a conflict that begins to shape their destinies in ways they could never have predicted.</p>

<p>This tiger lives in a ceramic dish, in which he is its decoration. And he loves living in the dish, because food is always close at hand. But when it&rsquo;s not, the adventure begins and the search for something to snack on is the master idea.</p>

<p>44 Houses is a film that reflects the process of revisiting the 44 homes I have lived in since birth, and examines the impact of constant uprooting as one nears 50 years old. This 16mm experimental short film explores generational memory and personal experiences. It features exterior shots of 44 houses, recorded over a 3-day road trip, with family audio snippets. Shot on Bolex and developed using local plant material, the film weaves a narrative shaped by place and collective family memory.</p>

<p>Three moody geraniums take control over their fate and plan their escape from the windowsill they spent their entire boring life on.</p>

<p>Opening this year&rsquo;s Discovery programme is Maddie&rsquo;s Secret, the unmissable directorial debut satirizing and skewering content culture from iconic alt-comedian John Early, who plays the titular role, alongside a troupe of comedians including Kate Berlant, Vanessa Bayer, and Conner O&rsquo;Malley.</p>

<p>If you&rsquo;re a bird, you can&rsquo;t miss the most important competition for flying beings there is. But the teams won&rsquo;t&nbsp;play fair and it will take a lot of care to figure out who the real winner is.</p>

<p>Estranged siblings reunite after years apart, forced to confront unresolved tensions and reevaluate their strained relationships with their emotionally distant parents</p>

<p>Tales told from the perspective of a lonely old tree standing in the middle of a botanical garden.</p>

<p>Follows the story of a brave princess who transcends time and space.</p>

<p>A directionless man is swept off his feet when an enigmatic, impossibly handsome biker takes him on as his submissive.</p>

<p>When Fatima leaves her close-knit suburban family to study philosophy in Paris, she finds herself caught between her religious upbringing and the freedom of student life in the city.</p>

<p>On February 8, 1977, Tony Kiritsis, entered the office of Richard Hall, president of the Meridian Mortgage Company, and took him hostage with a sawed-off shotgun wired with a &quot;dead man&#39;s wire&quot; from the trigger to Tony&#39;s own neck.</p>

<p>Body horror meets prairie gothic in Gavin Baird&rsquo;s mind-blowing period sci-fi that flips the script on colonization as an alien in the form of an Indigenous man infiltrates a remote Saskatchewan community and seduces its members one by one.</p>

<p><span style="color:#000000">A woman talks to us from inside a machine that records her brain activity. She describes a men- tal labyrinth combining an old amusement park called Dreamland, 19th-century dream photo- graphs, contemporary experiments in mental de- coding using AI, and Prophetic, a start-up whose goal is to control dreams. But what do our dreams see when they look back at us? like moths to light is a meditation on the future of our dream worlds&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size:small"><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif"><span style="background-color:#ffffff"><span style="color:#000000">in the age of neurocapitalism.</span></span></span></span></p> <p>Credits:</p> <div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width:0px; text-align:start; text-indent:0px">Cinematography: Artur Pol Camprubi</div> <div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width:0px; text-align:start; text-indent:0px">Edition : Dina Ekchajzer</div> <div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width:0px; text-align:start; text-indent:0px">Sound by : Laura Tomas</div> <div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width:0px; text-align:start; text-indent:0px">Music by : Hara Alonso</div> <div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width:0px; text-align:start; text-indent:0px">Image: Colour, black and white - 1.85:1</div>

<p>In 1930s Algeria, apathetic Frenchman Meursault shows total indifference to life. His emotional detachment leads to a murder, followed by a trial that scrutinizes both the crime and his character.</p>

<p>Amrum Island, Spring 1945. In the final days of the war, 12-year-old Nanning braves the treacherous sea to hunt seals, goes fishing at night, and works the nearby farm to help his mother feed the family. Despite the hardship, life on the beautiful, windswept island almost feels like paradise. But when peace finally comes, it reveals a deeper threat: the enemy is far closer than he imagined.</p>

<p>Short animated film depicting the horrors of the Medieval and Renaissance-era European witch hunts.</p>

<p>It&#39;s Indy&#39;s birthday, but she doesn&rsquo;t have money to treat her friends. Still, she doesn&rsquo;t want to show up empty-handed. How will she solve this problem?</p>

<p>After seeing him mentioned on a Bishop&rsquo;s Transcript held in Gloucestershire Archives, Dan goes for a walk in the woods in search of Daniel, a man buried in Nympsfield on the 31st of December 1719 and described on the document as &lsquo;a black stranger&rsquo;. Whilst walking, Dan talks directly to Daniel, speculating about the parallels between him and his namesake and wrestling aloud with the problems that come with trying to read the archive at face value and fill in its gaps.</p>

<p>In June 2020, thousands of people took to the streets in Brussels to make a fist against police brutality and institutional racism in solidarity with Black Lives Matter. For a moment, it seemed that some demonstrators would take down the statue of colonial king Leopold II in a nearby square. For now the sculpture is still standing, but poet Marie Paule Mugeni already prepares her speech for the day it will be removed.</p>

<p>With her mother&#39;s diary in hand, Marina&#39;s search for official documents for university leads her to her biological family on the Atlantic coast. What starts as an administrative quest reveals long-buried family secrets.</p>

<p>Two estranged brothers with chequered childhoods in the care system suddenly find themselves living under the same roof. They must now reconcile with their pasts and make decisions about the future.</p>

<p>Blake Williams&rsquo;s (Something Horizontal, NYFF53) 3D travelogue of the American Southwest is a literal adventure in stereoscopy and retrospection, capturing the textured desert landscapes, snaking powerlines, streaming atmospheres, and hazy roadsides in fractured glimpses and headlong motion. Gesturing toward cinema&rsquo;s roots in 19th-century phantom rides and panoramas, FELT finds a dynamic new form for the sensory experience of space and movement.</p>

<p>It is said that one out of every 20 people in Japan is currently being treated for some form of mental illness. The field of psychiatry in Japan has various problems such as historical backgrounds, difficulties in psychiatry itself, and structural distortions of psychiatry, which may hinder the recovery of people suffering from mental illnesses. In this work, a boy who lost his beloved cat and began hallucinating about the cat is diagnosed with a mental illness simply because he can see the cat, and is forcibly admitted to a hospital for treatment. What will the boy experience in the hospital? This is a work that only VR can provide a realistic view of the problems of psychiatry, the relationship between mother and child, and what salvation means to the boy.</p>

<p>In a future society where humans and mermaids coexist, Stephan, a regular office worker at a shipbuilding company, is suddenly proposed to by Chao &ndash; a princess from the mermaid kingdom! With no time to make sense of what&#39;s happening, Stephan finds himself living together with Chao. As he is showered with Chao&#39;s pure and wholehearted love, Stephan gradually begins to fall for her. What will become of their unlikely romance?</p>

<p>1936. As villages across Mandatory Palestine rise against British colonial rule, Yusuf drifts between his rural home and the restless energy of Jerusalem, longing for a future beyond the growing unrest. But history is relentless. With rising numbers of Jewish immigrants escaping antisemitism in Europe, and the Palestinian population uniting in the largest and longest uprising against Britain&#39;s 30-year dominion, all sides spiral towards inevitable collision in a decisive moment for the British Empire and the future of the entire region.</p>

<p>Lean into loneliness &mdash; and know you&rsquo;re not alone in it. Filmmaker Andrea Dorfman reunites with poet Tanya Davis to craft tender and profound animation on the theme of isolation, providing a wise and soaringly lyrical sequel to their viral hit How to Be Alone.</p>

<p>A teen tennis prodigy struggles with his father&#39;s expectations while embarking on a transformative coastal Italian training tour with his coach, an ex-champion who lost his way.</p>

<p>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.</p>

<p>A woman struggles with yarn in a film so 1970s it will make you yearn for the good old days of macram&eacute; and fringe! Katarzyna Latałło&rsquo;s metaphorical take on the struggles of being a woman focuses on yarn as the material which entangles and knots us up in its fuzzy embrace while also providing a possible means of escape.</p>

<p>Departing from a parenthetical phrase in Christina Rossetti&rsquo;s 1904 poem &lsquo;On the Wing&rsquo;, Kate Solar conjures a dark, modern, highly material form of Romanticism. A human figure gradually merges into the darkness of the woods, with only the ghostly illumination of a truck headlight; meanwhile, the celluloid image strip is worked upon with scratches, dirt and reversals of brightness and darkness. Bursts of plaintive music and glimpses of a map add to the dreamlike reverie.</p>

<p>Women relate their experiences with marriage and motherhood, punctuated by commercials for weddings, among other things. A seminal work by Kathleen Shannon, who founded Studio D, a production entity dedicated to women making films at the National Film Board of Canada.</p>

<p>When ROV is sent on a toxic treasure hunt into the deep depths of our waters, it discovers how what was once an easy solution is now poisoning our seas and reverberating into the future.</p>

<p>A live-action adaptation of the video game.</p>

<p>During a mysterious event, an insect makes its way in the head of our protagonist. The vibrations caused by the critter make the man lose his grip on reality. Trying to escape his fears, the boundaries between time, space, reality and dream slowly erode. Beautifully shot on 16mm, this experimental horror film serves as an allegory for the fear and constant threat of war we currently experience.</p>

<p>Legendary New York poet Ed Saxberger&#39;s forgotten works captivate an eccentric group of young creatives, reigniting his artistic passion. Their intrigue intertwines with the bewitching presence of actress Gloria.</p>

<p>A French academic is seduced into a world of untold histories in her scholarly quest to uncover the mystery of a history-capturing camera-like machine created by clandestine Benedictine monks. An academic-noir, armchair mystery in the lineage of Jorge Luis Borges and Umberto Eco.</p>

<p>Two spirits encounter each other in a limbo - a place between the earthly and the beyond. They are trapped in their human shells, but have lost the ability to speak. After a few days in limbo a wandering light leads them to the next world.</p>

<p>On the night of 3 December 2024, people in Seoul hit the streets to protest the declaration of martial law. The Night in Seoul brings you into the crowd and inside the National Assembly, where South Korea once again fought for democracy and freedom.</p>

<p>Funny, honest, and deeply human, I Swear tells the inspirational true story of John Davidson, a trailblazer whose honesty and humour helped the world better understand what it means to live with Tourette Syndrome.</p>

<p>A suicide note alarms a prestigious school focused on nothing but excellence. Was it a bad joke, or is there a life in danger? As the mystery unravels, the cracks in the system presumed perfect start showing and priorities are reshuffled.</p>

<p>Brandon&rsquo;s gym is unique. He practices his sport at a very social place where athletes are all but family. After a lot of hard work, Brandon will receive the black belt &ndash; but not before this short documentary poses the question of what it means to be a good man. Is a &lsquo;good man&rsquo; the same as a &lsquo;real man&rsquo;? And how does faith fit into all of this?</p>

<p>Małgorzata wanders through a city without rivers, seeking currents that no longer flow. She moves as if her own vitality has run dry, mirroring the city&rsquo;s quiet exhaustion. A quirky tribute to a generation caught between youth and adulthood, haunted by the fear of missing the tide &ndash; and to the city of Ł&oacute;dź (Polish for &lsquo;boat&rsquo;), once abundant with water, now consumed by industry.</p>

<p>Against the threatening specter of 1977 Brazil, we meet Marcelo, a man in his 40s who has recently moved to Recife to escape a violent past, but finds himself becoming an agent of chaos.</p>

<p>In combining hard-boiled action with fetishistic sex, Toei set a new template for V-Cinema with this film, which led to a long-running series and countless imitators in the girls-with-guns genre. As a means to disarm her targets, a female assassin kills men right after intercourse.</p>

<p>As the country&rsquo;s military leader grows increasingly despotic, undercover actress Rosarin assembles a team of dashing, fearless bandits to assassinate him. One hiccup: the bandits can&rsquo;t stand each other. A stylish, shapeshifting spaghetti Western that blends fantasy, romance and eye-popping action.</p>

<p>Three intertwined stories &ndash; a young boy being prepped by his father, two soldiers longing for each other along the riverside, and interviews with the filmmaker&rsquo;s parents &ndash; reveal a sensitive portrait of growing up in a country where militarisation has become the norm and conscription is always looming. How do we find an identity of our own when we are bound by both our parents&rsquo; and our country&rsquo;s expectations?</p>

<p>On the Testv&eacute;ris&eacute;g (Hungarian for &lsquo;Brotherhood&rsquo;) football pitch somewhere in Budapest, three members of a writers&rsquo; collective meet to reflect on love, friendship, dreams and reality in the shadow of an impending war. In this enigmatic miniature by Krist&oacute;f S&oacute;lyom, the personal becomes political, while the battle between nations rewrites itself as a love affair.</p>

<p>The US army&rsquo;s 1944 offensive to capture the island of Peleliu from the Japanese resulted in thousands of casualties on both sides. Based on an extraordinary true story, Peleliu: Guernica of Paradise provides a harrowing, animated glimpse into the human cost of war.</p>

<p>Two layabout would-be gangsters become embroiled in a local politician&rsquo;s plan to drive out all unwanted elements from a rundown community. Initially supportive of his attempts to take on the yakuza, they soon find themselves targets of his push toward a totalitarian mini-state.</p>

<p>The presence of the German word Schatzi (&lsquo;darling&rsquo;) in the title, and the initial display of highly formalistic film techniques, are designed to deliberately mislead the innocent viewer. At first, this silent film by the structural master Kurt Kren seems devoted to showing the material deformations and distortions of a barely legible image: scratches, light flares, blur and black frames rule. Gradually, something more representational will become evident to your eye &ndash; something intended to shock.</p>

<p>A tableaux of juxtapositions on Vancouver Island: light and dark, natural and man-made, pristine and destroyed. Many of these collisions happen in the frame through the use of lovely matte work, and the film explores a natural landscape forever altered by its colonial past. Finished on 16mm.</p>

<p>Jackie Chan and Tony Leung Ka-Fai face off in a Macau-set thieves-and-cops battle of wits and agility. A retired surveillance expert is called back to service to train and lead the elite &ldquo;Adorable Unit&rdquo; with one mission: track down and arrest mysterious criminal mastermind The Shadow and his gang.</p>

<p>A playful, sometimes cheeky, always loving portrait of Sibylle Boden-Gerstner, a costume designer for screen and stage as well as the founder of the GDR&rsquo;s first women&rsquo;s magazine, sketched by her matrilineal granddaughter, writer-director Laura Laabs (Red Stars Upon the Field, IFFR 2025). An essay on style, fashion and beauty as forces of resistance.</p>

<p>A doctor secretly finds a way of reviving his dead wife by injecting her with large quantities of blood. However, the blood must be fresh and his wife requires frequent injections so when people start dying of mysterious blood losses, the doctor falls under suspicion.</p>

<p>What happens when film breaks out of its frame and unfolds as space around you? In Leopold Emmen&rsquo;s installations, the surroundings, the location and your own gaze shape the story.</p>

<p>Xeroxed images of hollowed-out public spaces become the canvas for Lilli Carr&eacute;&rsquo;s signature loose, figurative animation style to take hold. Frenetic movements and frantic gestures reveal a deeper feeling of alienation and evacuation in our era of social, political and ecological crises. They vanish as quickly as they appear, without a trace.</p>

<p>A recreation of a typical 1950s burlesque show, with lots of energetic stripping and formidably corny comedy skits &ndash; including one about Stalin. Choreographer-director Lillian Hunt had a particular interest in female viewers, whom she wanted to educate and empower with her work.</p>

<p>A jazzy experimental film that highlights how art is made with various animated methods and images by Chicago duo Lillian Somersaulter Moats and JP Somersaulter. By turns surreal, witty and contemplative, the film weaves together photographs, drawings, tapestry, stop-motion and more as a collaged exploration of how ideas come to life and meaning emerges from shapes.</p>

<p>In the ruins of a former military dormitory, a globe is diligently polished, and small Taiwanese and US flags are carefully perked up in vases. We meet Michael and Jim, two Afro-Taiwanese men of US military heritage. Speaking in Hakka and Taiwanese Hokkien, they open up with generosity and vulnerability, confronting the complexity of heritage, identity, belonging and language &ndash; and the impossibility of being contained by a single perspective.</p>

<p>For the freelance drivers who took the initial opportunity offered by the international company Uber, the prospects of self-management and grand earnings were irresistible. Changes in Uber procedures, however, left the drivers frustrated and struggling. This innovative documentary probes the case of drivers in the Netherlands.</p>

<p>The vampire represents death come to life. Such transformations form the central metaphor in this experimental short, which explores the tides of change within a landscape, a body and an identity. Channelling eco-horror and bloody exploitation cinema, filmmakers Lou Lou Sainsbury and Gabi Dao have created a haunting work set against the backdrop of a former limestone quarry and the sacred mountain grotto of Mary Magdalene. Employing expressive 16mm cinematography and a sensorial score, the duo trouble ideas about life and death, gender and parasitism.</p>

<p>Pablo wants to save his chicken Pascualina from the clutches of Don Chucho. This means he has to win a spinning top duel from the best player in the area. Supported by the other village kids, Pablo pulls off a great feat.</p>

<p>Sat in front of his tent, Philip watches new neighbours arrive at the campsite. He admires the enormous camper van that belongs to Nuri and her family. His tiny tent seems simple in comparison, but is that Nuri&rsquo;s impression as well?</p>

<p>Fragments of pottery. Gold, silver, jewellery. Contemporary art. Bolivian experimental filmmaker Luciana Decker Orozco (Puro Andar, 2025) visits various museums and collections in London, tracing a homegrown past present on another continent. Each piece are windows that open and close, briefly revealing what they hide, a mystery that she encapsulates in her celluloid and magical editing.</p>

<p>Armed men kill Indigenous leader Javier Chocobar during attempted eviction in Argentina, 2009. After years of protests, court case opens in 2018. community voices and trial footage amid colonial land struggles.</p>

<p>In the Vietnamese city of H&ocirc;i An, people invite spirits for the festival of the damned souls. Linh, a playful young girl, summons a very naughty spirit.</p>

<p>Łukasz Ronduda follows two young artists whose first serious relationship becomes a volatile space charged with emotion and fierce physicality. He captures the exhilaration and instability of two people trying, and often failing, to find a language for connection.</p>

<p>My Sweet Elora reveals the hidden stories that have lain dormant within a family for generations. Through film and photography, Luuk van Raamsdonk breaks open inherited patterns and makes visible what has long remained unspoken.</p>

<p>Aspiring hip-hop artist Mirah is an instant success at her first live performance. But her passion draws her away from her Deaf father, who needs her help to run their burger stall. Speech and sign language find their inner music in this feel-good family drama.</p>

<p>At a demonstration in Berlin against the genocide in Gaza and the German arms supplies contributing to it, protestors are violently arrested, wrestled to the ground, sprayed with pepper spray and captured on camera. This essay pauses those overwhelming moments and isolates what is happening in order to examine it. Drawing from Fanon and Butler, among others, it offers a pointed interrogation of double standards, the state&rsquo;s monopoly on violence and protesting under constant surveillance.</p>

<p>Malek Bensmail&rsquo;s fiction debut reframes the unnamed figure from Albert Camus&rsquo; L&rsquo;&eacute;tranger through the testimony of his ageing brother. Moving between memory, imagination and historical record, it offers a sharp reflection on identity, storytelling and the ways nations remember their past.</p>

<p>Three attempts at reconnecting with often traumatic pasts, all leading to flights from home and the need for personal reinvention. A documentary triptych of many layers and emotions, whose parts connect with each other in unexpected ways.</p>

<p>In the mid-1980s, during a summer day, Rui Carlos and his friends Maranau and Toman&eacute; enjoy their free time in the neighborhood, between football matches and playful games. Rui Carlos repairs his worn-out shoes and heads out to borrow a valuable football from their neighbor, Dona Olinda, who daily entrusts it to him. As the teams are chosen and the game begins, typical neighborhood interruptions ensue: a visit from Mascote the dog, a break for lunch, and spontaneous games. But when the ball gets punctured, Rui Carlos is left to face responsibility and the realities of growing up.</p>

<p>A collage of moments, some candid, others oozing the most disquieting of surreal energies. Melons are clobbered with beer bottles, kittens patted, vaginas caressed. Death drifts through the air, but companionship and pleasure just might be able to ward it off for a while. A classic of Australian avant-garde cinema.</p>

<p>A taxidermist finds a strange old photograph of her mother with a serpent that will alter her instincts and sensibilities in unpredictable ways. The Colombian visual artist duo Mar&iacute;a Ardila and Liliana Correa play with an astonishing story that mutates its skin, snaking between bodies and science, desires and mythology, shifting towards a suggestive retro aesthetic and delving into obsession, eroticism and irony.</p>

<p>Vilja (12) loves wrestling even though she is terrified of pain and loses every match. When her parents separate, Vilja&rsquo;s feelings freeze. Then mum&rsquo;s new boyfriend&rsquo;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?</p>

<p>A little sparrow is in awe of the ostriches with their long necks, dazzling eyes and muscular legs and wants to be just like them.</p>

<p>Once upon a time, in a rigidly ruled kingdom bordered with enchanted wilderness, a sharp-witted girl named Jasna battles the tyrant Volk, with some unexpected help from Eagle, the forest guardian. In this amusing eco-feminist rap fairytale, that combines live-action scenes shot on 16mm with 2D and 3D animation, Marie Luk&aacute;čov&aacute; draws on contemporary ecological and feminist perspectives, emphasising interpersonal acceptance and understanding. Czech folk surrealism at its best!</p>

<p>In an empty studio space, three female filmmakers re-enact the testimonies of the survivors of sexual violence in Russia, using stop-motion, performance and pseudo-documentary rehearsals. As their fragile and sometimes ambiguous creative process unfolds, the filmmakers become both subjects and guides, inviting viewers into a shared gesture of remembrance, grief and empathy.</p>

<p>Through the eyes of a young girl uprooted from Yugoslavia to Denmark, we watch a family navigate a new world and rebuild their lives while holding on to what they left behind. Home speaks to belonging, sacrifice and the generations shaped by displacement. Maja is six years old when most of her family moves from the Yugoslav SFR to Denmark, leaving her two brothers behind for the time being, waiting to follow the rest to the promised land. Denmark proves to be far from the welcoming haven they imagined. There is a new language to learn, new customs to navigate, new skies to understand. Did they really want to stay? Maja grows up in Denmark, builds a life and a career there as an artist, yet she cannot forget all that her parents left behind.</p>

<p>It&rsquo;s not easy being a dragon in Dragonville, especially when that dragon is Samson, who is so bullied by his companions that he is forced to go to the land of humans. But it&rsquo;s there that he meets Simon, whose friendship will give him the strength to change his life.</p>

<p>A writer ends up in prison for a crazy and unexpected act, where she meets with some young inmates. Once out the writer and the other women maintain their friendship, an authentic bond that no one else will be able to understand.</p>

<p>In Kampala&rsquo;s cinema halls, VJ Emmy is the main event. Marion Desmaret&rsquo;s Forget the Director, This Is Emmy&rsquo;s Cut! follows this boisterous interlocutor as he brings the art of dubbing to life. Emmy doesn&rsquo;t just translate; he performs, remixing blockbusters and cult classics with unfiltered commentary that renders them newly meaningful for local audiences. The documentary itself reflects his delivery, weaving together stylised fiction and layered narration.</p>

<p>The Road to Fenix documents the five‑year transformation of the historic Fenixloods warehouse in Rotterdam into the Fenix Museum, a space dedicated to commemorating and sharing global migration stories. Through personal histories and broader reflections on movement, departure, and new beginnings, the film explores how places and people are shaped by the universal experience of migration and the search for home.</p>

<p>Pupils of a school in Hamburg take part in a sex education workshop. A lively bush also plays part in the proceedings. As usual with Marlene Denningmann, reality is framed in a crisp, clear-cut, modernist fashion that opens up discussions about society and performance.</p>

<p>A special effects-packed sequel to the 2014 smash hit, The Blue Elephant 2 raises the stakes and tempo of its predecessor. Now leading a stable life, Dr Yehia&rsquo;s new-found familial bliss is threatened by an enigmatic patient who might be haunted by a demon. Marwan Hamed joined forces with novelist Ahmed Mourad for the fourth time in this popular sequel to their 2014 supernatural thriller &ndash; the first Egyptian film to surpass the LE100 million mark. Hamed ups the ante in this special-effects-laden extravaganza, which follows a newly reformed psychotherapist, Dr Yehia (Karim Abdel-Aziz), now leading a seemingly tranquil family life. This stability is threatened when he is assigned to investigate the case of Farida (Tunisian star Hind Sabry, from The Yacoubian Building and Ibrahim Labyad), who is accused of ritualistic murder. Farida&rsquo;s unnerving knowledge of Yehia&rsquo;s personal life suggests that she may be possessed by a demon, prompting him to once again seek the aid of the eponymous hallucinogen to solve the case and restore his collapsing family life.</p>

<p>After a five-year hiatus, Marwan Hamed returned with a project that would usher in his next chapter. Adapted from the 2012 best-selling novel by Ahmed Mourad, The Blue Elephant marked Hamed&rsquo;s first collaboration with Egypt&rsquo;s popular writer &ndash; a partnership that would yield six highly successful features, including El Sett (2025). Karim Abdel Aziz &ndash; the current reigning king of the Arab box office &ndash; plays Dr Yehia, an alcoholic psychotherapist returning from a sabbatical as he attempts to rebuild his fractured life. He is assigned to draft a report on forensic patient and former colleague Dr Sherif (character actor Khaled El Sawy, in one of his most imposing performances), who is believed to have murdered his wife (Nelly Karim). Nightmares and hallucinations begin to torment Dr Yehia as he turns to the eponymous cryptic drug, which opens a portal into his altered states of consciousness.</p>

<p>Taha (Asser Yassin) is a middle-class pharmacist leading a solitary existence while caring for his disabled father, a former history teacher. His life is turned upside down when his father is suddenly and mysteriously murdered, prompting an obsessive quest to uncover his father&rsquo;s dark past &ndash; one linked to an underground organisation with a dubious mission.</p>

<p>El Sett chronicles the life of legendary Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum, a treasure of the Arab world. With a remarkable lead performance by Mona Zaki, filmmaker Marwan Hamed celebrates the beloved performer who best echoed the aspirations and struggles of her time.</p>

<p>Marwan Hamed&rsquo;s sophomore film was a radical departure for the director. An action melodrama starring Ahmed El Sakka &ndash; Egypt&rsquo;s biggest action star of the 2000s &ndash; the film traces the ascent of a young hoodlum through Cairo&rsquo;s criminal underworld. The hoodlum&rsquo;s ambitions are thwarted when he finds himself dragged into a love triangle involving a fearsome gang leader &ndash; played by the late veteran actor Mahmoud Abdel Aziz in one of his most brilliantly chilling performances &ndash; and his childhood sweetheart (Hind Sabry from The Yacoubian Building).</p>

<p>Cairo, 1919. The Great War has left Egyptian soldiers of the Empire traumatised, the Spanish Flu has ravaged the country and nationalist leaders are being deported amid fervent protests. Unfazed by the tumult, Abdel Qader, an apolitical drug peddler known as the Jinn, continues to do business with the colonisers. But when injustice comes knocking, he finds himself joining hands with an underground resistance unit led by Ahmed Kira, a physician in the good books of the British.</p>

<p>After the success of The Blue Elephant, Marwan Hamed returned with this quirky, offbeat satire &ndash; the most atypical entry in his oeuvre. Samir is a middle-class banker leading a mundane family life. After he&rsquo;s abruptly made redundant, he discovers he&rsquo;s being watched by a shady group who have been recording his deepest, most intimate secrets. The titular group is revealed to be a clandestine organisation whose members have appointed themselves as guardians of the nation &ndash; tireless eyes that ceaselessly surveil in the name of collective security. Once recruited, Samir (Maged El-Kidwani) gradually discerns that El-Asliyyin may not be what they purport to be. Paranoia, delusion and an existential confrontation with the futility of his own life destabilise his reality.</p>

<p>Marwan Hamed&rsquo;s debut feature was one of the most buzzed-about Egyptian films of the 2000s and was touted as the most expensive Egyptian production of its time. The film is based on Alaa Al Aswany&rsquo;s 2002 blockbuster novel of the same name, which reignited interest in Arabic literature. The Yacoubian Building was adapted for the screen by the director&rsquo;s father, Wahid Hamed, Egypt&rsquo;s most acclaimed and daring scriptwriter of the 1980s and 1990s. It boasts a star-studded cast &ndash; including Adel Emam, the Arab world&rsquo;s most prominent comedy star of the past half-century; the late Nour El-Sherif; and other celebrated performers such as Hind Sabri and Youssra.</p>

<p>Suffused with alluring atmospherics and a slight air of the oneiric, Hong Kong-born (and future &Eacute;ric Rohmer editor) Mary Stephen&rsquo;s debut feature evocatively traces the uncertain relationship between two Chinese women in Shanghai in 1935.</p>

<p>An aged Spanish woman in Tangier resists her daughter&#39;s decision to sell her home.</p>

<p>&ldquo;Rotation&rdquo; is a therapeutic hypnosis ritual experienced by a young Ukrainian woman who shifted from civilian life to military service. She needs support to adapt to the displaced reality she now lives in.</p>

<p>An aimless young man delivering pizza stumbles onto an underworld massacre carried out by a single hitman. Deeply impressed by the killer&rsquo;s skill, he volunteers to become his apprentice. He learns quickly but his new vocation leads him into worlds he never imagined. As ideal vehicles for stoic masculine heroes played by handsome male stars, the hitman movie was a common genre in the early years of V-Cinema. Tuff is no exception, with its lead role for pop singer Kimura Kazuya and future heartthrob Toyokawa Etsushi playing his equally young and handsome nemesis. But this is no cookie-cutter fare.</p>

<p>It is springtime and the little bird is nurturing the first leaves on the trees. One by one, the blossoms open, luring the zooming bees. The little bird sets off in playful pursuit &ndash; but there&rsquo;s a fox in the forest as well&hellip;</p>

<p>A remote German farm harbors generations of secrets. Four women, separated by decades but united by trauma, uncover the truth behind its weathered walls.</p>

<p>In this quiet, enigmatic drama, Matsui Yoshihiko reflects on the toll of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear plant disaster in the lives of its townspeople. Time has passed since Akira lost his mother. Now, he sets off to find his father who works to decontaminate the region. Time stands still in the silent streets of Fukushima. Radioactive residues continue to taint the lives of the citizens with a slow, invisible anxiety, trapping them between past wounds and future uncertainties. As his old home was highly exposed to radiation, leading to his mother&rsquo;s death, young Akira grows up aimless and uprooted. In his search for his lost father, he is assisted by Yuji, the owner of a down-at-heels surfboard shop, as well as a concerned classmate, Shinichi, who becomes increasingly entangled in Akira&rsquo;s story.</p>

<p>The lens of the camera is a key to the senses and the sensual. The close-up renders tactility inviting touch, the obscured image tests the boundaries of the frame beckoning one to enter. But as all the senses are awakened, the lens of the projector relays a distance that cannot be collapsed.</p>

<p>From the wreckage of a buddy comedy rises something stranger: a story that fractures midway into an existential revenge thriller&mdash;burning forward with the inevitability of the sun&rsquo;s passage across the sky.</p>

<p>Drawing lessons give shape to lessons about living life from a different perspective for a woman who struggles with insomnia. After finding a tape cassette of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain at a yard sale (read by poet Mark Strand), the woman narrates a series of revelations inspired by the exercises. Selwood&rsquo;s simple lines are interspersed with drawings by her mother Eileen, creating a tender symmetry.</p>

<p>The power of literature, the value of archiving, and the beauty of our memories converge in this remarkable fictional documentary, Movement Song. The film centres on Noa, a researcher who, after a period of heartbreak, travels to St. Paul-de-Vence &ndash; a small village in the south of France that was home to James Baldwin in his final years. After a painful break-up, Amsterdam-based researcher Noa is in mourning. She keeps dreaming about meeting her ex-lover Anna in the dunes by the sea, and about a mysterious glass hammer. When Noa tries to uncover the meaning of this object, she meets Saffron, a fellow lover of literature, poetry and theoretical research.</p>

<p>Living in near isolation, a husband repeatedly attempts to break free from his volatile wife, to no avail. Mejbaur Rahman Sumon&rsquo;s Roid examines desire and attachment with haunting, elemental imagery and compelling performances. Far from the nearest village, a couple lives in near isolation: a shy man and the benighted woman he has married. At times, she cannot control her emotions, and her outbursts become a threat to her husband&rsquo;s life. Quietly, he begins plotting her removal, abandoning her in places she has never seen. Days after his first attempt, a fruit drops from the palmyra palm near their home, and his wife returns. Again and again, he tries to lose her, yet each time the fruit falls, and each time she comes back.</p>

<p>Distant reminiscences of a devastating hurricane float in a ghostly space. Indecipherable words, fragmented remembrances, foggy memories from a strange home. Filmmaker and director of photography Mel Nocetti explores the sensoriality of the intangible, the mysterious layers of reverie with wandering shots traversing the ethereal, floating through the dimensions of an unreachable time.</p>

<p>Since the Arab Revolution in Egypt in 2011, which deposed the long-standing regime of Hosni Mubarak, the country has experienced ongoing political unrest till the rise of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. In this hallucinatory journey that defies our idea of reality, MeowX2 takes us to the heart of a propaganda machine that shapes and propels an image of aggressive, conservative and ultimately toxic masculinity &ndash; one capable of permeating society down to its most personal spheres.</p>

<p>A history of modern Danish women&rsquo;s cinema made as a collage of excerpts from some 20 works, including activist documentaries and ironic bits of fiction alike. The essence of it all: A woman would sooner cross the desert stylishly clothed than fall in line with Peggy March&rsquo;s 1963 call to &ldquo;Follow Him&rdquo;!</p>

<p>If a woman can survive for two years on a rugged island while pregnant, in the company of only her maid and an aggressor, with no food, no shelter, and no resources, then, surely, she must be a witch. Otherwise, her survival is beyond comprehension. 1592: Marguerite de la Rocque, a French noblewoman travelling to the &lsquo;New World&rsquo;, is abandoned on a desolate island off the coast of Newfoundland when it&rsquo;s discovered that she&rsquo;s pregnant &ndash; the result of a sexual assault. As the convoy of ships continues its voyage, Marguerite, her maid and her rapist are left for dead on the harsh &lsquo;Island of Demons&rsquo;, where the wind and rain are unforgiving, and any chance of escape appears futile. With winter looming and her aggressor becoming unhinged, Marguerite must draw on remarkable wells of strength to keep herself and her unborn baby alive.</p>

<p>Drawing from an extensive archive of over 3,000 narrative works HOLOFICTION critically examines how Holocaust imagery has been codified and reproduced in cinema across decades. The film exposes recurring visual motifs and narrative patterns that have become iconic in the portrayal of the Holocaust. Inspired by Claude Lanzmann&rsquo;s skepticism toward visual representations of historical trauma, the film questions the possibility and implications of depicting such an atrocity in fictional cinema. Through its essayistic approach, HOLOFICTION invites audiences to reflect on the ethics and responsibility of cinematic storytelling, urging a deeper understanding of how these representations shape collective memory and historical perception.</p>

<p>Michiel van Bakel, whose shorts have regularly featured in IFFR, combines scientific techniques of observation and recording with poetic treatments of image and sound. Here, a slow pan shot shows us the Chemours industrial plant next to the contaminated Merwede river, while photographic and digital processes reveal a hidden world of agitated, spectral colours and noises. It offers a paradoxical spectacle, combining lyrical beauty with disquieting horror.</p>

<p>To avenge his older brother&rsquo;s murder at the hands of his yakuza boss father, a high school student sets up his own crime syndicate, composed entirely of children. Three years before Audition, this wildly inventive romp first put Miike Takashi&rsquo;s name on the map. High school student Riki Fudoh leads a double life in organised crime. With his gang of underage assassins (including five-year olds with handguns and a teenage stripper who shoots deadly darts from an unexpected orifice) he aspires to take over criminal affairs on Japan&rsquo;s southern island of Kyushu. But Fudoh&rsquo;s true motivations are not just a lust for power: as a child he witnessed the grisly murder of his older brother at the hands of his yakuza boss father and he swore revenge.</p>

<p>IFFR regular Mike Hoolboom offers a beguiling, humorous presentation of cinematic impermanence. A naked man (Hoolboom), tilted 90 degrees by the camera angle, paints a black shape on a white wall; meanwhile, in a second, superimposed image, he re-paints it in white. Our eye and mind struggle to figure out which act came first, for all positive and negative values in the frame are completely reversible.</p>

<p>After the accidental death of her children, painter Eleni is shunned by her fellow villagers for bringing a curse upon them. Inconsolable and isolated, Eleni tries to resurrect her children through an image-making ritual, only to unleash furious otherworldly forces. Cyprus, 1882. In a village under British occupation, immigrant painter Eleni suffers an unspeakable tragedy, losing all three of her children in a freak accident. Grieving in isolation, she meets Michalakis, an artistically gifted boy tyrannised by his abusive father. With his help, Eleni tries to resurrect her dead children, but her ritual ends up summoning malevolent creatures that threaten to take Michalakis away.</p>

<p>Rites and rituals of desire acted out by Mi&ntilde;uca Villaverde and her husband Fernando: loneliness, waiting, getting ready, horniness, the act itself, all delivered in the sparsest of decorations including (probably artificial) plants and fairy lights.</p>

<p>What does the world need now? That&rsquo;s right: a bespoke embroidered music video for They Might Be Giant&rsquo;s &lsquo;Lake Monsters&rsquo;. Using a traditional needlepoint method called Kogin, the video is every bit as delightful and eccentric as the music. Colourful, quirky, cute and cheeky, this meticulously crafted work is the very best in alt-rock folk art.</p>

<p>On the day of a decisive court hearing and an important wedding performance, a quiet wedding musician finds his private life exposed to public scrutiny. Accused of exploiting his marriage, he moves between courtroom, city streets and stage, carrying the weight of judgment, loyalty, and unspoken guilt. Forced to make a restrained but irreversible decision, the film observes a man whose inner truth remains elusive, caught between devotion, dignity and loss.</p>

<p>In the chill of exile, an Iranian writer confronts a foreign language &ndash; a language in which he must rediscover love, anger, joy and sorrow in order to write again. His quest to reclaim the power of writing becomes an inner journey between memory and forgetting, between a lost language and a new one, where human, emotion and meaning must be recreated anew.</p>

<p>The July Revolution ripples through river-veined Delupi, in southwestern Bangladesh, in this timely political drama. A power struggle between the village&rsquo;s elder leaders and young dissidents breaks out as they attempt to navigate the aftermath of a disaster and the new state of their country.</p>

<p>Ann Lee, the founding leader of the Shaker Movement, proclaimed as the female Christ by her followers. Depicts her establishment of a utopian society and the Shakers&#39; worship through song and dance, based on real events.</p>

<p>In the new cryptic triptych by ever-mysterious Mox M&auml;kel&auml;, trains travel across the borders of time, armies gather in a place where history repeats itself, while Karelian women sing about how humans will destroy the world. To quote the filmmaker: &ldquo;Time passes silently, the containers fill and empty. Your job is to ask a question about where all the words left off and see where the pictures lead.&rdquo;</p>

<p>Kin&rsquo;Gongolo Kiniata, a band of sonic eccentrics from Kinshasa, forges raw, electric music from scrap metal and sheer will. As they ready their defiant sound for the world stage, their dreams collide with the rigid reality of unjust immigration laws designed to deter young Congolese artists. Nizar Saleh&rsquo;s film is a potent tribute to creativity under pressure, and to sound as an act of resistance.</p>

<p>Judith Wynter is a writer of pulp romances whose characters and dilemmas she bases on her immediate surroundings. Does reality really always know best? Doesn&rsquo;t purple prose have a liberating wisdom all its own? A meditation on the different virtues found in fantasy and in real life, rendered in delirious colour and luscious black-and-white.</p>

<p>James, a disgraced preacher exiled after a city scandal, is assigned to build a new church in a distant rural community. However, the land bought by the church is occupied by Chirongoma, a revered traditional healer. As a fierce rivalry breaks out between James and Chirongoma over the land, God Sleeps on Sundays presents a timely critique on the imperialist nature of religion in displacing Indigenous communities and eroding ancestral traditions.</p>

<p>High school boy Hideki is killed in a traffic accident but sent back to Earth so that he can lose his virginity. To his dismay, he is reincarnated in the body of schoolgirl Mari. He soon realises that being a girl allows him to enter locker rooms and ogle Mari&rsquo;s older sister.</p>

<p>High school teacher Noriko receives regular messages on her answering machine that sound like declarations of love from a student. Meanwhile she is dating her colleague Morimoto. When their tryst is witnessed by their pupils Mitsuru and Yumi, rumours begin to echo through the school corridors.</p>

<p>Echoes Between Seeing is an ongoing audiovisual experiment which combines 16mm travel footage shot in Spain and China with AI image-to-image processes, creating landscapes where analogue film grain meets fluid, generated forms. The original footage is continuously reprocessed, generating imagery that exists between documentation and hallucination. Perception itself becomes unstable: what remains of a place once it has passed through both mechanical and algorithmic translation? The artist guides audiences through this shifting visual territory, exploring how perception constructs meaning while the image is constantly on the move.</p>

<p>As the ranger overseeing a thickly forested patch of southern Ireland, the woman at the heart of Nanouk Leopold&rsquo;s seventh feature is a formidable presence in her community. Played with all due tenacity and ferocity by Natasha O&rsquo;Keeffe, Jen is equally unlikely to suffer fools as tolerate the poachers who&rsquo;ve been encroaching on her territory under cover of night.</p>

<p>An orphaned bear cub finds a home with a fatherly evergreen tree, until his hunger for trash leads him to danger.</p>

<p>The heads of exquisite corpses assembled from YouTube videos enthusiastically share their so-called success stories. This polyphonic montage of self-obsession and relentless competitiveness is contextualised by fragments from 1950s documentaries, when the normalisation of productivity, progress and individualism was in full swing. Artist duo and found-footage virtuosos NEOZOON make the cringe bearable through a characteristically rhythmic edit in which liberal individualism&rsquo;s final bosses are propelling towards their own collapse.</p>

<p>A one‑minute cinematic piece exploring time travel through minimal storytelling, created by celebrated cartoonist Nicolas Mahler and filmmaker Stefan Holaus.</p>

<p>Part of the One Minute Movies series, this one‑minute short by Nicolas Mahler and Stefan Holaus compresses a reinterpretation of the Frankenstein myth into a rapid, humorous cinematic beat, showcasing how a classic theme can be reconceived in just 60 seconds.</p>

<p>A chilling, one‑minute animation that evokes eerie atmosphere without words, the film plays on elemental fears and folklore within its ultra‑short format, using visuals alone to craft a compact yet haunting cinematic experience.</p>

<p>In a series of animated art boards, the city of Venice comes alive, as it struggles, crumbles and slowly decays &ndash; a development that has silently progressed over time. With his singular, meticulous style, entirely drawn by hand and making full use of the materials he works with, Nicolas Piret manages to capture the process of erosion and the fragility of our cities.</p>

<p>The ability to fly like a bird is an ancient fantasy of the human soul. In This Is Your Captain Speaking, a group of neighbours living in the same building in Delfshaven explore the personal implications of this collective fantasy. Nienke Deutz and Digna Van Der Put build a dreamlike, sensorial animation that is as light as it is profound.</p>

<p>Who wouldn&rsquo;t want a tower of pancakes to devour? That&rsquo;s what this mischievous trio thinks when trying to steal this delicacy from their friends. But things don&rsquo;t work out the way they want!</p>

<p>Attempting a backflip is not exactly safe. You can break your neck, or land on your head, or land badly on your wrists. So, I let my avatar learn the trick. He practices on a 6-core processor with the help of Machine Learning.</p>

<p>An animated documentary that stitches together a tapestry of decorations and patterns moving with the rhythm of life. Several people speak about the formation of Kala Raksha, where hundreds of artists combine the traditional art of Suf embroidery with storytelling, giving voice to the traumas of war, earthquakes and migration, and the pleasures of thriving communities and art.</p>

<p>An affectionate portrait of the forgotten town of Tapoleng, where church once served as a sanctuary for its residents during the old apartheid order. Here, a new religion emerges &ndash; one tethered to a new spiritual practice, community and self-determination. Nolitha Refilwe Mkulisi&rsquo;s prismatic directorial feature debut unfolds in her hometown of Tapoleng, a small village in South Africa&rsquo;s Eastern Cape. Let Them Be Seen examines a region renowned for its dense concentration of churches &ndash; a legacy of long-standing missionary indoctrination. It&rsquo;s also an area forgotten by the new order in the post-apartheid era. Through an intriguing blend of documentary, absurdism and satire, the film follows the inhabitants of Tapoleng as they redefine their spiritual ties and forge new beliefs rooted in ancestral traditions. Mkulisi&rsquo;s gaze is at once sharp and affectionate, intimately exploring the residents&rsquo; daily lives within spaza shops, informal gatherings and their homes.</p>

<p>A re-edit of John Frankenheimer&rsquo;s 1966 car racing paragon Grand Prix that begins with the shortest scene of the film and ends with its longest. What sounds like a purely formalist exercise reveals itself as a fascinating essay on story-telling as well as a profound meditation on time. A rare cinematic experience!</p>

<p>The story of Navy man Mike Jones who goes through fantasies and memories before being caught but finding his ideal man.</p>

<p>In a world in which garbage is rebranded by criminal syndicates as &ldquo;raw material&rdquo; and sold to the highest bidder, mild-mannered Ismet enters a brutal gangland war. Intending to raise the cash to pay for his ailing mother&rsquo;s medication, he soon sinks into moral quicksand.</p>

<p>When Tsumire was young, she idolised her older brother, who was always surrounded by other girls, but her affection was met with disdain. As she grows up, the traces of his behaviour linger on. Told with understated, deadpan humour and creative animation, this slightly absurd coming-of-age tale broaches a variety of subjects &ndash; from cults and superstition to peer pressure and our self-image &ndash; with surprising sensitivity.</p>

<p>Supercop Joe and his bandana return for the first of two sequels, released only a few months after part 1. This time he takes up arms against rogue cop Cash, whose undercover mission has resulted in Stockholm syndrome and turned him into a dangerous criminal.</p>

<p>The third and final film in the series, released within a year of the original. All the expected ingredients are firmly in place and handled with increasing confidence, as Joe investigates another shady crime syndicate that threatens the life of his partner (a lady cop, this time).</p>

<p>The film that launched Toei&rsquo;s V-Cinema line and inspired an entire industry. This is action cinema at its purest: a procession of shoot-outs, car chases and explosions, set in harbour docks, night-time streets, nightclubs and warehouses. Never a dull moment!</p>

<p>Two young men during World War I set out to record the lives, voices and music of their American countrymen.</p>

<p>A father, accompanied by his son, goes looking for his missing daughter in North Africa.</p>

<p>A young Russian filmmaker becomes an unlikely advisor to Vladimir Putin as he rises to power in post-Soviet Russia, navigating the new era&#39;s complexities and chaos.</p>

<p>Against the background of our increasingly threatened environment, which is facing immense ecological challenges, journey to ecosystems hardly ever seen before. How can ecological interdependence, co-creation, resilience and collaboration in nature lead us away from dystopian visions of the future?</p>

<p>When their abusive father is murdered by a neighbour, two brothers must grapple with loss and liberty while navigating their friendship with the killer&rsquo;s son. A deeply felt debut about the complexities of crime and inherited guilt.</p>

<p>During an Amsterdam heatwave, Sandra discovers her partner&rsquo;s cheating and is dealt one financial blow after another. Spirited and hopeful, humorous and heart-wrenching, this insightful feature boasts a radiant performance from Nienke Plas as a mother refusing to be cowed by an apathetic social system.</p>

<p>Reluctant to get up from her bed in the Netherlands, a lonely artist daydreams about the sunny weekends she spent back home as a child in Thailand: the taste of sea water, the texture of sand between her toes, the story of a mermaid with a golden comb, the fisherman who pines for her. By turns literal and oblique, Panida Petchara&rsquo;s playful diaristic film is a lyrical reflection on the pangs of time and distance.</p>

<p>Born in the former French colony of Pondicherry in India, Monsieur Mounissamy fights for the French citizenship that he believes to be his right. To Die a Frenchman offers a poignant, complex examination of the intersections of class, nationality and post-colonial identity.</p>

<p>Browsing through photos on the camera of his recently deceased brother&ndash; a photo journalist in Gaza &ndash; Musa makes a painful discovery. He fights for the inclusion of his brother&rsquo;s work in an upcoming exposition, but has his own feelings to cope with as well. Last Shot is a distressing, yet impressive film about grief and censorship that hits a nerve.</p>

<p>After being unemployed for several years, a man devises a unique plan to secure a new job: eliminate his competition.</p>

<p>Should Victor Hugo be regarded as a &lsquo;great genius&rsquo; or &lsquo;like everybody&rsquo;, a talented but flawed human being? This film is the comical yet sensitive dramatisation of an actor (superb Fabrice Luchini) facing the complexities of post-#MeToo culture both on stage and in life.</p>

<p>Paul de Nooijer is a Dutch artist celebrated for his exploration of &ldquo;staged photography&rdquo;. This film organises one of his familiar visual paradoxes: within a landscape, a Polaroid camera pointed toward reflective glass takes pictures of itself &ndash; images which are then assembled piece by piece on the glass surface by the filmmaker, all in a single take, until the entire scene is blotted out. What matters more: real space or the mosaic of reflexive photographs?</p>

<p>This dark Basque fairy tale is a witches&rsquo; brew of macabre fantasy, folk horror and sexual liberation. Kattalin is caught between duty and desire, people and parish &ndash; at the mercy of judgments both sacred and profane.</p>

<p>8.75mm is a gauge of celluloid filmstrip that circulated exclusively in China between the 1960s and 1980s. Designed primarily for itinerant screenings in villages and rural areas, the format never had its own dedicated camera. By blending 8.75mm film prints with contemporary Super 8 footage, Peng Zuqiang takes us on a sensorial journey into the past of a country defined by rapid transformation, preserving a fragment of memory endangered by oblivion.</p>

<p>Bram Stoker&rsquo;s Dracula as an appropriated-footage film that uses earlier cinema versions of the narrative together with other photoplays about bloodsucking revenants &ndash; to visually stunning and stirring effect. A Dracula unlike any other made so far.</p>

<p>Veteran experimental artist Peter Rose&rsquo;s Omen richly alternates highly treated images of the natural world and of the human, built environment &ndash; both streams shrouded in dread. Where nature often appears scarred by the passing shadows of civilisation, the built structures are dark, subterranean passages intermittently illuminated by a skittering torch. Giacinto Scelsi&rsquo;s ominous music provides the perfect accompaniment.</p>

<p>In the claustrophobic depths of the Mutoshi mine in Katanga (DRC), Ndjimu follows The Rememberers &ndash; a community labouring in unsafe and brutal conditions to extract coveted minerals from the ancestral soils to feed global tech empires, to their own detriment. Set to a soundtrack of metallic rock being crushed, Ndjimu is an invocation and a descent into the earth&rsquo;s memory, beneath the noise of extraction and the myth of progress.</p>

<p>Named after a figure from martial-arts literature, Cyclone follows a wanderer travelling from mainland China to Hong Kong in search of gender-affirming surgery. As the journey unfolds, desire and identity blur, echoing Philip Yung&rsquo;s portrait of a city continually redefining its sense of belonging.</p>