Playlist
<p>An intimate chronicle of the war that devastated South Lebanon, leaving behind scorched land and a wounded community struggling to rebuild and find a semblance of peace.</p>
<p>With boundless energy and optimism, the greatly beloved performer Alaa Meqdad brightens the lives of his family in a Gaza tent camp. As the clown Aloosh, he brings joy to children on the streets and in hospitals.</p>
<p>A devoted soldier of the Taliban’s ideology that has shaped his destiny since birth, Samim (23) struggles between the alluring promises of martyrdom and the mundanity of his daily existence as a husband and farmer. Samim’s younger brother, Rafi (14), idolizes his big brother as he navigates the confusion of adolescence, leaving behind playfulness to enter a world shaped by decades of military intervention and resulting radicalization.</p>
<p>An at times experimental film that initially appears to be about life aboard a fishing boat. Gradually it becomes clear that the filmmaker’s intention is to get to know his father better, a man who spent more time at sea than with his family.</p>
<p>While humans try to prevent matter from decaying, microfungi remind us that everything must perish in order to continue to exist. This conceptually designed film tells a story of transformation with religion as its backdrop and fungi as its metaphor.</p>
<p>A groundbreaking comedy troupe takes the stage in Palestine, where laughter embodies survival and defiance. Following six comedians from Jenin, Hebron, Ramallah, the Golan Heights, and beyond, the film captures intimate family moments, raw rehearsals, and daring performances amid the suffocating grip of occupation and escalating violence. Especially amid unprecedented attempts to erase Palestinian culture, comedy is not just art, but an act of political resistance and a way to insist on Palestinian humanity.</p>
<p>Discovering the National Library, a true vault and museum of words where readings, precious and rare works, knowledge, catalogs, and book collections form a "memory of the world."</p>
<p>An interactive music album set in a virtual re-creation of Chicago. Explore the hip-hop history of the city in 31 chapters, tracking the genre’s influence all the way to New York and Spoleto, Italy.</p>
<p>Albert Kuhn’s multi-stranded cinematic exploration of his family’s past interweaves a personal story with a more universal truth: what is left unsaid always finds a way to travel with us.</p>
<p>In the marshlands of southern Iraq, Ibrahim feels like a stranger in the world. His sole companion is his faithful buffalo. But a looming environmental catastrophe threatens the only life he knows and the one living being he truly understands.</p>
<p>Shot from a distance, patients sit in the bleak waiting room of a Russian clinic. In these oppressive scenes, Alina Rudnitskaya penetrates deeply into the minds of the inwardly focused young women.</p>
<p>"Agatha's Almanac" offers a sensuous and cinematic portrait of 90-year-old Agatha, who defies modernity and capitalism by leading a simple, self-sufficient life on her ancestral farm. There, she cultivates heirloom seeds passed down through generations, tending to a large garden that provides everything she needs. Crafted over six years on analog 16mm film with a small all-female crew, the documentary immerses viewers in Agatha's handmade universe, highlighting themes of sustainability, tradition, and resilience.</p>
<p>Comedian Noam Shuster Eliassi creates a personal and political one-woman show about the struggle for equality in Israel/Palestine. When the elusive coexistence she’s spent her life working toward starts sounding like a bad joke, she challenges her audiences with hard truths that are no laughing matter.</p>
<p>Rising musician Jeff Buckley had only released one album when he died suddenly in 1997. Now, never-before-seen footage, exclusive voice messages, and accounts from those closest to him offer a portrait of the captivating singer.</p>
<p>Poetic and delicately crafted portrayal of a ritual guiding a deceased child in Taiwan into the afterlife. The parents are absent, so the ceremony is performed by staff members at a funeral home.</p>
<p>Revealing portrait of the family formed by director Anaël Dang and his parents. Twenty-one years after a painful family secret came to light, they reflect on the past and their mutual bond.</p>
<p>Anan Fries (Posthuman Wombs) uses AI bots and 3D printers to explore the potentials of queerness and creativity within the digisexual revolution. A multimedia video essay that you may—no, must—physically touch.</p>
<p>Russians wanting to commemorate opposition leader Navalny are arrested and convicted. In scenes that rarely reach the public eye, we see how peaceful protests are continuing in Russia, despite Putin’s ruthless repression.</p>
<p>Katya, a fiercely independent young welder, embarks on a raw and emotional journey to reconnect with her estranged family. Haunted by a traumatic childhood, Katya unexpectedly finds herself caring for her little half-sister, determined to protect the child’s fragile world from a harsh reality. As their bond grows deeper, Katya is faced with a heart-wrenching dilemma that will not only determine her own future, but also give her sister a chance for a better life. With its arresting imagery and intimate access, this compelling coming-of-age portrait explores the weight of responsibility, the power of forgiveness and the cost of love in the face of impossible circumstances. It’s a quietly powerful story of survival, sacrifice and sisterhood.</p>
<p>American Sons is the story of a brotherhood of Marines who endured a life-changing period of growth and bonding while deployed to Helmand Province Afghanistan during Operation Enduring Freedom. A decade after their deployment, they struggle to overcome mental and emotional trauma caused by the loss of their close friend, Cpl. JV Villarreal. Leaving more than his memory behind, JV’s intimate video diary is an immersion in the harrowing Afghanistan experience and the catalyst that sets the Marines’ healing journey in motion.</p>
<p>Filmed over five years, The Alabama Solution is a gripping first-hand investigation into the horrors of Alabama’s prison system. With contraband phones as their only tools, incarcerated men risk everything to document rampant abuse, slave-like labour conditions and shocking cover-ups. Co-directed by Andrew Jarecki (Capturing the Friedmans, Catfish) and Charlotte Kaufman, the film follows this hidden resistance movement, from inside prison walls to the grieving families on the outside who seek justice against a broken system. The story begins with a chance encounter at a public BBQ and unravels into a powerful, real-time exposé of systemic malfeasance. The Alabama Solution is both a devastating indictment of mass incarceration, and a stirring call for accountability and</p>
<p>An exploration of the everyday mysteries of quantum mechanics, in which the state of particles is only certain when observed, and split déjà vus imply parallel realities.</p>
<p>A central Warsaw street becomes a kaleidoscope of Polish society. Behind the camera is an Indian migrant who is seeking to overcome the distance between himself and a country full of contradictions and anxieties.</p>
<p>Reverie and observation forge relations among a fire lookout in California and a landscape painter in London — with a concern for how media technology impacts representations of forest fires and the experience of witnessing with one’s own eyes.</p>
<p>A powerful video collage set to Kanye West’s “Ultralight Beam,” made from home videos, found footage, and archival material. Footage of African-American icons from sports, music, and politics intertwines with civil rights protests and police violence.</p>
<p>In the West Philippine Sea, Filipino fishermen and frontliners risk their lives to deliver food and hope, transforming a humble mission into a powerful story of courage and national resilience.</p>
<p>Abandoned houses, surviving objects that carry memory. Exiled from Iran after her film on the 2009 Green Movement was banned, a filmmaker breaks her family’s decades-long silence about a disappeared cousin, executed during the 1988 purges in Iran’s political prisons. Grappling with estrangement and loss, she uses fragments, archives, and the images made during her years of diaristic filming in Iran to reflect on the collective taboo, the fear that silenced the population for so many years, and the explosion of resistance that continues to grow within Iranian society today.</p>
<p>In this love letter to cinema, we witness Ghanaian cameraman Chris Hesse, now in his 90s, pass on his legacy to the younger filmmaker Anita Afonu, captured by two-time Oscar winner Ben Proudfoot.</p>
<p>Inside a groundbreaking new behavioral program, people who are at the end of their rope find hope that life is worth living again.</p>
<p>A film set in a fictional world where there are no longer adults. The kids live without governance and do what they please.</p>
<p>As millions die each year from superbug infections, a Chilean scientist makes it her mission to find new antibiotics in the salt lakes of the Atacama Desert. Through microscopic imagery and staggering vistas of the landscape, we take in the urgency of the scientist’s work and the scale of the battle as lithium mining poses a serious threat to the region’s delicate ecosystem.</p>
<p>Meet Meena, Afsara, Bilkis, Rabin and many other remarkable individuals from Kolkata’s impoverished Kalighat red-light district. They are part of CAM-ON, a creative community that learns filmmaking through online tutorials. Regularly uploading dynamic visual stories about their lives to YouTube, their work navigates their personal struggles and the challenges of their past. Despite the derision of a deeply conservative society, they remain determined to become filmmakers and actors, attempting to break the cycle of prostitution for the next generation, and survive through the art of cinema. Their ultimate dream is to transform the red-light district into a professional film hub in a post-pandemic world. Redlight to Limelight captures the remarkable power of this collective endeavour.</p>
<p>A girl predicts the end of the world. The deteriorating desert ecosystem directly affects this film: Blake Knecht treated the 16mm film with salt dried up from the Great Salt Lake and buried it in desert soil.</p>
<p>An exploration of Black generational farmers in the American South reveals the fragility of legacy and the significance of owning land.</p>
<p>A damaged film shot in 1982 in a Latin American country documents the violence that took place on 9 May that year. Beneath its apparent banality, the film raises suspicions of manipulation of the truth.</p>
<p>With shrinking newsrooms, media monopolization, weaponized social media, and a president deliberately eroding public trust in truth and reality, STEAL THIS STORY, PLEASE! offers an intimate counterpoint, showing how independent media is essential to a functioning democracy. Set against some of the most consequential stories of our time—from the war in Gaza to the global climate catastrophe—the film follows the intrepid independent journalist Amy Goodman over 30 years. As she becomes a leader in the movement for independent media that amplifies voices excluded from the mainstream, she faces off against forces trying to silence her.</p>
<p>A solitary road‑movie documentary in which Carla cycles through roads of Uruguay, confronting wind, time, migration and memory. The film interweaves objective camera observation with intimate images, voice‑over narration, diary recordings and sound design to explore identity, origin, loneliness, and how the timeless intersects with personal history.</p>
<p dir="ltr">In 1982, six rural communities across the United States were notified that all of the nation’s nuclear waste might be buried beneath them forever. Each candidate site was studied in detail by the Department of Energy’s scientists and bureaucrats, in a process met with distress and resistance. A compelling indictment that interweaves physics, geology and democracy.</p>
<p>Peer into this stereoscopic viewing box and experience an alternative reality in the middle of a busy public space. Is that man who’s behaving strangely real or fictional? And what’s happening behind your back? Is reality actually an objective truth?</p>
<p>Oscar winners Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin (Free Solo, TIFF ’18) turn the camera on Pulitzer Prize–winning photographer Lynsey Addario as she documents the war in Ukraine and looks back on her career.</p>
<p>In a Parisian hospital, Claire Simon films a ward where destinies intersect: abortion, endometriosis, assisted reproduction, maternity, gender transition, cancer... There, she collects the stories of these individuals, their hopes, their desires, but also their fears. This film follows doctors and patients at a gynecology ward in France. </p> <pre> </pre>
<p>In this spirited celebration of the power of literature, secondary school students across France share their experiences of reading the raw and compelling work of French author and Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux.</p>
<p>Amadou (13) relates the epic journey that saw him cross the desert, sea and mountains to reach France, three years after his departure from Guinea Conakry. A personal and artistic film about illegal immigration, observed through the eyes of a teenager. Current Future: Age suggestion 14+</p>
<p>On a bustling footbridge separating Argentina and Paraguay, where people traffic all kinds of things in a mix of Guarani and Spanish, the director meets nine-year-old Angel. Struck by his expressiveness and panache, she follows him home. Over the course of ten years, they create a film together, during which Angel will have to make decisive choices for his future.</p>
<p>The coup on 25 April 1974 brought Portugal’s fascist dictatorship to an end. On 1 May that year, throngs of people flooded the streets of Lisbon to celebrate their newfound freedom—the beginning of the Carnation Revolution, captured in real time.</p>
<p>A father and daughter fight to preserve their environment and the interests of their people, the Suruí tribe of the Amazon. Coletivo Lakapoy, Louise Botkay and João Moreira Salles follow them in the run-up to the Brazilian elections.</p>
<p>The tornado is both a destructive event and a uniquely American icon, one often fraught with collective tragedy. With wit and humour, this film unfolds like an episodic road movie, raising questions of memory, inequality, colonisation, climate change, and disaster capitalism as it examines legacies of weather within this area of the United States dubbed “tornado alley”.</p>
<p>Few things are more unwieldy and lacking in transparency than European politics. Who’s really running the show in Brussels? What’s the true role of the European Parliament or the Council of Ministers? And how do the new laws and regulations get made? For two years, Democracy followed several key figures behind the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation.<br /> <br /> The film starts in 2014 with the European Parliament approving the new regulation, and then leaps two years back to the start of the negotiations. Rapporteur Jan Philipp Albrecht is the German Green Party politician tasked with steering and overseeing the entire process.<br /> <br /> We see him talking with lobbyists and civil rights activists, joining fringe gatherings and debates, participating in think tanks, talking with colleagues in the corridors of power, and reporting to EU Commissioner Viviane Reding. Often patient but sometimes visibly frustrated, he counters opponents’ arguments about a new regulation that met particularly intense resistance from big businesses working with large amounts of personal data.</p>
<p>On the border between Morocco and Spain, a group of travelers is eagerly waiting to cross over to Europe. One failed attempt after another, they survive, while the “director” must keep the flame of hope alive for the whole group. Les Voyageurs, woven together with a camera and a couple of songs, echoes as a powerful gesture of resilience.</p>
<p>Leonard Peltier, one of the surviving leaders of the American Indian Movement, has been in prison for 50 years following a contentious conviction. A new generation of Native activists is committed to winning his freedom before he dies.</p>
<p>Years after leaving Iran, Afghan-Dutch artist and filmmaker Dawood Hilmandi returns to his childhood home. In Paikar, he portrays his relationship with his aging, authoritarian father.</p>
<p>Deming Chen’s Always follows eight-year-old poet Youbin Gong over five years in a mountainous Hunan province village. Living with his disabled father and grandparents while his mother is mysteriously absent, Gong represents China’s “left-behind children”—a reality Chen knows intimately, having been raised by grandparents himself. Rigorous, long takes and intimate black-and-white compositions are punctuated by poems of piercing beauty, observing the inner worlds of a childhood transitioning into adolescence.</p>
<p>I received a land in Pankissi, Georgia, a valley at the foot of the Caucasus, right by the Chechnyan border, where I was born. In exile, I am thinking of building a house in this remote place, inhabited by descendants of my Chechen clan. But how could I possibly live in such a place?</p>
<p>Olivia and a group of volunteers help homeless asylum seekers in Dublin, despite opposition from the government and far-right hatred on the streets. An urgent piece of documentary journalism on Ireland’s increasingly inhumane asylum policy.</p>
<p>A club of aging Congolese wrestlers are training for a special “catch wrestling” tournament—it's a final tribute to their beloved sports hero and former world wrestling champion, Pierre Kelekele Lituka.</p>
<p>Thirty years ago, Diego Gutiérrez moved to the Netherlands. For his latest film, he returned to Mexico, seeking answers to lingering questions. How do you cope with loneliness and grief? How do you connect with nature? Is an easier life in a less dangerous country also a better life?<br /> <br /> Breathtaking natural beauty is on full display through the widescreen format in which Gutiérrez, in close collaboration with editor Albert Markus, presents portraits of several Mexican people: a farmer who decided to return to his father’s farm, a couple of young nature conservationists, and an art restorer returning a statue of Jesus to its former glory. The violence pervading Mexican society and the pain of the past leave them struggling to find purpose and meaning.<br /> <br /> Though simple in form, this modest yet ambitious account conveys far-reaching meaning. In this thoughtful group portrait, Gutiérrez seems to be searching for some kind of analgesic. He finds solace in observing others.</p>
<p>For decades, members of a pacifist, traditional religious community have been living in isolation along the Dniester River in western Ukraine. Their peaceful existence has often been disrupted by the fluctuating levels of the river, but since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, their way of life has come under pressure from a far greater threat.<br /> <br /> The first part of Silent Flood shows beautiful, poetic images of their idyllic surroundings. The farmers, who split from the Amish in the distant past, work the land with horse and cart, their children play or do laundry in the river, and in the evening families dine by candlelight—there is no electricity. The film then leaves the village, following a special shipment to the front.<br /> <br /> When the lens shifts from the community to the Ukrainian soldiers longing for home, we see how, under the pressure of war, the two worlds converge. The peace-loving farmers find a way of their own to contribute. Without ever showing a soldier in combat, the film offers a unique perspective on a country and its people at war.</p>
<p>A ghost story told from the first-person perspective of a trans woman seeking asylum in Paris. A VR experience about alienation, missing home, and searching for connection in an unfathomable world.</p>
<p>Biting sarcasm in the form of a humorous nature documentary: a deadpan voice-over comments on the behavior, habitat, and fascinating survival mechanisms of the Homo bureaucratus.</p>
<p>A cheerful glimpse into the complicated life of Lydia, who was born in the Netherlands but is still waiting for a residence permit. So are her father, mother and little brother. Lydia tells her story, partly in songs she improvised herself. Dutch spoken screening. Screening in Dutch as part of IDFA Junior.</p>
<p>Reuniting Elisabeth Subrin with the Lebanese-French actress Manal Issa (a collaborator on Subrin’s award-winning short film Maria Schneider, 1983 and gallery installation The Listening Takes), this pendant work thrums with tension and political urgency as the artists react to the devastating crisis of the Middle East and to the experience of being silenced.</p>
<p>Julian Assange faced a possible 175 years in prison for exposing U.S. war crimes until events took a turn in this landmark case.</p>
<p>A layered, subtle and majestically filmed documentary diptych about how the traditional, centuries-old existence of shepherds in both Sardinia and Palestine is now being shaped by the indirect or direct threat of war.</p>
<p>Sleeping disorders are omnipresent in this day and age. In this desktop diary, a resident of Amsterdam cannot sleep, absorbed by the genocides and atrocities being broadcast in real time. They are looking for solutions to cut down their screen time. But then, a particular anxiety takes hold: What in the world will happen while they are offline?</p>
<p>The untold story of art collector, Ginny Williams (1927-2019), who championed women artists to record-breaking auction sales including Louise Bourgeois, Yayoi Kusama, Helen Frankenthaler and Joan Mitchell.</p>
<p>Palestinian historian Salman Abu Sitta worked with Forensic Architecture to create a reconstruction of his vanished birthplace, al-Ma’in. They discovered that the Israeli army has brought the old route from al-Ma’in back into use.</p>
<p>In a desolated surreal universe, a man leaves a voice message: “Where I am now, there is nothing.” Combining video game with film and reality with imagination, this is a dreamlike journey that makes you wonder about connection, regret and loneliness. Current Future: Age suggestion 14+</p>
<p>Frederick Wiseman an extensive portrait of the prestigious University of California, Berkeley as it strives to provide independent, high-quality public education in the face of financial deficits.</p>
<p>In the US state of Idaho, the legislature consists not of career politicians, but citizen legislators, who meet for only three months a year. The rest of the time, as the Speaker of the House of Representatives explains in the opening scene of this now-classic film, they are ordinary citizens like everyone else, and they have to live with the policies they themselves have created.<br /> <br /> Frederick Wiseman and his crew were present throughout the entire 2004 session. They recorded some 160 hours of material, which has been distilled into a patient documentary capturing committee discussions, senate votes, and conversations in the corridors.<br /> <br /> The political mood in 2004 feels far less intense than the hype-driven politics of today. From a contemporary perspective, the calmness of this democratic process feels like a breath of fresh air, even though there are still plenty of problems to deal with—lobbyists exert pressure, and prejudice and religious beliefs repeatedly stand in the way of balanced policymaking. Without judgment or commentary, State Legislature demonstrates the achievements, values, constraints and limitations of the democratic process.</p>
<p>In Cuba, the nights are very dark indeed when there’s yet another power outage—but as much as possible, life goes on. In dreamlike black-and-white images, the pitch-dark night becomes a mysterious play of shadows, silhouettes, and glimmers.</p>
<p>Pol, a 21-year-old living with his grandmother in a coastal town in Tarragona, dreams of relocating to Miami and earning over €10,000 per month. Immersed in the world of personal development, online coaching, and cryptocurrency investments, Pol's journey reflects the aspirations and challenges of a generation seeking success in the digital age. </p>
<p>Documentarian Gianfranco Rosi’s monumental latest details with pointillist precision and unnerving beauty a region in Naples living under the shadow of Mount Vesuvius and above the simmering Campi Flegrei volcanic caldera.</p>
<p>At Milan’s Niguarda public hospital, the unconventional Dr. Bini leads a bold mission overseeing aspiring parents undergoing in vitro fertilization and the journeys of individuals reconciling their bodies with their gender identities. He navigates the constraints set by a conservative government and an aggressive market eager to commodify bodies.</p>
<p>Two women stand facing each other amid the ruins of a Roman theater. Under the watchful eye of the local police and the family to which they both belong, Luisa and Imma air their mutual grievances. The heated argument that follows reveals just how deep the rift runs between the two sisters-in-law.<br /> <br /> Director Gianluca Matarrese used a decade-long conflict in his own family to explore the meaning of blood ties in a Calabrian village. Contrada Viscigliette has only seventy inhabitants, all of whom are related. Disputes like the one between Imma and Luisa therefore have a major impact on the community. Matarrese introduces a group of aunts who try to reconcile the two women.<br /> <br /> This allows the viewer to learn more about the background of the conflict. A mother who turned her back on her daughter. A difference in social status that bred contempt. Kevin Brunet’s camerawork captures the conversations, dinners and arguments so vividly that as a viewer you sometimes feel like you’re watching a tragicomedy by Ettore Scola. A folk song plays: “The real winner is the one who forgives.” Will either of them be able to do so?</p>
<p>Commuter workers scrub sterile flex office spaces, haul rolls of insulation material or cycle with your meal across the city. Enchantingly beautiful scenes honor the invisible people who keep our world turning.</p>
<p>In this essay film, artist Harun Farocki analyzes aerial photographs taken over Auschwitz alongside portraits of Algerian women, and takes a penetrating look at the complex relationship between image, perception, and history.</p>
<p>A violinist who deserted the army—once a musician with the Bosnian National Opera—recounts how his new life literally began underground: as a musician in the Paris metro. He is one of many who fled their country and now get by in the French capital with their music, often playing at an accomplished level.<br /> <br /> The Underground Orchestra, now in a restored version, follows a number of these musicians in the metro, on stairways and in tunnels, and also to their often cramped lodgings. Among them are a philosophical Venezuelan harpist, a Zairian pop musician, a Romanian family and a charismatic trio that wins applause from the Parisian metro audience. Some of the musicians struggle with discrimination, disillusionment or memories of torture. All share the feeling of being uprooted.<br /> <br /> Heddy Honigmann (1951-2022), herself born in Peru as the child of Jewish refugees, shows the people behind migration and how they enrich the city. The result is a richly textured portrait of exile, resilience and the inestimable value of music.</p>
<p>Before Hollis Frampton became known as a filmmaker of the New American Cinema, he was mainly involved with photography. In (nostalgia), he presents 11 of his photos, taken between 1958 and 1966, plus one by an unknown photographer. The photos depict friends in the New York art world, moldy spaghetti, two toilets imitating a crucifixion. He reminisces about all 12 of them. After about a minute, when the narration stops, the photos catch fire one by one and burn to ashes. By filming the charred remains, Frampton in a sense recreates them.<br /> <br /> The voice-over and images are out of sync: each story belongs to the photo that follows, not to the one we are looking at. As a viewer, you navigate between the photo you expect to see and the story accompanying the previous one. Frampton’s black-and-white film, part of a larger work titled Hapax Legomena, is a dual experience of time in which memory and anticipation merge.</p>
<p>An immersive archival documentary that reanimates the clash between the then-emerging World Trade Organization (WTO) and the more than 40,000 people who took to the streets of Seattle to protest the WTO's impact on human rights, labor, and the environment.</p>
<p>What do you tell your dead parents? Combining family archives and glimpses of today, the filmmaker weaves together fifty years of his life and the socio-political history of Chile. The montage wanders through the ages, between light and shadow, without ever leaving the joy.</p>
<p>In the spring, the communal livestock of a Kyrgyz village is moved to the summer pastures in the mountains, a journey fraught with challenges. Occasionally, the camera lingers on a limping dog, a plaintively bleating, rain-soaked lamb, or a boy helping out by distributing raincoats to the more seasoned men. Some animals refuse to cross the swirling river, while others make it across with ease. Ultimately, it’s not about the individual but about the group.<br /> <br /> The herd and the herders endure the same hardships, seeming to be at one with the breathtakingly beautiful, inhospitable landscape. There is only the here and now, both for the protagonists (humans, animals, and nature) and for the viewer. At the same time, the film feels timeless: the journey has been made again and again, for centuries.<br /> <br /> This highly cinematic account of an annual episode in the semi-nomadic existence of a shepherd family won two awards at its world premiere at the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival.</p>
<p>In an Armenian retirement home, a theater director sets out to stage Shakespeare’s Sins with a cast of residents. In the play, Shakespeare’s characters call him to account for their tragic fates—it’s a story that in rehearsal sparks conversations about love, life, and loss.<br /> <br /> We follow the residents from casting to premiere. As the group grows closer, we see how the tragedies onstage are reflected in their own lives, which also feature love, betrayal, mourning, and exile. One resident finds and loses her Romeo, another is cast out by her own son, and yet another—who had briefly returned to her home in Artsakh (the Armenian name for Nagorno-Karabakh) after the ceasefire of a war still present in the region—must come back to the retirement home following the forced displacement of the entire Armenian population by Azerbaijan.<br /> <br /> What begins as a light-hearted look at aging becomes an exploration of the loneliness and loss that so often accompany it. The dilapidated Soviet-era retirement home itself plays a supporting role, with its peeling paint, prowling cats, and modern care robot all coexisting under the same roof.</p>
<p>Lesbian Simulator is shown as an installation in the DocLab Exhibition and is part of the VR Gallery.<br /> <br /> For lesbians looking for recognition, but more particularly for anyone who would like to get a sense of what their queer family, friends, colleagues and acquaintances experience, both negative and positive, here’s Lesbian Simulator.<br /> <br /> Mix your own lesbian avatar in the magic cauldron (with a few body parts, a dash of fashion sense, and a few more secret ingredients); choose the hairstyle and outfit that best suit your alter ego and set off in search of your first lesbian rave, date and partner, with a little help from the heavenly Lesbian Goddess (voiced by Hanna van Vliet). But along the way—because, sadly, that’s still the world we live in—you’ll have to come out more than once in different situations, fend off toxic male harassers and face public disapproval.<br /> <br /> In a cheerful, cartoonish form, with infectious danceable music and an ironic tone, this colorful VR game playfully navigates both serious and light-hearted topics. You flirt, fight and knock back another negroni sbagliato, while scoring as many carabiners as you can, on your way to a collective, loving Pride experience.</p>
<p>Over a period of 16 months, herders in the Georgian region of Tusheti guide vast flocks of sheep back and forth between the snow-covered Caucasus peaks and the remote Vashlovani steppes. The herders are transient figures in this dialogue-free film, leaving barely a trace in the landscape.<br /> <br /> There are no protagonists here; not even among the sheep and lambs that pass before the camera, though the film offers an affectionate tribute to the species as a whole, including moments of tenderness. Their fleeces take on the colors of the landscape and the weather, changing from near-white to rich shades of purple. The flock and the herders follow the rhythms of the sun, the moon, and the seasons. Like a river, they move in fluid harmony, finding their way.<br /> <br /> Everything changes as they approach the inhabited world, where different rules apply. Signs of human presence are everywhere: felled trees, oil derricks, and impatient, honking cars. This rapidly changing world stands in stark contrast to the repetitive patterns of traditional migration, which preserves knowledge that has accumulated over centuries.</p>
<p>The residents of a quiet Mediterranean town are thrown into speculation overdrive with the unusual appearance of a bear in the midst of asparagus season in Ivan Grgur’s delightfully whimsical documentary about the blurred lines between truth and personal agenda.</p>
<p>Tracing Colombia is shown in the DocLab Exhibition, with a one-time special live presentation during DocLab Playroom: Connected Offline.<br /> <br /> Visual artist Jan Rothuizen, author of The Soft Atlas, arrives in Colombia for an exhibition, shortly after the country has signed a historic peace accord. What begins as a professional trip evolves into a personal and emotional journey. Wandering through the capital, Bogotá with his camera and drawing tools in hand, he takes in the atmosphere, meets people, and delves into the country’s past, asking: How do Colombians experience their country, with its complex history of colonization and ongoing armed conflict?<br /> <br /> Tracing Colombia is an interactive film experience for laptop and smartphone, following the artist as he visits various cities, regions, and neighborhoods. Navigating a country in transformation, he also confronts his own position as an outsider. The chapter-based structure allows users of this web experience to set their own pace and explore Rothuizen’s sketches of various situations, which they can view in full detail by scrolling.</p>
<p>A new film by British artist–filmmakers Jane Pollard and Iain Forsyth, showcased Out of Competition at the 2025 Venice Film Festival. Running at 96 minutes, this narrative–documentary hybrid continues their lyrical exploration of music, memory, and experimentation in moving‑image form.</p>
<p>A pulsating combination of powerful contemporary dance and exhilarating music, with water as the unifying element. Multiple dancers perform a shared choreography—brought together through the editing—across various locations in Zimbabwe, from dense forests and open plains to urban settings and pristine natural landscapes.<br /> <br /> Some of the buildings look like abandoned ruins, about to be reclaimed by nature; others are brightly painted with motifs that are an echo of the prehistoric drawings previously visible on a rock face. Boundaries blur between built environments and natural structures, and the dancers bring all these places and times together into a single, cohesive whole.<br /> <br /> The 360 fulldome projection offers an all-encompassing view of the unity of people, culture, and nature, showing how—especially in these times of alarming climate change—water both connects all things and puts them to the test. A voice reminds us that, “There was water, even before there was light.” And without water, there is only darkness.</p>
<p>After surviving ISIS prisons as a child, Rashid has been reunited with his family in Sinjar, northwestern Iraq. Now a teenager, the young Yazidi dreams of a brighter future. But peace is fragile, and hatred against his community is resurfacing. On the threshold of adulthood, Rashid must reinvent himself amid daily disruptions, while wondering whether to leave or stay.</p>
<p>Shot 25 years ago, this intimate and raw documentary reveals a relationship in conflict as filmmakers Jay Rosenblatt and Stephanie Rapp capture emotionally charged moments. The couple grapples with the decision to have a child, confronting the profound implications of pregnancy, especially for a woman who feels ambivalent yet is faced with a ticking biological clock. HEARTBEAT explores situations that many couples experience but rarely share, sparking important conversations—particularly in a time when reproductive justice is under attack.</p>
<p>A woman's search for her missing son leads to the defeat of a dictatorship & inspires a new generation of women to fight for their freedoms.</p>
<p>Five top-ranked high school oratory students spend a year crafting spellbinding spoken word performances with the dream of winning one of the world’s largest and most intense public speaking competitions.</p>
<p>At the start of his documentary Love-22-Love, video artist Jeroen Kooijmans is lying in bed in the psychiatric ward of a New York hospital. It’s 2002 and he’s filming his own anxious face: he has just experienced a psychotic episode.<br /> <br /> The film then takes us ten years back in time. In numerous home videos, we see him and his partner Elspeth Diederix, a successful artist in her own right, at home, traveling and at work. But in Kooijmans’ voice-over, he regularly talks about his “demons”—and his reluctance to talk about them with others. He does discuss them “with himself”: in emails, he corresponds with a “Jeroen” who is free of depressive thoughts.<br /> <br /> As time slips by year by year, we pass through his stay in New York—where he and Diederix also experience 9/11—and the film moves towards the present. Giving up his artistic career, embracing fatherhood, and ultimately rediscovering his creative urge lead him to come to terms with his psychosis. We see this reflected in a number of striking video works and in this candid film debut itself, Kooijmans’ love letter to Diederix.</p>
<p>How do people around the globe interact with the internet on a daily basis? In what ways does it influence their lives—and how do they feel about that? For 15 years, Jeroen van Loon has been collecting handwritten letters on this subject. He now has over 1,400 letters from people of all ages, from many different cultures and from a wide range of occupations and backgrounds.<br /> <br /> This unique archive of stories and personal experiences in many languages is now the centerpiece of a spatial and physical installation—where the letters are accompanied by video portraits of the writers, and visitors can reflect on the internet’s role in their daily lives. Rather than chronologically, the hundreds of letters are presented in an associative way. The installation also incorporates a writing desk where visitors are invited to recount their own experiences.<br /> <br /> This is the first time this long-term project is being presented on such a large scale. It’s central question is this: Do we need the internet in our lives?</p>
<p>On a beach in southern Chile, a man lives in isolation, surrounded only by a pack of dogs as his companions. In half-spoken words, he tries to articulate an unspeakable secret.</p>
<p>For a long time, Vallbona was a forgotten corner in the outskirts of Barcelona, wedged between a river, a railway line, and a highway. Workers lived in illegally built houses and cultivated vegetable gardens and orchards.<br /> <br /> Now, the outside world has discovered Vallbona. Both European migrant workers and Barcelonians fleeing high rents have moved into the small community. This sometimes causes friction, but in general the atmosphere remains friendly. More troubling is the planned construction of a new railway line. Residents aren’t even being promised a station. Will their voices be heard?<br /> <br /> Good Valley Stories is the portrait of a neighborhood in constant flux. With care and empathy, director José Luis Guerin captures the stories of different generations of Vallbona residents. His camera quietly observes older inhabitants passing on their knowledge to the young, and at times glimpses the legendary Valbona as it once must have been. A new generation is growing up in this little paradise, but how long will it hold on to its magic?</p>
<p>This fully archival journey through the 35 years of Alfredo Stroessner’s regime in Paraguay reveals unseen footage and explores one of the longest-running dictatorships in history, whose effects still resonate today.</p>
<p>American filmmaker Julia Loktev, born in the Soviet Union, returned to Moscow in 2021 to make a documentary on the persistence of independent media journalism in Putin’s Russia—just months, as it turned out, before the country’s invasion of Ukraine. Structured in five chapters, Loktev’s film is an extraordinary vérité document of a moment of immense change and anxiety.</p>
<p>Preeminent West African curator and scholar Funmilayo Akechukwu’s magnum opus, , leads her to the heart of the Atlantic Ocean, drawing a journalist into a journey that shatters her understanding of consciousness and time.</p>
<p>Rediscovered MiniDV footage from Gaza in 2001 frames the filmmaker’s search for a former prison‑mate, accompanied by Hasan, a local guide whose fate remains unknown. As they journey from north to south Gaza, the film evokes memory, loss, and the fleeting beauty of everyday life in a place forever changed</p>
<p>In 1945, the Okinawa caves offered the population shelter from the bombs and the US troops’ arrival. Kaori Oda’s film works in different visual layers, superimposing oral memory culture over historical wounds. The past casts shadows over the present.</p>
<p>In a small booth, the visitor is confronted with a piece of shrapnel, one of the many fragments of metal the maker of this installation collected on the frontlines in Ukraine. Removed from that context, the fragment could just as easily be some ancient artifact. Each visitor’s experience of the instrument of war is unique: their heartbeat and other physical signals are imperceptibly picked up in this small space, shaping the soundscape and juxtaposing life with this agent of death.<br /> <br /> This installation is the latest branch of a larger, ongoing project by Tunisian‑Belgian artist and former war correspondent Karim Ben Khelifa. He explores in a variety of ways how war is mediated, how it is remembered and how it takes root within us. The title In 36,000 Ways refers to the roughly 36,000 fragments a fragmentation weapon shatters into upon detonation—each one a deadly projectile in its own right. But in this installation, the object that was made to destroy becomes an invitation for reflection, empathy and resistance.</p>
<p>In Brussels, tucked away among tall row houses in the municipality of Evere, a multireligious cemetery is open to all. It is run by an intermunicipal association that recognizes and respects a wide range of funeral rites, and is the only cemetery in Belgium that accommodates all religions on equal terms.<br /> <br /> Filmmaker Karima Saïdi captures the people there as they come and go—relatives, friends, neighbors, and acquaintances of the deceased. They talk at length and with emotion sing to the gravestones, some of which are overgrown with wild plants, others polished and gleaming. Each grave is a memorial to the immigrants who are buried here in their adopted homeland.<br /> <br /> We hear from the visitors, each with their own reasons for coming. They share food, perform personal rituals, and read poems. The caretaker also talks about the history of the cemetery, while the gravediggers and gardeners express their love for their work. This small piece of land in Evere thus illustrates the rich and layered reality of a multicultural city.</p>
<p>Seventy-nine-year-old entomologist Art Shapiro has spent 53 years researching the biodiversity of Central California by recording butterfly populations. His method is also known as slow science: he has been repeating the same walks for decades. This has enabled him to record an alarming decline in butterfly numbers.<br /> <br /> In Weeping Rocks, directors Karlis Bergs and Andrew Siedenburg literally follow in Shapiro’s footsteps. They join him on his walks, observing him in the same way he studies changes in nature. His wife calls him “an exaggerated form of a human.” This seems to be confirmed when the camera captures his collection of butterflies, meticulously pinned and catalogued.<br /> <br /> Shapiro’s world revolves around fixed patterns, but even he can’t escape the transformations taking place—California’s increasingly severe wildfires, as well as his own deteriorating health. He remains admirably down to earth in his observations: “Fifty years isn’t enough for me to understand what the fuck is going on.” Weeping Rocks is thus a reflection on the passage of time and the acceptance of change.</p>
<p>More than six million Brazilians are domestic workers, almost all of them women, and mostly black. Every day, they scrub their employers’ often-palatial homes, take children to school and serve meals. They themselves may have to make do with leftovers. The maid’s quarters—still common in Brazilian residential buildings—are no larger than six square meters. They are paid very little, and make long working hours. In spite of all this, they manage to build a life for themselves and their children.<br /> <br /> One of them is the mother of filmmaker Karol Maia. Initially, she doesn’t want to talk about her life, so Maia interviews others in the same situation in various cities. Through a combination of historical research and personal memoirs, stories emerge about systematic marginalization, racism, exploitation, and loneliness. At the same time, the filmmaker herself is proof that it is possible to escape poverty—thanks in part to a group of women and the black movement, who fought for the Brazilian state to finally grant them labor rights in 2013.</p>
<p>A Long Goodbye tells the story of Ida, a 72-year-old pianist living with dementia. In this animated, interactive VR experience, we walk in Ida’s shoes. We experience a day in her life, as her reality is fading. The apartment, where she spent a lifetime with her beloved husband Daniel, first feels empty and undefined. When we interact with objects and play the tape recordings of her husband, her playful world gradually comes to life, as if drawn in paint before our eyes.</p>
<p>Despite the war, school life continues in Ukraine, with pupils and teachers striving to continue learning even under constant threat. The film is a mosaic of the everyday lives of teachers and students from different corners of Ukraine.</p>
<p>Miriam is an unemployed journalist who has a beat on a story that could turn her bad luck around. Her dad is an evangelical who believes the fossil record derived from Noah's Flood. For ten years, he has lived in the Mojave Desert running a paleontology museum. Miriam ventures west to interview him about what made him a creationist.</p>
<p>Kethiwe is piecing together the extraordinary life of her mother, Lauretta Ngcobo – a rural South African storyteller turned revolutionary, exile and celebrated feminist writer. Through a powerful blend of archival footage, dramatic reenactments and readings from Lauretta’s work, the film explores the personal cost of activism and the transformative power of storytelling. From her role as a PAC courier to raising children in exile, Lauretta’s life is shaped by South Africa’s liberation struggle and her feminist awakening in the UK. The words she wrote became a vessel for memory, defiance and identity. As mother and daughter’s narratives intertwine, the film reveals how stories passed down become acts of resistance, resilience and remembrance across generations.</p>
<p>Behind you lies the sea; before you stands the enemy. This is the reality for the people of Gaza—and for Palestinian journalist Sami, who records it all with his 360° camera in the VR documentary Under the Same Sky. Driving along the Mediterranean coast in a press vehicle, he documents the war in the Gaza Strip. On one side are peaceful waters; on the other, heart-wrenching ruins.<br /> <br /> Mounted on a long pole held by Sami, the camera exposes the atrocities of Israeli occupation—wherever you look, a searing scene meets the eye. Sami speaks with people recovering their personal belongings among the rubble, visits fellow journalists committed to bringing this story to the world, and recounts his own experiences of the war.<br /> <br /> Tireless adrenaline-fueled journalists record the facts and report on events. This immersive experience of war in occupied territory leaves you with no choice: you cannot look away. The 360° camera makes you a witness to the Gaza war—right at its epicenter.</p>
<p>Kim Longinotto graduated from the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield, England, with this film, coming to terms with a painful episode from her past. Longinotto, who co-directed the film with Dorothea Gazidis, was sent to a girls’ boarding school by her parents when she was a teenager. The school, located in an old, isolated castle in Buckinghamshire, ran its own mini-government, with bizarre rules, inedible food, and punishments which were absurd and unfair.<br /> <br /> Longinotto wisely ran away at the age of 17, and years later got the unique opportunity for sweet revenge. In subtle but purposeful impressions from the perspectives of girls still living there, she exposes the educational system of this boarding school as a repressive world full of unacceptable regulations.<br /> <br /> All subsequent films by Longinotto deal with people who revolt against oppressive authorities and stifling traditions, whether they involve class, gender or sexual orientation. In terms of expressiveness, her debut certainly measures up to her later work. One year after the release of Pride of Place, the boarding school was closed down.</p>
<p>Multimedia artist Konstantin von Sichart challenges the viewer with an animation that pushes the limits of free association. A man climbs a tower via an endless spiral staircase. Where to? The voice-over carries a hint of panic and despair. He thinks of his grandfather. Is he going to make a film about him?<br /> <br /> Before this thought can take shape, he is distracted. And then the floodgates open. One idea tumbles over another. “Neuronal roundabouts, as they call them here in the facility.” There are monsters, teddy bears, a magical island. “My thoughts feel like bad AI animations.” Can this madcap ride lead to a conclusion?<br /> <br /> The protagonist sees his stream of ideas magnified in whimsical, hand-drawn and AI-generated animation, propelled by impulsive outpourings and accompanied by a tense soundtrack. This film is not only an immersion in a creative and neurodivergent mind, but also an exploration of the possibility of a new resonance between humans and machines—the machine as a mirror, an amplifier and perhaps a source of comfort.</p>
<p>It’s October 1988, and an elementary school class in the Japanese city of Ina is discussing the arrival of a calf. Caring for the animal is part of the school’s integrated learning approach: instead of memorizing dry subject matter from books, the children learn through practical experience. They calculate how much it will cost to feed Laura the calf for a year. They build a stall, head outdoors to find the right leaves for the floor (oak and zelkova, not ginkgo), and take responsibility for Laura’s care.<br /> <br /> With this documentary, Hirokazu Kore-eda, now one of Japan’s leading contemporary filmmakers, took his first steps into the world of cinema. Playfully and curiously, he follows the children while also portraying an educational system in which learning is rooted in the world around them. At the end of the film, the children have to decide whether Laura should return to the ranch. With tearful eyes and trembling voices, they weigh the arguments for and against in a moving reflection on the lessons Laura has taught them.</p>
<p>Three years after the eruption of the Cumbre Vieja volcano, filmmaker Werner Herzog visited the Canary Islands for the Film Accelerator workshop. In his wake came fifty young directors and cinematographers, tasked with gathering stories from the local people of La Palma. They had witnessed the devastating power of the volcano for almost a hundred days. What effect did that have on them?<br /> <br /> Director Kornelijus Stučkus and cameraman Jacinto Velasco chose the story of Pedro Tomás Remedios Rodriguez. This gentle man describes the world around him only in nouns: flower, duck, motorbike. He sees things differently from most people. He calls a tree “my wife.” And he has a name for the island itself: “home.” But is that really what he means?<br /> <br /> “If you want to access a deeper layer of reality, be a poet,” Herzog tells his students. This is precisely where Stučkus and Velasco have succeeded. Their modest portrait shows that beauty and pain can be found close together.</p>
<p>Top-level show jumping horses are treated like pop stars, zigzagging all over the world from one show jumping competition to the next, awaited by hordes of enthusiastic fans. They travel aboard a specially equipped airplane. In this “flying stable,” every effort is made to ensure the prize horses arrive at their destination with as little stress as possible.<br /> <br /> In a short documentary Lasse Linder follows the travel schedule of Legacy, a fifteen-year-old mare ranked among the very best in the world. Linder shows the constant care and personal attention the horse receives, but also the problems that can arise from incorrect paperwork at customs.<br /> <br /> Much of the film is shot from the horse’s perspective, with the world constantly framed by the bars of stable doors or the forecful motion of a treadmill. When Legacy returns to her home base in Florida, her owner claims that her “girl” leads a privileged life.</p>
<p>An investigative documentary that follows journalist Seymour Hersh as he uncovers and exposes significant politically sensitive stories—continuing Poitras’s acclaimed engagement with high‑stakes investigative journalism and governmental power.</p>
<p>A poetic allegory of the filmmaker Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese’s childhood, an ode to cinema and an inner nod to his mother. Through fragmented narratives and mythic imagery, Mosese crafts a haunting reflection on dislocation and belonging.</p>
<p>From a montage of visual archives gathered from YouTube emerges the social and cultural landscape of an American high school, along with a story centered on Eva, a typical cheerleader at the heart of a strange collective episode.</p>
<p>An economic crisis that had been simmering for years erupted in Argentina in December 2001. In an attempt to preserve financial stability, the government decided that Argentinians could withdraw no more than 250 pesos per person per week from the bank. In some cases, salaries, as well as pensions and benefits, had not been paid for months. This was the last straw for the general population. They took to the streets en masse under the rallying cry, ¡Que se vayan todos! (“They must all go!”), aimed at bankers and politicians alike.<br /> <br /> This brilliantly edited documentary is composed entirely of archival footage shot between December 1, 2001 and January 3, 2002—five weeks in which the country had five different presidents, and a growing crisis exploded. In the first week political reports were still interspersed with seemingly random news items—a film star photo-shoot, concert rehearsals, multiple car accidents—but soon the focus shifted entirely to the protests, riots and political twists and turns.<br /> <br /> December is a chronicle of spontaneous outbreaks of protest that shows what can happen when the despair and discontent of the people are ignored for too long.</p>
<p>Abstract images and written text are the two components of this testimony of domestic violence, physical and psychological, that shaped the narrator’s childhood. It is told by a woman who recalls diffuse memories of a decade of abuse endured by her and her sisters, and their escape from it. The text, which appears on screen sentence by sentence, does not tell the entire story. These are fragments, snippets, shards of a story.<br /> <br /> Sometimes the images become distinct for a moment—clouds, the moon, treetops at dusk, the sea—but more often they are abstractions. Filmed over six years and in several countries, the images become a refuge, a place where words and memory coexist—anonymous, yet inescapable.</p>
<p>Digital technology is increasingly steering us towards a world of the mind, a frictionless existence that has become detached from our physical experience. With this film, post-humanist artists Luna Maurer and Roel Wouters attempt to turn the tide. They seek a way to lead people back from their screens to a bodily and material experience.<br /> <br /> The duo invited people online to contribute their own videos on a variety of themes. Not of people, but only of matter and movement—breaking, rolling, sinking, floating, falling. All these clips go into the soup—a green physical intelligence that is trained on the collected images.<br /> <br /> In Deep Soup, we see this non-human intelligence in its weightless world, processing this slurry of information. The result is a challenge to view physical reality with fresh eyes. A celebration of the forces that belong to our material world, which digital AI models and algorithms try to smooth out.</p>
<p>Who am I? What is real? How to live in the madness of the world? These are questions posed by six people who have had psychosis and speak openly about their experience. They have in common that they think deeply, and that at particular moments in their lives, they were under intense personal and social pressure.<br /> <br /> The Desert of the Real draws the viewer into their lives before the pivotal events, the psychosis itself, the intensive treatment and the road to recovery, in full awareness that what has occurred cannot be undone. The unguarded and emotional interviews, conducted in their familiar surroundings, are interspersed with staged situations that evoke the interviewees’ experiences of being in a reality that is manipulated, as if in a movie.<br /> <br /> The film offers a clear perspective on what it’s like to have psychosis, while also raising questions about how we, as a society, treat one another. One the six offers their view on psychosis as “A normal response to a completely crazy and disturbed society.”</p>
<p>One in ten people hear voices. In this film, we meet five people living with this phenomenon. One person hears a single voice, another hears 19. One voice wants to protect, another wants to kill.<br /> <br /> The film takes place in a therapeutic setting, with a psychiatrist off-screen leading a conversation with patients about their voices—and with the voices, too. Who are they? Why are they here? And what do they actually want? We witness how this revolutionary approach allows the patients to gain a greater insight into their own minds, and acceptance of what goes on inside them.<br /> <br /> Which is not to say that the voices readily give themselves away—something is at stake here. Several sessions reveal a trauma that is directly linked to the emergence of these voices. Unraveling these histories, however, is not the focus of My Word Against Mine. Above all, the film draws a fascinating group portrait—of the protagonists as well as their voices—reflecting the wondrous world of the human mind.</p>
<p>Cinema Kawakeb follows a filmmaker’s struggle to document the fading existence of a crumbling cinema in Amman, Jordan. Through the stories of its last two employees and its only loyal patron, a homeless scrap collector who lives for classic Indian films, the film becomes a meditation on loss, memory and conflict. As the theatre nears demolition, the film delves into the roots of its demise, tracing tensions from a family feud to regional and global power struggles.</p>
<p>Two intrepid Nairobi women decide to transform what used to be a whites-only library until 1958 into a vibrant cultural hub. Along the way, they must navigate local politics, raise millions for the rebuild, and confront the lingering ghosts of Kenya’s colonial past.</p>
<p>One morning a young girl wakes up on the plantation where she's being kept as a slave and sees that her sister has disappeared. This marks the terrifying starting point of a dark, atmospheric desktop game about the history of anti-Black racism in the US and the UK.<br /> <br /> The girl takes you into her life on the plantation. Her story—based on historical facts and events, and on real lives—is enriched by fascinating archival materials and gripping eyewitness accounts. In the second part of the game, you explore a British city, sometime in the 20th century. Here, too, there are stories of injustice to be found on every street corner.<br /> <br /> Alongside its educational aspect, this intentionally uncomfortable game provides space for personal reflection. But there are triumphs, too, along with the horrors, and heroes and successes in both worlds. There’s the story of Nanny Griggs, for instance, who led a rebellion in Jamaica, and of Oscar Micheaux, the first major African-American filmmaker.</p>
<p>Lennart and Karin are dedicated observers at their manual weather station in Sweden. They reflect on their life’s work as the station faces automation.</p>
<p>It’s spring 2014. The Algerian presidential election is in full swing when documentary filmmaker Malek Bensmaïl gets permission to film the newsrooms of the independent French-language daily El Watan. He encounters a microcosm that, as the deadline approaches, increasingly resembles a pressure cooker. The editors feverishly seek content and meaning, and fiercely discuss hot political topics.<br /> <br /> El Watan is anything but an extension of the incumbent regime. One of the journalists openly protests against President Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s bid for a fourth term. Bouteflika isn’t only a symbol of the country’s political stagnation, but he’s also associated with the aftermath of the violent civil war of the 1990s that cost Algeria 200,000 lives.<br /> <br /> Below the surface of relative peace, the trauma of the war still rages. Hundreds of journalists were persecuted, murdered or banished at the time. Checks and Balances is a tribute to them and their contemporaries, who fight for freedom of speech and try to convey the reality of Algerian life with their talented, intellectual and humorous writing.</p>
<p>Guinaw Rail, a forgotten neighbourhood on the outskirts of Dakar, is emptying out. Bulldozers are demolishing houses along the route of the ‘Train Express Regional’, the symbol of President Macky Sall's “Emerging Senegal”. Before it disappears and is transformed entirely, the filmmaker captures his childhood kingdom and his mother, as she recalls a life lived behind the Rails.</p>
<p>In his entertaining film, Marc Isaacs (The Filmmaker's House) makes a deal with The Synthetic Sincerity Lab, an AI research project affiliated with the University of Southern England. There, researchers are investigating the possibility of teaching AI characters authenticity, using characters from Isaacs’ documentaries to do so. In return, they allow Isaacs to film the process.<br /> <br /> An AI character, created in collaboration with Romanian actress Illinca Manolache, guides him through this complex research world and sternly instructs him how to behave there. Isaacs films the work of the rebellious AI researcher Lynn, and follows an Uyghur chef who puts himself forward as a subject of study. Can this chef, in AI form, put into words what he is unable to express as a human being?<br /> <br /> Isaacs’ innovative narrative gradually blurs the line between fact and fiction.Synthetic Sincerity explores the relationship between humans and machines through a blend of documentary, fictional scenes, and gently absurd humor. How does the development of AI influence the way we look at human faces? And how might this technology affect cinema in the future?</p>
<p>Desert roses are a geological phenomenon formed by the interaction of water, sand, and wind. Neither mineral nor rock, their shape and texture embody a contradiction—a contradiction that also defines this documentary named after them, an indefinable and poetic collage of images, texts, and symbols.<br /> <br /> As in their two previous films, Trás-os-Montes and Ana, the mountainous region of Trás-os-Montes in northeastern Portugal serves as the setting for the work of filmmaking couple Margarida Cordeiro and António Reis. This time, however, their approach is more abstract and essayistic. Using texts from Kafka, Montaigne, Carl Sagan, and others, they create an intricate patchwork of scenes: children survey the landscape from the rocks and describe the wandering souls that inhabit it; a pig is condemned to death for murder and executed; a woman makes music from the wind.<br /> <br /> And always, there are the mountains, the valleys, the jagged rocks, the swaying grasslands—a landscape in which imagination and physical reality meet, where the traces of history are etched and transformed into myth.</p>
<p>When Joëlle and her retired friend walk up to a beach in Marseilles, they pass a graffiti saying that old bats should keep their bras on. Right there and then Joëlle strips off, goes topless and gives the graffiti the finger. And carries on with her day.<br /> <br /> This beach is theirs. Joëlle and her friends come here every day. To tan, drink, laugh and talk about sex—explicitly and unapologetically. If You Don’t Like It, Look Away is an entertaining, funny, disruptive film, and not for the faint-hearted. This is not how women are usually portrayed, not how retired women are usually portrayed and definitely not how retired women talking about sex are usually portrayed. Margaux Fournier decided to leave clichés and stereotypes behind, and introduce us to a more unpolished version of reality.<br /> <br /> It’s liberating to see women who couldn’t care less about how they are perceived. Even though in the end it turns out they have human insecurities too—they are confident enough to want to participate in this film.</p>
<p>Mailin tells her daughter a bedtime story. It’s a fairytale that soon turns dark, about a girl born from true love and a beast that devoured her childhood. To allow her daughter the childhood she never had, Mailin needs to confront her own pain and fear.<br /> <br /> Mailin collaborated with filmmaker María Silvia Esteve on this film for eight years, during which she seeks justice after being sexually abused as a child in Argentina. The perpetrator, a priest and family friend, was responsible for many more victims. A wealth of archival footage, home movies, and audio recordings from court hearings accompany Mailin’s story and the accounts of family members and friends. A picture emerges of the enduring impact of the abuse, which is powerfully evoked in ghostly visuals accompanying the fantasy story that runs throughout the film.<br /> <br /> Understanding—or even just remembering—what happened to her as a young child has been a long journey for Mailin. Her courageous efforts to overcome the past stand in sharp contrast with the church’s stifling attempts to hush up the scandal. Mailin’s strong, honest and fragile account conveys the vital importance of acknowledgement and retribution.</p>
<p>In Georgia, Ushguli mountain customs dictate that in the absence of a son, a family’s land must be handed down to the next male relative who will perpetuate the family name. The Men’s Land follows the journey of an aspiring singer as she fights for her property in the face of dated local rules and traditions, her song becoming a bulwark against humiliation.</p>
<p>Explores the life and legacy of Mariska Hargitay's mother, Hollywood icon Jayne Mansfield, who died tragically in a car accident at age 34 when Mariska was only three years old.</p>
<p>In al-Eizariya, a town in the occupied West Bank near Jerusalem, the Palestinian Manar and her husband Milad have founded a Waldorf school called House of Hope. An elementary school, based on the Waldorf educational philosophy, that embraces non-violent resistance, supporting children in healing from trauma. Manar tries to offer young Palestinian students a safe haven, but she’s finding it increasingly difficult.<br /> <br /> In collaboration with a Palestinian crew, director Marjolein Busstra followed Manar and Milad at work as well as at home with their two children. The film crew kept returning over a period of three years. After 7 October 2023, tensions rise steadily inside and outside the home of the idealistic couple. The director’s photos, as well as phone recordings by Manar supplement their story.<br /> <br /> Without security or dignity, life is suffocating, says Manar. She has spent her entire life under Israeli occupation, but the increasing violence and the accompanying stress are taking their toll. Yet the school remains open and the children sing about peace.</p>
<p>In a remote spot in the Eastern European countryside, far from the reach of the state, marshy earth is plowed, homemade wine tasted, and hunting rifles prepared—all meticulously observed by a slow-moving camera. From clearing construction waste to slaughtering a pig: the existential dimension of life here can be detected in almost every activity. This is a world that feels stable, yet always on edge, as if the structure could collapse at any moment.<br /> <br /> In six chapters, Martin Imrich’s striking feature debut summons an existential resonance. His expressive, carefully orchestrated style, firmly rooted in reality, is closely attuned to the surroundings. The dialogue-free, high-contrast black-and-white images capture silence, pain, and emptiness, deepened by music inspired by Bach’s St John Passion. The camera drifts along like a stray guest in the lives of the silent protagonists, wandering among them through dystopian settings, sometimes just as lost as they seem to be.</p>
<p>Veteran filmmaker Mary Stephen digs into her own family past to uncover the long-hidden origins of her Western surname, revealing a story of culture shock, colonialism, and contested remembrance.</p>
<p>From the constant work of research and restoration of ancient war films at the Istituto Luce in Rome; to the daily life of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Crisis Unit with its monitors permanently lit up on the world; from the training of young soldiers who learn how to produce war images at the Ecpad (Military Archive and Image Agency of the French Ministry of Defence); to the preservation of the precious archives of the International Red Cross kept at the Swiss Film Library in Lausanne, War and Peace tells us how the aesthetics of war, much more than the aesthetics of peace, has always accompanied us, reflecting and projecting itself into the ephemeral present that surrounds us.</p>
<p>In Tehran, sisters Mahya and Zahra grow up as carefree young girls: swinging on the playground bars, playing with Barbies, getting up to mischief. But the many restrictions imposed by society gradually creep into their lives via their traditional family. At the first signs of puberty, the headscarf is brought out of the closet, their grandmother tells them religious stories, and suddenly all kinds of fun things turn out to be sinful.<br /> <br /> At the same time, the sisters—now including a third sister, Maleka, who is born later in the film—develop into critical, socially engaged young women. Their uncle, filmmaker Massoud Bakhshi, follows them from their early childhood in 2007 to the present, 18 years later. In this frame story, he shows his footage to the now-adult women.<br /> <br /> Bakhshi uses optical tricks to circumvent restrictions regarding the visibility of women’s hair or body contours while he records how the sisters learn to stand up and fight for their rights and freedom.</p>
<p>Off the coast of Manquemapu, Chile, buried beneath the indifferent waves, lies the wreck of the Janequeo. The ship capsized in 1965, and 51 people lost their lives. While the sea has swallowed the wreck, on land the memory of this disaster lives on—in the people and in the landscape.<br /> <br /> In this remote corner of the Chilean lake district, which seems always to be shrouded in a mist of rain, hardly any recorded history exists. It survives in oral testimonies and songs.<br /> <br /> This film does not attempt to reconstruct that history. With eerie sound design and analog footage in which the colors have faded or become saturated, the film probes the memories of the local residents—memories weathered and eroded by time and the salty sea.</p>
<p>Aney, a New York–based healthcare worker, returns to rural India after her mother dies from lack of medical care. Driven by grief and resolve, she sets up a clinic for village outcasts, hoping to change the system. There she meets Farida, a wise and resilient teenager from a nomadic tribe. Aney's work with the village helps her heal from her mother's death, but Farida's life takes a tragic turn when her father dies because he can no longer afford his hospital stay. As Farida's life unravels, Aney discovers that her utopian dreams are no match for harsh reality. Filmed over seven years, this deeply personal East-meets-West story of mutual healing shows how the sufferings and joys of the human experience blurs borders and boundaries, countries and caste.</p>
<p>The player’s task in this computer game sounds simple enough: deliver milk to various locations in the village. But nothing is as it seems in MILKMAN ZERO, which is played using text prompts. Customers make suggestive proposals, mugs of milk mysteriously never run dry, and the payment system appears to have been hacked by extraterrestrial beings. The computer game spurs the player on, subtly coercing them into subversive actions—and then playing dumb when critical questions are asked.<br /> <br /> In a 30-minute stage performance in which he plays MILKMAN ZERO live on stage, Matt Romein shows how quickly and radically the interaction between human and computer can derail. Systemic violence gets normalized in the name of efficiency, and the player becomes a slave to their own tool. As he has shown in his past work, Romein nurtures a fascination with devices that enhance human potential—or dehumanize us as we increasingly bend to technology.</p>
<p>The film travels at the pace of the seasons through the real and fictional story of a region in Portugal, the Alentejo, and the peoples who have lived there. It begins at a present with no memory and travels back in time to the immemorial time, before the invention of writing. Along the way, it crosses more or less distant pasts: the work and life of German archaeologists detained far away from home during WWII, through their archives and letters; the occupation of the land by the rural workers after the revolution in April 1974; stories kept in the collective memory. During this journey we meet women and men, old people and children, shepherds, hunters, beekeepers, archaeologist, teachers and storytellers, and also ruins, dolmens and a thousand-year old olive tree. All contribute, with their memories, believes and knowledge, to compose a poetic, political, multi-layered and polyphonic portrait of the region</p>
<p>At just 16, Soraya is already creating stunning drawings and sculptures that are as beautiful as they are dark. This strong-willed Afghan sculptor and illustrator has been trying for five years to escape Iran and join her mother in Austria.<br /> <br /> This subtly textured self-portrait interweaves chilling scenes of her escape attempts with political news from Afghanistan and videos in which she sings and dances—or shows her bruises. Soraya is married to a violent man, and she is determined to shape her own future. Mehrdad Oskouei directed this film entirely remotely, with Soraya filming all the footage herself over five years using her phone.<br /> <br /> This material is interspersed with shots of her drawings and surreal animations. Making art is no idle pastime for Soraya: she puts all her worries, joys, and fears into her drawings and the sculptures she makes from soaked egg cartons or clay that she finds along her escape routes. Many of her drawings feature recurring figures: a loyal fox who is her traveling companion, a pink moon that always watches over her, and a clown who never laughs—a character Soraya identifies with.</p>
<p>For the past 50 years, a man has been planting baobab trees every year in his village located in western Burkina Faso. At the age of 80 today, he has planted over 3,000 baobab trees that stretch as far as the eye can see. El Hadj Salifou Ouédraogo has spent 2/3 of his life planting baobabs. It's been a struggle and, above all, a life dedicated to ensuring the existence of these trees despite prevailing prejudices. El Hadj Salifou Ouédraogo was misunderstood by the inhabitants of his village when he started planting these majestic and millennia-old trees, which are rare and endangered in the African savannah.</p>
<p>Michèle Stephenson’s moving documentary centres on the 1969 student protests against racism at Montreal’s Concordia University and their contribution to the story of Black liberation.</p>
<p>A filmmaker returns from Taiwan to his native Myanmar—a nation with a bloody history that is once again suffering under a repressive military regime. He attempts to capture the soul of the country in atmospheric, tranquil scenes. Long, dreamy shots of snack vendors at work on the ferry and conversations with their families at home portray the daily lives of the many Myanmar citizens struggling with an uncertain existence.<br /> <br /> In extended takes, his fly-on-the-wall camera records conversations among the women as they cook, care for babies, and manage the household budget. Is this the life he missed out on by leaving Myanmar? As he travels around the country, he follows news reports of the latest outbreaks of violence on his phone. The wandering filmmaker seems to epitomize a country adrift.<br /> <br /> When the film’s producer later returns to shoot additional footage, they discover that the young vendors from the ferry are now married and have become mothers. These are glimmers of hope in a stunningly photogenic country, one to which the filmmaker himself will probably never be able to return.</p>
<p>Poet, agricultural engineer and revolutionary Amílcar Cabral was born in Guinea-Bissau to Cape Verdean parents. After studying in Portugal, he emerged as the charismatic leader of the anti-colonial struggle against Portuguese rule. With his utopian ideas, he sparked a cultural and an armed uprising that went on to inspire other African liberation movements.<br /> <br /> His poetry, letters to his two successive wives, and political pamphlets form the basis of a journal-like film narrative. Associative atmospheric images with a charged soundtrack are interwoven with police reports and archival footage. A layered portrait gradually emerges of a visionary who could be both diplomatic and ruthless.<br /> <br /> As the dream of a free Guinea-Bissau and unity with Cape Verde draws ever closer, the threat also increases, not only from the Portuguese army and secret service, but also from undermining forces within Cabral’s own party. This culminates in the question: who was behind his assassination in 1973? A portrait encompassing interracial love, ambition, terror and betrayal.</p>
<p>“The summer I turned 13, I got a camera. I have only one video from that year. I don’t know if I erased everything or if I just wanted to forget.” Skin Despair shows a young girl lying in bed, casually recording herself. As we look at her while listening to these opening words, we know everything is about to change.<br /> <br /> Mireia Vilapuig’s film is a powerful memoir of the year she became an adolescent. Playful images of walking on the beach or singing in front of the bathroom mirror are intertwined with her calm yet shocking words. She recalls random moments, like when she was thirteen and a man asked if she had ever spent a night in a luxury hotel. Or when a boy online kept guilting her into meeting him in real life.<br /> <br /> All these memories are related in a composed manner. She has never told anyone before. Mireia’s silence and her restrained way of looking back at the past make these stories all the more distressing. They reveal how sexual violence is so casually intertwined in a girl’s life that it’s not even worth mentioning—it’s just another part of growing up. An engaging and urgent film about teenage girls growing up in a man’s world.</p>
<p>In their feature-length debut, Gossing/Sieckmann dive into the merfolk subculture with performance artist and siren Una. Genre elements, fiction and documentary, self-care, political activism and self-chosen identities blend into one another.</p>
<p>The uniqueness of filmmaker Miro Remo resides, among others, in the originality of the questions his films raise. His latest outing, a work which loosely develops the theme explored in the book of the same name by Aleš Palán and Jan Šibík, provocatively asks whether it’s possible to spend your whole life in a single place. As if harking back to a bygone era, twins František and Ondřej Klišík have made the stubborn decision to do just that. Crazy eccentrics or charismatic, possessed storytellers? It seems that they never grew up; viewed through the lens of so-called civilisation, their world shows signs of absurdity. Yet, in their genuine bucolic enchantment, they offer us all the chance to distil our source of inspiration, those of us who sometimes tire of conformist adherence to order.</p>
<p>After seven years of living and studying in Poland, Mo returns to her parents in China. She quickly finds herself back in the family’s perpetual patterns, but she feels out of place. Her parents’ usual care, though well-intentioned, often triggers conflicts with her, while relatives chime in with questions about when she’ll take the next step in life.<br /> <br /> Meanwhile, her relationship with her boyfriend is far from smooth, and then there’s the matter of the mole below her eye. According to traditional Chinese face reading, its tear-like appearance will bring misfortune. What will happen if she simply leaves it as it is?<br /> <br /> Traditional beliefs clash with modern values in this tragicomic melodrama, full of self-mockery and comic stop-motion animation. Mo pushes back in her search for the truth, unaware that her insistence might deepen the existing rifts within her family. Can the calamity that then befalls the family still bring them together, or has it already gone too far?</p>
<p>This photographic documentary uncovers the intimate experiences of four trans women from Lebanon, recounting tales spanning from pioneering Lebanese state-funded gender-affirming surgery in 1997 to vanished safe spaces today. Together, Em Abed, Jamal Abdo, Antonella, and Mama Jad present an untold history to the backdrop of what is arguably the first photographic archive of trans women in Lebanon.<br /> <br /> Treat Me Like Your Mother is a photographic scrapbook, with images from the women’s personal archives, as well as home video footage from photographer and director Mohamad Abdouni’s family vault. He weaves in his own experiences growing up and his exploration of gender as an adult, accompanied by the voices of the four women. They talk about the Raouche strip—a queer haven on the coast of Beirut—remember trans friends, and reflect on lives lived amid war, chaos, and uncertainty.<br /> <br /> Abdouni’s film explores the social integration of the trans community in Beirut over the past four decades. It stands as a heartfelt tribute to the power of community, friendship, and Motherhood in the face of adversity.</p>
<p>“There were so many of us, but when it all ended, each of us went our own way.” We see footage of the Green Movement, a wave of protests in Iran that began in the summer of 2009, in response to the presidential election fraud in favor of the incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. We see the chaos, the solidarity among the people, and the amazement too: that this is possible, that this is actually happening. Shaky handheld images capture both the energy of the crowd and the panic when shots suddenly ring out. Meanwhile, a voice-over calmly recounts what happened to the people we see.<br /> <br /> Each time, the wild images are paused for a moment and we hear what became of the person we see in the blurry images. These stories are fictional in the sense that they don’t correspond to the actual people we’re looking at, or to the names they’re given here, although they are drawn directly from life. No matter how heartbreaking these stories are, the narrator maintains the same calm distance, as if observing it all from a different dimension.</p>
<p>When the Israeli army invades the Gaza Strip in 2023, Rania is eight months pregnant. She gives birth to triplets just as her hometown in northern Gaza is bombed. One girl dies at birth, while the other two babies, Jowan and her brother Hamoud, are so weak that they have to be placed in an incubator. When the hospital is evacuated, the twins are moved to southern Gaza, where Rania’s sister Nisreen takes over their care. A travel ban prevents the babies from returning to their mother.<br /> <br /> It's nothing out of the ordinary—just another Gazan family torn apart by war. The story told here by director Mohammed Sawwaf illustrates how the conflict affects every Palestinian. But first and foremost, Rania herself, who can only watch her newborns grow up on video. Her family, forced to flee five times during this period, and her sister Nisreen, who becomes ever more attached to the twins. And the babies themselves, with Hamoud clearly in need of extra care. Strong family ties provide a lifeline time and time again—but for how much longer?</p>
<p>Reel No 21 comes as an additional reflection on a collection of twenty films in 16mm format, safeguarded in Tokyo by the movement of Japanese solidarity with Palestine. It is an undelivered love letter, written by a Japanese activist, that was lost on its way to a Palestinian filmmaker. Fragments of the letter are found thoughout the collection and compiled into an imagined structure that reveals itself over the course of the film. The film as catalogue, the film as time machine, the film as archive: these themes Reel No 21 deals with have the feel of a montage essay; at the same time, the act of restoring these films exposes the motives, aspirations and disappearances of a generation and its struggles— not only in Japan but also around the world. It is a film essay that explores questions of transnational solidarity by gazing at 16 mm films that have been collected and projected by a Japanese solidarity group</p>
<p>From his cozy apartment in Brussels, Mon Dewulf documents his connection with his Lebanese partner Karim—living a world away in Beirut. Dewulf closely follows developments in Lebanon’s capital through videos, voice memos, and text messages. Karim sends videos of devastated apartment buildings, describes Israeli airstrikes, and shares his fears and despair about the situation.<br /> <br /> In Far from Beyrouth, Dewulf crafts an intimate portrait of partners keeping close emotionally while living in different worlds. He offers Karim a listening ear, watches live broadcasts from locations in Beirut, and joins pro-Palestine protests to calm his anxieties a little.<br /> <br /> Caught between the everyday routines of Brussels and his constant concern for his partner, Dewulf struggles to find a balance as he awaits Karim’s return to Brussels. Even when the distance seems insurmountable, this modern, loving correspondence bears witness to the power of connection.</p>
<p>Maryam fled Iran decades ago and settled in the United States. Her parents remained in Tehran. Now that they are growing older and political unrest is intensifying, she is concerned. She persuades them to install security cameras in every room, so she can stay in direct contact with them from a distance. Maryam finds herself glued to this virtual connection, only now realizing how lonely they must have been all these years.</p>
<p>Halime doesn’t identify with the traditional image of women in her patriarchal Turkish village community. There’s more to life than looking after the house and children, she believes. So she decides to organize a shooting competition for women. But this idea isn’t universally welcomed by the men in the village and, as heads of the household, their permission is needed.<br /> <br /> 32 Meters follows the women with warmth and understated humor as they bravely defend themselves against arguments that guns are “not toys” and that shooting is a man’s business. The camera is present during these intimate conversations, both indoors and outdoors, capturing how the community cautiously dares to embrace subtle change, and showing that even the most entrenched ideas about gender roles can be shifted.<br /> <br /> The result is a hopeful portrait of a close-knit community and an independent-minded woman who, with her enthusiasm and perseverance—along with the support of a growing group of female friends and male allies—succeeds in challenging the traditional status quo.</p>
<p>Amid the failing counteroffensive, a journalist follows a Ukrainian platoon on their mission to traverse one mile of heavily fortified forest and liberate a strategic village from Russian occupation. But the farther they advance through their destroyed homeland, the more they realize that this war may never end.</p>
<p>At the beginning of The Man Who Can, eleven-year-old Malik is jumping around and dancing with his cousins and sister. Malik, who<br /> has Down Syndrome, introduces everyone including himself in voice-over. Then he proceeds to tell us, “Daddy can’t come to Holland anymore. We’re going to Senegal.”<br /> <br /> It’s clear that Malik will have to find his way in Senegal. Everything is new and different, there’s no one to play with, and everything he learned back in Holland seems different here. Losing power in Senegal can’t be resolved by screwing in a new fuse, as the clever boy suggests. One night, when his father tells him a story about an African king, Malik rediscovers his self-confidence: in the end, he is the man who can do anything.<br /> <br /> In 2003, director Nadine Kuipers was accepted to the Netherlands Film and Television Academy with a film about Malik, his mother, and the book she made for her son to help him through life. Kuipers has continued to follow this<br /> special mother-son relationship, with Michael Apted's Up series in the back of her mind.</p>
<p>Fifty years after the end of the Vietnam War, one image still defines how we remember it: the Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan executing a Vietcong prisoner during the Tet Offensive. Reproduced and debated for decades, it has become an icon of America’s most divisive war. But that single, frozen frame cannot hold the full story. Woven through voices of survivors, ON HEALING LAND, BIRDS PERCH meditates on memory, loss, and renewal confronting the enduring scars of war and the resilience of refugees rebuilding their lives.</p>
<p>When Siham passed away, Namir didn’t realize that she was gone forever. In a child’s mind, mothers are immortal… To keep her memory alive, Namir delves into his family history across Egypt and France. With the cinema of Youssef Chahine as his companion, a story of exile — and above all, of love — begins to unfold.</p>
<p>Do you remember the good old days when the internet had just begun—dialing up your connection to the charming zzzzz-screee-brrr of your modem, and then updating your MySpace page? The early internet was an open space for fellow nerds and cheerful, curious, creative minds. Someone had made a program you could use to put together your very own zine. There used to be such a thing as the Electric Love Potato, which lived on your computer desktop and gave you recipes. Even Microsoft offered “silly software.”<br /> <br /> Today, software is in the hands of big corporations—completely locked down and impossible to modify. We, the users, have become the fodder for a vast machine. Can it still be stopped? This interactive essay on techno-capitalism is a beginning. Follow the coins and discover hyperlinks, gems from the internet archive, and texts that make you ponder. A tirade in the form of a “walking simulator.”</p>
<p>It’s early morning, and journalists, presenters, and technicians are streaming into the Maison de la Radio. This iconic building in the heart of Paris, overlooking the Seine and the Eiffel Tower, is home to Radio France, the broadcasting organization that runs France’s public radio stations.<br /> <br /> We follow the unfolding of 24 hours of radio broadcasting, distilled into slightly less than 100 minutes by Nicolas Philibert (Être et avoir, Sur l’Adamant) from footage shot over the course of six months in every corner of the radio building—from the reception area to the library—and beyond. A succession of brief impressions builds a picture of what goes on behind the scenes at the radio stations.<br /> <br /> An aspiring presenter receives feedback on his submission, editorial staff scour the internet for newsworthy stories, producers brainstorm ideas, and technicians ensure that the sound quality is perfect. The work is intense and tireless in the editorial offices and recording studios—but there is laughter in the corridors as well. La Maison de la Radio paints a compelling portrait of a medium that derives its popularity from the very absence of images.</p>
<p>Nikolaus Geyrhalter positions his camera in places around the world where snow and ice are central to human existence—from Antarctica, Iceland, Canada and Japan to the French Alps and the highest glaciers in Austria and Switzerland. His expansive, static shots and breathtaking drone footage capture these majestic places to reveal myriad forms of snow and ice. And experts show how the same diversity exists at the microscopic level—no two snowflakes are alike, after all.<br /> <br /> The inhabitants of these regions, as well as the people working with these elements, know all too well how profoundly the landscapes are changing, and how they may in time disappear altogether. The ice caves in Iceland steadily retreat, even as snow cannons on French slopes keep the skiing dream alive.<br /> <br /> In his 2019 film Earth, Geyrhalter showed humanity around the world digging into the earth and trying to control the land; here he explores our relationship to the wintry elements. Interwoven with breathtaking images in every shade of white, gray and silver, they tell their urgent story.</p>
<p>For filmmaker Nordin Lasfar, who grew up in the Netherlands as the child of Moroccan parents, author Paul Bowles opened the door to literature and stories from the land of his forebears. In the 1960s and 70s, Tangier was a base for Western artists and writers of the Beat Generation, among them Bowles.<br /> <br /> Mohammed Mrabet, a fisherman’s son and storyteller in the Moroccan oral tradition, became a central figure in those circles. Although illiterate, he gained wider recognition when Bowles transcribed and published his stories. In a setting where creativity and free morality went hand in hand with colonial inequality and racism, a complex relationship developed between the two.<br /> <br /> Now in his late eighties, Mrabet, a master at interweaving fantasy and reality, looks back. Fragments of his stories, recorded on dozens of cassette tapes, are complemented by magical-realist AI images—a giant fish, a melon that houses a palace. Through archival material, interviews, and street scenes, the filmmaker goes in search of this remarkable literary bond and asks the question: who actually owns the stories?</p>
<p>Haunted by his father’s unresolved death during the 1983 Matabeleland massacres, a Zimbabwean immigrant in Botswana believes his family is cursed. Burdened by generational trauma and historical violence, the man struggles to build a future, despite having love in his life. While trying to properly bury his father, he must confront his long-avoided pain. This powerful exploration of grief and memory is an intimate portrait of one man’s journey toward healing and spiritual reconciliation.</p>
<p>During a stay in her native Greece, Olia hears that her friend Sofia has cancer. Her doctors and family are keeping the illness hidden from her, and Olia isn’t allowed to give anything away either. She decides to investigate the rationale behind this practice.<br /> <br /> What does concealing (or revealing) the truth do to a patient’s mental state? Is it better to know nothing, or only the bare minimum? Does it differ from patient to patient? Does it happen in Greece because Greek has no word for “infantilize,” or out of fear that merely uttering the “C-word” would open Pandora’s box—with unforeseeable consequences?<br /> <br /> With a playful touch and her theatrical father at her side— who as a dentist has his own view on the matter, but mostly just revels in the camera’s attention—she visits the medical professionals in her immediate surroundings. She also reflects on her own childhood, the lies we tell each other for our own good and the stories that make life more bearable.</p>
<p>Dance is by far the most important thing in 14-year-old Skip’s life. He’s got big ambitions, so whenever he gets the chance to take part in a dance competition with his all-boys group the Rhythm Rangers, he’s completely committed to the rehearsals at the local dance school.<br /> <br /> In addition to being physically challenging, the voguing dance style poses other problems for Skip. What if his classmates from high school see him perform? Skip has two good friends named Robin and Kynan at the dance school, but as he explains in an interview, his life isn’t easy outside this trusted environment. He gets teased at school because his classmates think dancing is only for girls and gay guys.<br /> <br /> But that doesn’t stop Skip from going all out for his passion: “It’s the people who do special things that come furthest in life,” he explains coolly and with apparent self-confidence. In this short film, we discover precisely what this young man has had to overcome to arrive to this realization.</p>
<p>Director Ollie Launspach is making his graduation film at the Netherlands Film Academy about what it’s like for his girlfriend Sterre Mulder that he’s transitioning. But over the course of their tender yet halting conversations, she makes him realize that his wariness mainly reveals his own insecurities.<br /> <br /> Scenes in which he literally backs her into a corner and fires questions at her that all seem to boil down to “Are you going to leave me?” are intercut with a playful, colorful, and uplifting collage of diverse material, including home videos, childhood photos, and diary excerpts filmed word for word, all to the beat of the soundtrack.<br /> <br /> Even when the intimate conversations become uncomfortable, there’s still room for laughter. And the more the insecurities, doubts and misunderstandings come to light, the more kiss kiss bang bang becomes a declaration of love to a relationship that embraces all of this, both literally and figuratively.</p>
<p>Anyone familiar with the work of the Flemish theater company Ontroerend Goed knows that the audience rarely gets a chance to sit back and relax. In their 2018 production £¥€$, the audience themselves became bankers in an overheated financial market. And 2010’s A Game of You was a confrontational, personalized theater-based game that held up a mirror to each spectator.<br /> <br /> Their new piece, Handle with Care, reduces theater to its absolute essence. There are no actors and no technicians. Nor is there any scenery or director. There is only the audience—and a box. Using what they find inside the participants create their own performance. How the evening will unfold is completely unknown.<br /> <br /> Ontroerend Goed’s work has been performed worldwide since 2007, and inspired remakes in French, Mandarin, Russian, and Kazakh. Handle With Care is premiering in several places simultaneously, connecting with audiences all over the world without being physically present.</p>
<p>In 2018, the activist, poet, and scholar Stella Nyanzi was arrested for insulting Ugandan president and dictator Yoweri Museveni online. The torture she endured in prison resulted in a miscarriage. In 2020, she campaigned for the parliamentary elections in the hope of preventing Museveni from serving a sixth term.<br /> <br /> Nyanzi is one of Uganda’s most prominent activists. She is an outspoken feminist and advocates for the rights of queer people in a conservative country where homosexuality is punishable by death. During her campaign, she was constantly obstructed by the authorities.<br /> <br /> Footage of Nyanzi’s campaign is interspersed with archive material of the protests and oppression in Uganda. This is accompanied by scenes in her home and conversations with her three teenage children. The result is a portrait not only of Nyanzi herself, but also of Uganda’s political landscape and the toll her activism takes on her family.</p>
<p>A year after the premiere of her documentary debut Lapilli, Paula Ďurinová returns with an entirely different, yet equally sensitive film entitled Action Item. This activist anatomy of burnout, set in Berlin, interweaves the observation of community sharing with a more experimental montage. The work takes note of the myths associated with individualistic society yet, at the same time, it conveys sincere moments of solidarity between individuals who aren’t afraid to speak of their anxieties. This is both a personal and also very human film, which invites us to take a break in these hectic times, when burnout doesn’t necessarily mean the end; on the contrary, it might be a new beginning, where individual pain is gradually transformed into the power of collective sharing.</p>
<p>Justine is in her room, in her bed. Her alarm goes off and it takes a long time for her to turn the sound off. She goes back to sleep. My Sister’s Room takes place in Justine’s bedroom. The camera almost never leaves these four walls. And neither does she.<br /> <br /> The space feels suffocating at times, and familiar and safe at others. This is where Justine scrolls, laughs with friends, avoids school, discusses dating habits and cries when opening up about her state of mind. Subtle shifts, like getting dressed, or cleaning her bedroom window, signal that she could be having a better day.<br /> <br /> This intimate and sober portrait is made by Justine’s sister. Their bond allows us to observe her during vulnerable times without it ever feeling voyeuristic. We see her through a patient and loving lens, revealing bits and pieces of her inner world. The director skillfully relies on subtleties, and seems never to feel pressure to zoom in on her sister’s insecurities or dramatize her emotions. A raw and authentic film that deals with urgent issues like depression, anxiety and sexual boundaries.</p>
<p>Only through his camera is Swiss-Canadian filmmaker Peter Mettler (The End of Time, Becoming Animal) able to relate to the world, study himself and the people around him, and share his insights. This also applies to his relationship with the phenomenon of time and the finite nature of our existence on earth. He is confronted by this when his mother dies and he knows that his 90-year-old father, despite his cheerful zest for life, inevitably will follow. During Mettler’s cinematographic exploration of the meaning of life and what comes before and after, the COVID pandemic breaks out, which puts everything even more sharply into perspective.</p> <p>While the Green Grass Grows consists of parts 1 and 6 of a seven-part filmic diary that unfolds unhurriedly and meditatively. Mettler asks his parents and friends his existential questions. At the same time, he focuses on nature: the Swiss Alps, where his parents come from, and the forests of his own native country, Canada. Everything flows, reproduces and continues—with great beauty, and without revealing any meaning.</p>
<p>A poignant documentary exploring the extraordinary bond between director Pippo Delbono and Bobò—Vincenzo Cannavacciuolo—a deaf-mute, illiterate man with microcephaly who lived for over four decades in the Aversa asylum. Delbono discovered Bobò in 1995 and brought him into his theater and film world, capturing archival footage and new material that reveal Bobò’s profound poetic presence and transformative impact on Delbono’s artistic vision</p>
<p>A mining town in Morocco faces a decline in its fortunes until all mining is ceased in 2001.</p>
<p>The ultimate and comprehensive documentary film about the exceptional writer George Orwell.</p>
<p>Seasonal laborer María “Chena” Benítez works on coffee plantations, in fish farming, and as a woodworker. She does hard physical work, such as carrying dozens of pounds of coffee beans up hills on her shoulders, or dragging around extremely heavy nets full of fish.<br /> <br /> The harvest periods are getting shorter due to climate change, so she has to travel more often and farther from home to earn enough money. To make matters even worse, she suffers a knee injury. But quitting is out of the question, because the bills need to be paid. Her nomadic existence means María, a single mother, has to leave her young son with her parents for weeks on end—while she lives from job to job and bill to bill, sleeping in wooden barracks.<br /> <br /> Can María keep up this life, or will she end up like her father, a middle-aged man whose body is already completely worn out? She records her thoughts in her diary. Extracts from her writing that appear on-screen reveal the rich inner life hidden beneath the hard labor.</p>
<p>This beautiful and heart-wrenching story about family, transmission and self-acceptance shows how Treacher Collins Syndrome, a genetic disorder, has prevented Ricardo from pronouncing his own name. His life is one in which he grew up struggling to find his voice – both literally and figuratively. Through Ricardo’s personal journey, from learning how to live with his condition to undergoing multiple surgeries, which in turn led to questions about his own identity, The Broken R is a reminder of how filmmaking can not only be a perfect tool for documenting life, but can be an essential aid in exploring and accepting who we are.</p>
<p>The death of his son causes McElwee, an autobiographical filmmaker, to look back on his life’s work. He eventually turns to his archive of home movies. To what extent did his camera affect their relationship when Adrian was alive? To what extent does it define that relationship now that he is gone? Meanwhile, an effort to adapt McElwee’s first feature, Sherman’s March, into a work of fiction lurches along, giving the filmmaker another perspective from which to meditate on movie making and mortality.</p>
<p>Pat, the evasive, androgynous SNL character played by Julia Sweeney, was a ubiquitous presence in the pop culture ether of the 1990s. As a kid, filmmaker Ro Haber grappled with a strange obsession with Pat — a character whose popularity hinged on them making others wildly uncomfortable with their refusal to adhere to strict gender lines. Both time and their identity moved forward and yet, even as an adult, Haber’s preoccupation remained.</p>
<p>As climate change erases the Louisiana coast, the last two teenagers on Isle de Jean Charles fight to stay on an island that's been their family home for generations.</p>
<p>As the first elected councilwoman of her Iranian village, Sara Shahverdi aims to break long-held patriarchal traditions by training teenage girls to ride motorcycles and stopping child marriages. When accusations arise questioning Sara’s intentions to empower the girls, her identity is put in turmoil.</p>
<p>Sarah Maldoror (1929–2020) is often described as the mother of Pan-African cinema. Born to a Guadeloupean father and French mother, she devoted her life to the anti-colonial struggle—first as a theater-maker, and from the late 1960s as a filmmaker.<br /> <br /> Maldoror’s short debut film Monangambééé (1968) encapsulates the director’s artistic and political vision: this is not militant grandstanding, but a deeply human and lyrical portrayal of colonial inequality and injustice. Based on the short story “O fato completo de Lucas Matesso” (1962) by José Luandino Vieira, it shows how an Angolan activist arrested by the Portuguese occupiers becomes the victim of an absurd linguistic mix-up.<br /> <br /> He is imprisoned and tortured beneath a portrait of the Portuguese dictator António de Oliveira Salazar. Rather than filming the torture itself, Maldoror shows the prisoner’s subsequent expressions of despair. These resemble a form of modern dance—an impression that is reinforced by the modern jazz on the soundtrack. The tender way the other prisoners care for him movingly evokes the great importance Maldoror attaches to solidarity.</p>
<p>A pedestrian (the filmmaker) equipped with a tiny pocket camera wanders through Brussels and encounters Polish, Iranian, Brazilian, Belgian and Moroccan workers. They slip small pieces of paper into the columns, the walls, and the floors of construction sites: secret wishes intended for future generations. As she roams the city, filming the messages hidden behind bricks, under cobblestones, on traffic poles and at the bases of statues, the wanderer wonders: “You may be walking on a builder’s wish.”</p>
<p>Our Body Is an Expanding Star is at the same time an abstract nature film, a creative journey of self-discovery and a moving family portrait. Mexican siblings Semillites and Tania filmed the journey their bodies have taken in their still young lives. It is a voyage through time, landscapes and emotions in which we gradually come to know them more intimately.<br /> <br /> Two siblings, their queer bodies and the deep bond they share. They read the brown skin they once wished they didn’t have as a landscape. Associatively, with extreme close-ups, animations, projections or razor-sharp nature photography, pores become desert landscapes, skin cells become salt flats.<br /> <br /> Semillites takes us through his transition using a series of illustrations. He draws himself as a little seed that wants to grow: nature, too, is always in transition. This seed metaphor is also an ode to their peasant family history. Semillites and Tania meet various relatives and ancestors—including flowers, fossils and grasshoppers—who guide them in their search. This exploration of collective memory culminates in a new perspective on identity, leaving colonial narratives behind.</p>
<p>A documentary filmmaker and his 12-year-old son stay in an abandoned hotel in Lisbon, which is empty like the one in The Shining. The boy is haunted by stories of monsters and ghosts. But during their stay, other ghosts emerge: those of the first Portuguese serial killer, and of men who suddenly go berserk and abandon their families. Starring Ana Moreira, Daniel Blaufuks and Manuel Mozos, the film is a deep reflection on cinema and what it means to be a spectator, exploring the way knowledge is passed on—from father to son, from one culture to another, and through the archives.</p>
<p>Shayma’ was six years old when the Second Intifada broke out. More than twenty years later, she opens a box of old videotapes that starts her search for memories. In voice-over she addresses her mother, who says she is blessed with a poor memory. Shayma’, by contrast, still remembers exactly what she wore on her first day of school: her new school uniform with a lace collar and a white bow in her hair. She also remembers spying her birthday cake through a crack in the kitchen door of their house, which had been confiscated by Israeli soldiers.<br /> <br /> These glimpses into an intimate world are contrasted with stark images of the city, including scenes of tanks blocking the streets of Hebron, endless checkpoints, houses being destroyed, the wounded and the dead, and children playing among the rubble and trees.<br /> <br /> Personal memories and collective trauma intertwine to form a powerful portrait of a childhood lived under occupation, offering a perspective on the present and the future. The film is dedicated to Shayma’s mother, who taught her to cherish the scent of almond blossoms in spring, and to all the mothers of Palestine.</p>
<p>A young student undergoing trauma therapy recounts how she was raped by someone she trusted. The camera focuses on the therapist’s face, and we never see the anonymous speaker. The Sessions unfolds almost entirely in this space, where the young woman speaks openly about the impact of the rape. Outside the therapy room she doesn’t dare speak to anyone else about it—only her boyfriend knows what happened.<br /> <br /> Throughout this period, her rapist is being questioned by the police. We don’t see these interrogations taking place, but we do hear about them in phone calls between the young woman and the court. They can tell her very little, and the police also prove to be of little help to her.<br /> <br /> While she suffers every day from what was done to her, it looks like he’s going to get away with it. Her conversations with the therapist and the legal system provide insight into the long and difficult healing process that follows sexual violence.</p>
<p>Grounded brings this vital connection to the fore, as the crew accompanies a pilot approaching his retirement on a number of flights from Villavicencio to San Felipe—a distance of nearly 800 kilometers with stops along the way. From his cockpit, overlooking the winding river and the vast forest, he looks back on happy memories, but also on the fierce fighting between the army, paramilitary groups and guerrillas during the drug war. At one of the destinations we meet La Mona, who runs a local store where she trades the cargo and sells passenger tickets, and a waste picker, once a farmer, who lost his land in the drug war.<br /> <br /> Meanwhile Giovanna, manager of the company that operates the only two surviving commercial DC-3s in Colombia, fights a hard battle to prevent them from being grounded. Since insurance companies are no longer willing to cover the aging planes, this lifeline is now at risk of being cut.</p>
<p>Four years ago, video artist Sjef van Beers created the installation Gamer Keyboard Wall Piece #1, challenging the stereotype of the gamer as a withdrawn, socially awkward, and sometimes radicalized young man. Using the illuminated keys of a gaming keyboard as pixels, Van Beers created a text bar that gave voice to the inner world of the lonely NEET (a person not in education, employment or training): “There are endless worlds behind my screen but there is a cliff behind my bedroom door.”<br /> <br /> In Gamer Keyboard Wall Piece #2, the artist goes a step further. The new installation places memes that have emerged throughout the history of internet culture alongside quotes from feminist theory. Through this juxtaposition, Van Beers uncovers online influences on contemporary adolescent masculinity.</p>
<p>Powwow People is a radically immersive, durational portrait and cinematic celebration of a contemporary powwow by Sky Hopinka, one of the most vital artists working today.</p>
<p>An intimate, unconventional portrait of fashion designer Marc Jacobs, guided through decades of friendship and creative collaboration with Sofia Coppola—his longtime friend, muse, and creative partner.</p>
<p>From the very first shot—when Soumaya Hidalgo Djahdou bursts into laughter as co-director Berta Vicente Salas films her—it’s clear that this joint debut is deeply personal. Soumaya grew up in Barcelona, and the emotional distance between her and her mother, who is originally from Algeria, often feels vast. That tension is evident in their somewhat prickly conversation about praying and Ramadan. Things shift, however, when Soumaya decides to visit her grandmother in Algeria.<br /> <br /> Soumaya quickly becomes part of this unfamiliar family, where praying is as much part of life as using a smartphone. The seemingly off-the-cuff assortment of domestic moments, conversations with her grandmother, and games with her second cousins is interwoven with old home movies and video calls. We see trust growing, including between Soumaya and her mother.<br /> <br /> This simple account of a family visit expands into something much more: a harmonious whole that interweaves humor, thoughtful introspection, and intimate confession. A reflection on migration, parenthood, and three generations of women; and on bridging cultures and traditions.</p>
<p>Mohana is the president of the first trade union for women auto rickshaw drivers in the southeast Indian state of Tamil Nadu. As well as maneuvering her own auto through the busy streets of Chennai, she has to navigate a sexist and patriarchal system to secure equal opportunities for women drivers. She faces constant resistance—with conflicts and humiliations every day.<br /> <br /> Fortunately, she has an ally in her friend Leela, who is also a driver. Leela is totally unintimidated by their many colleagues in this male-dominated occupation. Mohana and Leela form a memorable duo whose eyes are set firmly on their shared goal. Despite their different approaches, they carry out groundbreaking work, and inspire a growing network of Indian women in the process.</p>
<p>Vividly tracing the history and influence of funk music, filmmakers Stanley Nelson (2012 Full Frame Tribute honoree) and Nicole London bring to the screen the stars and stories, the themes and theory, behind the music. Featuring dazzling archival performances from James Brown, Sly & the Family Stone, Parliament Funkadelic, Labelle, Fela Kuti, and more, this energetic documentary has the spirit and spectacle of a concert film. Effortlessly woven throughout the film are interviews with contemporary musicians and ambassadors of the sound, including Questlove, Prince Paul, and David Byrne, who discuss the vast constellation of funk, ranging from post-war politics, sociology, and science to the roots of the legendary rhythms. As infectious and dynamic as the grooves it chronicles, We Want the Funk! honors funk’s fantastic voyage with a cinematic journey through the genre.</p>
<p>For 48 years, the Salazar dictatorship held Portugal in its grip. To show us its true face, Susana de Sousa Dias needs only to show the dossier photos of political prisoners—accompanied by the voices of these men and women recalling the period. The Carnation Revolution of 1974 brought liberation. “Life returned to normal,” explains one of the former prisoners, “What’s left is the bad memory of the things you experienced and that you will never get out of your head.”<br /> <br /> The former prisoners recall memories of arrests and years spent in captivity, of violence, torture, and humiliation; of disgust and outrage, and their only possible form of resistance was to remain silent and to own the way they stared down the camera of the secret police. There’s just a single smile to be seen, one that the person concerned now looks back on with mixed feelings.<br /> <br /> De Sousa Dias’ stripped-back form makes for lucid and powerful storytelling, with the portraits and personal recollections combining to evoke the regime of terror established under Salazar. A powerfully eloquent and multi-award-winning minimalist documentary.</p>
<p>Since 2000, Susana de Sousa Dias has been researching the history of Portugal’s dictatorship under António de Oliveira Salazar, using the regime’s own archives. In her documentary Criminal Case 141/53 two Portuguese nurses share their harrowing story. Sisters Isaura Borges Coelho and Hortênsia Campos Lima were arrested in the early 1950s for protesting a law that barred nurses from marrying. Salazar wanted nurses to live like nuns, in line with Catholic conservative ideals.<br /> <br /> The defiant sisters look back on the brutal practices of the PIDE, the feared secret police that recruited informants everywhere, fabricated criminal offences, and conducted interrogations behind closed doors. Arrests were often followed by long periods of solitary confinement without formal charges.</p>
<p>In 1928, Henry Ford founded Fordlândia in Brazil, a company town centered on a rubber plantation on the banks of a tributary of the Amazon. The plantation was intended to supply rubber to his automobile factories in the United States. Ford provided houses, schools and other facilities for the workers and their families but also imposed unreasonable rules, both at work and in people’s private lives. In her film, Susana de Sousa Dias reflects on the past and present of this neocolonial project, which lasted less than ten years in its original form.<br /> <br /> Fordlândia is a place suspended between two eras, between utopia and dystopia. Amid decaying buildings of glass and steel, people live and children play, feeling closely connected to the town’s past. De Sousa Dias foregrounds the voices of today’s residents as they reclaim the narrative of their land by combining their stories, legends and songs about Fordlândia with archival material and drone footage. Through this seamless interplay of elements, we feel how a place and its people can be impacted when an outsider comes to impose his will by force.</p>
<p>What does it mean to be the child of enemies of the state in a country of intense political oppression? Filmmaker Susana de Sousa Dias poses this question to three children of former Communist leader Octávio Pato. All three were born in Portugal during Europe’s longest-lasting dictatorship of the 20th century (1926–1974).<br /> <br /> They were still very young when their parents were taken from a hiding place by the notorious Portuguese secret police (PIDE) to be imprisoned and tortured. Even as adults, Isabel, Àlvaro, and Rui still become deeply emotional as they speak about their memories of childhood and of parents they barely recognized upon their return.<br /> <br /> We hear their harrowing stories, as images emerge from the darkness like ghosts: mugshots of their parents, covert surveillance footage made by the Portuguese police, and shots of what remains of their grandparents’ farm. Image and audio combine to form a striking testimony to the lasting harm a dictatorship can inflict.</p>
<p>In 2000, Susana de Sousa Dias made Criminal Case 141/53, about the sisters Isaura Borges Coelho and Hortênsia Campos Lima, who resisted a 1950s’ Portuguese law that prohibited nurses from marrying. Supported by a montage of archival material, the film told their story, which was shaped by the dictatorship under Salazar.<br /> <br /> Now, a quarter of a century later, De Sousa Dias returns with a sequel that questions and reflects on her earlier film. She describes how she first encountered the archive material that led her to the sisters’ story in the early 1990s.<br /> <br /> She questions the notion of documentary, of archival images, of history. How do they relate to one another? How does collective history feed individual memory, and what exactly is preserved in an archive and what is not? She emphatically searches for the gaps and silences in the archive and in her own film, and reconstructs what exactly happens when you distill a narrative from an archive.</p>
<p>We all know about Nazi Germany, fascist Spain and Mussolini’s Italy, but it’s the four decades of António de Oliveira Salazar’s regime in Portugal that rates as the longest dictatorship of 20th-century Europe. In contrast to his colleagues, this absolute ruler managed to maintain a sheen of normalcy, at least to the outside world. Under him, Portugal became a member of the United Nations and a founder of NATO.<br /> <br /> Based on news reports, propaganda films and images from prison archives, Susana de Sousa Dias paints a picture of this almost forgotten and barely processed era in Portuguese history. We are confronted with processions that emphasized the bond between church and army, much flag waving, children in uniform and police photos of political prisoners. Meanwhile, Salazar waves affably from a balcony.<br /> <br /> After a relatively harmonious beginning, riots in Lisbon and bloody colonial wars become commonplace. This is a bird’s-eye view of history playing in slow motion—as if it were all just a bad dream.</p>
<p>A film that uses images from family archives to highlight the testimonies of children coming from Austria to Portugal, in the post-Second World War period. This reflection on a migration from an area marked by war, to another without the traces of that same destruction, gives space for dominant narratives to be confronted with first-hand experiences. The film proposes to look at a past that may resonate in the present.</p>
<p>After having walked the streets of Mellila, Malik, Mehdi, and Hassan now beat the cobblestones of Paris, discovering its lights and its chimeras, its joys and its violence... In this closing chapter of a trilogy on policies of migration, Sylvain George accompanies the street children of Morocco through this complex age and ordeal, while Europe turns a blind eye.</p>
<p>Generations of artists call Robert A. Nakamura “the godfather of Asian American media,” but filmmaker Tadashi Nakamura calls him Dad. Robert’s diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease leads to an exploration of art, activism, grief, and fatherhood.</p>
<p>Hundreds of thousands of Georgians fled their homes in the disputed region of Abkhazia following the 1993 war. With hardly any shelter available in the country, many sought refuge in vacant government buildings. One such place was the former Kartli sanatorium, named after Georgia’s famed historical kingdom. Around 200 families settled there, believing their stay would be only temporary.<br /> <br /> Three decades later, they’re still living there, in increasingly wretched conditions. A steadily widening crack is literally splitting the building in two. With the lights of Tbilisi twinkling in the distance, their dreams quietly fade in their “palace.” Any hope of returning to their birthplace seems lost.<br /> <br /> This observational documentary records their struggle for a dignified life, but especially highlights their personal lives in the building, aided by home videos of weddings and birthdays. Leaving the building is inevitable, and highly desirable for most, but it will still mean being uprooted all over again.</p>
<p>In 1928, industrialist Henry Ford built a company town in the Brazilian jungle and established a rubber plantation. Within a few years his industrial utopia collapsed, coming to an end in 1945. Fordlândia was largely abandoned and became known as a ghost town.<br /> <br /> Following on from her previous film Fordlandia Malaise, in this documentary Susana de Sousa Dias evokes the spirits that still haunt the place: of those who built the town and died in the process, from snakebites, infections, the blazing sun, and exhaustion; and of those who once lived there but are no longer remembered.<br /> <br /> Above all, the film lets us hear from the people who live there now. Since the early 21st century, Fordlândia’s population has been growing. Recent archaeological findings show that the history of this settlement goes back much further than Ford’s utopian illusion, which should not be allowed to dictate the land’s future. The images unfold dreamily, as if the camera itself were a floating spirit, releasing Fordlândia from the imprint of colonialism.</p>
<p>In The Tale of Silyan, Tamara Kotevska crafts an intimate documentary portrait of Silyan, a rural Macedonian farmer whose quiet life is transformed by an unexpected bond with a stray dog. Against the backdrop of changing landscapes and shifting demographics, Silyan’s simple routines become deeply poetic: tending fields, greeting neighbors, worrying for wildlife. As his relationship with the animal deepens, the film gently explores themes of solitude, belonging, and the human-animal connection. Subtle humor and lyrical imagery evoke a timeless rural existence touched by fleeting gestures of kindness. Ultimately, the story becomes a meditation on aging, memory, and quiet resilience.</p>
<p>A tender posthumous letter to Tamara’s father, who was a film actor in Soviet Armenia. She already watched him on TV as a child before later establishing herself as a filmmaker. A captivating sleepwalk through the landscapes of Armenian film history.</p>
<p>Emerging from the shadows of the rubber trade, the lost stories of Omarino and Aredomi are revealed. A journey through Amazonian archives connects research, speculation and the filmmaker’s own family history, invocating a dialogue between living and dead.</p>
<p>According to the myth still prevalent in the coal-mining towns of Patagonia, if a woman enters the mine, the earth becomes jealous. Then there is a collapse and death. "Río Turbio" is based on a dark personal experience to become a film about the silence of women who live in villages of men. How can we film where our presence is forbidden? How can we record the resonances of what is not heard? While the fog and smoke from the power plant cover the town, the voices of the women of Río Turbio forcefully break through the white ice and the hum of the drilling machines, shattering the structure of silence.</p>
<p>On 10 March 2019, a Boeing 737 MAX airplane crashed just six minutes after taking off from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. All 157 people on board perished, including Max Thabiso Edkins, the younger brother of director Teboho Edkins. He and his father, film producer Don Edkins, decided to travel together to the crash site in order to seek something tangible in their grief.<br /> <br /> What they find is a community in which mourning is an important part of the culture. Just as for the Edkins family, the lives of the villagers have also been turned upside down by the crash. In a deeply moving experience, they discover that the community members who welcome them regard the crash victims as visiting guests, whom they have taken into their hearts as brothers and sisters.<br /> <br /> Their compassion contrasts starkly with the calculating stance of airplane manufacturer Boeing. As if attempting somehow to connect with his brother’s spirit, the filmmaker immerses himself in the sounds of the disaster site.</p>
<p>Teenagers Isa, Dylan and Isabel have all acquired an extensive, exceptional family through their parents’ choices. They speak excitedly about the double families they are now part of, about extra mothers and stepmothers, donor fathers, half-brothers and stepsisters. Fairy tales have given stepmothers a bad name, and Isa thinks this isn’t fair.<br /> <br /> Director Tessa Louise Pope made a name for herself in 2016 with her graduation film The Origin of Trouble, about her own complex family relationships. In My Happy Complicated Family, she tackles the theme of modern families in an unconventional, unusually optimistic way. Of course there have been problems, and sometimes there are feelings of guilt, but these three girls also see a lot of benefits. They’re proud of their complicated families, and a film like this is a good opportunity to tell their parents about it.</p>
<p>In the tradition of VFX master Douglas Trumbull, who created comparable effects for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life (2011), director Thomas Vanz captures the awe-inspiring beauty of the universe without resorting to any computer-generated imagery.<br /> <br /> To the accompaniment of his own orchestral composition, Vanz evokes the vastness of the cosmos with slowly moving liquids, flowing inks and chemical solutions filmed at a macroscopic scale. Colorful formations unfurl across the heavens and organic abstractions arise out of the nothingness, suggesting distant nebulae, protoplanets and dying stars.<br /> <br /> Operating at the intersection of art and science, Vanz makes the invisible visible, conjuring the majestic from the miniscule. By touching the sublime, these monumental visuals confront the audience with the fragility of human life within the immeasurable expanse of the universe.</p>
<p>In conversation with his young son, a filmmaker wonders about time — our attempts to control it, and how it controls us. Intimate and political, poetic and scientific, the film explores the tension between objective and subjective time: from physicists tending atomic clocks, to people's daily encounters with the temporal, to the instrumentalization of time for power and commerce.</p>
<p>For centuries, the Maroons in Suriname’s rainforest have kept capitalist society at bay. Descendants of enslaved Africans who escaped Dutch plantations, they have thrived by preserving their ancestral traditions. In recent years, however, economic interests have encroached upon their land.</p>
<p>After his previous project about the dead animals around us (Dancing with Dead Animals), the filmmaker and animator decided to dedicate not only his further work but also his name to dead animals. For his new VR game, Tote Tiere Maarten (“Dead Animals Maarten”) created a desolate landscape—his interpretation of paradise—you can fly through with the guide of your choice.<br /> <br /> In this environment you encounter dead animals that you can revive. You can also read about their deaths—someone’s beloved pet cat died of old age, a rat was found floating in the water, a spider Maarten found by his back door. He made the 3D animations using photograms of each dead animal. What you do with them is up to you. Will you keep them to play with later, release them into paradise, or eat them to fuel your body with much-needed energy?</p>
<p>In 1985, prosecutor Julio César Strassera concluded his closing statement in the trial of nine Argentine junta leaders, including dictator Jorge Rafael Videla, with the words nunca más (‘never again’). They stood trial for the unlawful detention, torture and murder of an estimated 30,000 Argentinians between 1976 and 1983, the period of the military dictatorship. The court case is unique because for the first time in history a military junta was put on trial after the restoration of a democracy.</p> <p>With archival footage, The Trial provides a shocking insight into what Strassera describes as “a sort of descent into the sinister spheres of the human soul.” The footage was selected from the 530 hours of recordings made by Argentine television, hardly any of which was broadcast at the time. As a viewer you are present in the courtroom, listening to witnesses filmed from behind who paint a horrifying picture of ruthless state terror.</p> <p>In addition to documenting the historic court case, The Trial illustrates the boundlessness of human perversity and sadism when legitimized by ideology.</p>
<p>The endless tracking shot through a picturesque US panorama allows the American Dream to slide into ghostly auto-suggestion while Assange and Bezos ponder life.</p>
<p>A woman walks over jagged, weather-beaten rocks by the sea. She is barefoot, wearing a simple white dress. The wind blows unchecked, her face hidden beneath the brim of a floppy hat. She walks and walks, resolute. Sometimes she carries a large jute bag. What is happening here? From this simple starting point, filmed in black-and-white, filmmaker Victor Kossakovsky crafts an unforgettable story—minimalist with maximum impact.<br /> <br /> The camera captures the play of light, the textures, and the rhythms of the landscape—in its impressive grandeur and its smallest, most miraculous details. The superb soundtrack of atmospheric and natural sounds is occasionally complemented by gorgeous compositions for strings and piano.</p>
<p>Can we collectively re-explore what it means to be a bodily being and imagine existence beyond it? The Oracle is a thought-provoking futuristic ritual about the evolving relationship between humans, bodies and AI. Blending personal perspectives with an eerie systemic presence, participants delve into sensuality, death, agency and irreversible change.<br /> <br /> Starting from the personal story of two AI-enthusiasts, and their archival material, the audience gains control but is slowly then drastically overtaken and immersed by non-human entities and images. The audience is invited into a 360-degree screen environment to navigate a choreography that is as much social as it is immersive - as much intimate as it is uncanny.<br /> <br /> At its heart, The Oracle is not a spectacle of technology, but a reflection on it. Questioning the Western ideal of the autonomous rational human, it explores the self as fluid, (trans-)formed through systems larger than us: “Not ‘another AI show,’ but a ritual of collective experiencing: symbolic, embodied, and emotionally resonant.”</p>
<p>A translation of our visual perceptions in darkness, a metaphysical and sensory journey. Mental images in constante metamorphosis, encounter a poetic and reflective flow through voice-over.</p>
<p>How many ways can sunlight break through low-hanging mist? How many times can you watch clouds slowly envelop an entire forest? Endlessly, according to award-winning nature photographer and filmmaker Vincent Munier.<br /> <br /> After the IDFA hit The Velvet Queen (2021), in which he searched the Tibetan Plateau for the elusive snow leopard, Munier now returns with a new nature film that is just as breathtaking and hopeful. This time he stays much closer to home, in the forests of the Vosges in France. Munier first came here as a teenager; it was here his father taught him about nature—how to look, and above all, how to listen.<br /> <br /> Vincent’s son is now the same age he was at the time. We follow three generations of the Munier family in the vast forests. Waiting and watching, the silence broken only by their whispers. There are rutting deer and comical young owls. In the evening, by candlelight, they tell each other stories: the last time Grandpa saw a capercaillie, or a tall tale about a lynx. A joy to listen to and, luckily for us, accompanied by beautiful images.</p>
<p>Spring, summer, autumn, winter... still war in Lviv, western Ukraine. Torn between normality and a state of emergency. For one year, Mansky follows the life cycle of a society’s grieving rites and everyday rituals, where death is the order of the day.</p>
<p>After her parents’ separation, six-year-old Vladlena Sandu moved from Crimea to Grozny. There, in 1994, she was caught up in the Russian Federation’s war of occupation against the Chechen people. Years later, as a filmmaker, she revisits her childhood in this deeply personal, hybrid work of unbridled creativity. She searches for an answer to a fundamental question: how can we break the cycle of violence that shapes so many children and is passed down from generation to generation?<br /> <br /> Sandu has transformed her war memories into an imaginative film brimming with lyrical, political, and surrealistic images. She created a toy theater in which plastic dolls depict the horrors she witnessed as a child, recounted matter-of-factly in her autobiographical voice-over.<br /> <br /> The tableaux and saturated colors are reminiscent of her inspirations, Andrei Tarkovsky and Sergei Parajanov, interspersed with Europop hits such as It’s My Life. A recurring figure is King Kong, her imaginary friend and protector amid the chaos and death brought by war—which is today still scarring the lives of countless children worldwide.</p>
<p>Follows a mysterious herd of ghost elephants in the jungles of Angola.</p>
<p>Sang is one of countless children left behind by American soldiers after the Vietnam War—unwanted, discriminated against, and scarred by a war that took more than just his father. When Sang unexpectedly locates his gravely ill father in the U.S., he becomes determined to meet him, even though it comes at a price. The only way to fulfill this need is to move to the U.S. permanently, leaving behind his beloved wife, daughter, and grandson. In this foreign land, he struggles to find his place—not only in a society that sees him as an outsider but also within an American family that never knew of his existence. Cultural barriers collide when the past catches up with the present in the least expected ways.</p>
<p>They say films are made in the editing room, which is why the influence of the editor should never be underestimated. This is certainly true of Polish editor Agnieszka Bojanowska (1932–2019), who left her mark on more than 350 documentaries, feature films, animated works, and experimental projects. She is best remembered, however, for her close collaboration with Bogdan Dziworski, whose award-winning films she helped raise to new heights.<br /> <br /> We see the pair in action in Bojanowska’s basement editing room, seated behind screens in the half-darkness. Her critical assessments of the material keep Dziworski constantly on his toes: she expects his work to surprise her every single day. If he fails, it’s rubbish. If he succeeds and she offers a rare compliment, he's as happy as a child.<br /> <br /> Bojanowska is elderly and frail, and they both know this is likely to be their last project together. On her deathbed, she describes their collaboration as “a passion for watching”—a process that goes way beyond merely documenting the world.<br /> </p>
<p>Fragmented images of love, activism, and ancestral resilience intertwine with poignant voice messages between the filmmaker and his lover in Brazil, forming a lyrical reflection on memory and survival.</p>
<p>MILITANTROPOS captures the human condition through the fractured realities of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The film pieces together everyday lives transformed by war — those who flee, those who lose everything, and those who stay to resist and fight — tracing both the instinct to survive and the need for closeness.</p>
<p>Italian film pioneer Luca Comerio (1876–1940) spent the early decades of the 20th century traveling the globe as a cinereporter, from the North Pole to the equator, becoming increasingly fascinated by colonialism and fascism. He captured images of mounted soldiers, missionary schools in Africa, hunters shooting polar bears, zebras, and lions, as well as Italian Alpine troops in the trenches of the First World War.<br /> <br /> In 1982, Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi discovered that Comerio’s abandoned lab in Milan was about to be dismantled. His films lay decaying in the basement, and were soon to be incinerated. Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi edited the found footage to make their own work, having first rephotographed, printed, and hand-coloured the images using traditional film techniques.<br /> <br /> By slowing the footage down, they unravel the imperialist and colonial ideology inscribed on—and between—every image. Using the old to create something new, they reveal hidden meanings from the past.</p>
<p>Being LGBT is criminalised in Muslim-majority Malaysia. Trans man Faris and his punk band still travel the country playing gigs and protesting on the streets. A documentary portrait of courageous people, humorous friendship and the spirit of punk.</p>
<p>In this bold debut, director Zahraa Ghandour weaves a personal yet woefully universal story from her childhood into a careful, modern-day inquiry into the mistreatment of Iraqi women and girls.</p>
<p>“My family was shocked when they found out that I'm driving,” says Eva, a Kenyan woman, as she sits behind the wheel of a truck, heavily pregnant. She botched up her school years and was the only one in her family not to graduate. Pretty foolish, she admits in hindsight, but now she is glad to have chosen a profession she can be proud of. She sees more of the world than her brothers and sisters do.<br /> <br /> Two years after the birth of her second child, she returns to the road, even though it’s sometimes a struggle for her to combine single parenthood with her work. The nanny is not always reliable. During the long drives, she keeps in touch with her son by mobile phone.<br /> <br /> A combination of observational scenes and cinémavérité creates a multifaceted portrait of the vivacious Eva and a nuanced picture of the emotional dilemmas faced by many economically independent women. When her truck breaks down during a dangerous journey from Kenya to Sudan, Eva needs all the strength she can muster and is even forced to rethink her future.</p>
<p>The U.S. military developed the Da Vinci surgical robot in the 1980s. Remotely controlled by doctors, it was designed to help wounded soldiers in dangerous battlefield conditions. Nowadays the device is used in many hospitals, including for heart surgeries and complex cancer procedures.<br /> <br /> The contrast between the medical and military purpose, and the thin line between saving and taking a life, inspired Danielle Kaganov to make this philosophical science fiction film about a Da Vinci robot in a medical training institute that becomes self-aware. The device begins to wander through the halls and corridors, while images (or are they memories?) of real, high-precision surgeries and wartime situations resurface. The digital and real worlds progressively merge into a disorienting, bewildering, post-human state of being.</p>
<p>There are over 550,000 private security guards in South Africa — more than the combined total of police officers and soldiers in the country. Tuva Björk takes us on a disturbing journey into the compounds of the rich, observing the security forces who are hired to protect them. With persistent questioning and a knowing gaze, the film slowly dissolves the illusion of security, burrowing into the fragile atmosphere of inequality, paranoia and toxic masculinity that underpins South Africa’s security industry.</p>
<p>A swarm of bodies and lights clashes with the orderly grids of modernist architecture in Slet 1988, which takes its title from Yugoslavia’s final mass performance-celebration of socialism’s achievements. Through the body of 74-year-old dancer Sonja Vukićević and the late-1980s diaries of a teenage girl, Marta Popivoda’s incisive film contrasts the collective gatherings of the Socialist Federal Republic’s decline with the rise of nationalism and isolation in the present.</p>
<p>It looks like a little paradise, this Sicilian cactus nursery where plants, insects, and a remarkable group of people form a harmonious community. In this sheltered place, the world of war and violence beyond the garden walls feels far away. “A home,” one of the cactus growers calls it.<br /> <br /> Victor Missud lets the participants in this poetic group portrait shine as themselves, but also has them play roles created during the shoot. Due to the continual intermingling of observational documentary, performance, and invention, chance elements—an unexpected soccer goal, a strange object—take on a magical aura.<br /> <br /> Yet this locus amoenus, this idyllic refuge, is vulnerable. This becomes apparent when the outside world suddenly intrudes in the form of the fire ant (Solenopsis invicta), pursued by exterminators in protective suits spreading clouds of poison. A metaphor is never far away.</p>