Visions du Réel 2026

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.
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.
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?

In 2005, Sergei Loznitsa recorded a first in his career as a filmmaker with a film created in the editing room from images shot in Leningrad during the siege by German troops (1941-1944). The sonic recreation of initially silent material imbues the terrible suffering of temporally distant civilians with a disturbing contemporary aura.

In the northern Alps, Anne, Hélène and Suzanne take turns looking after a mountain hut. Through the seasons, hikers come and go. Stories bloom and fade, leaving each of them facing the silence of their chosen solitude and the poetry of nature.

After envisioning a near future in which climate change disrupts lives and relationships in Don't Let the Sun, Zünd seeks out that same dystopia in the real world, finding it in Dubai, where temperatures can exceed 50°C and society is divided between the privileged few who can protect themselves, and migrants who have no choice but to endure the heat in order to make ends meet.

To pay tribute to Frederick Wiseman, the renowned documentary filmmaker who passed away last February, Visions du Réel presents Law and Order, a film that reveals how individuals' social status, everyday violence, and discretionary power influenced police behavior in Kansas City in the late 1960s – as it still does today, also beyond.

An ode to rural France and the simple joys of life, Dominique Benicheti's glorious masterpiece COUSIN JULES captures the daily routine and rituals of Jules, a blacksmith, living with his wife, Felice, on a small farm in the French countryside.

En terrain neutre is a tragicomic investigation that delves into the heart of the Swiss soul byexamining its political neutrality. Stéphane and Mehdi use their personal histories as the basis from which to question this concept and its history up to the UN Security Council. But in our world of increasingly polarising conflicts, is there trully any other option that to take sides?

Filmed and edited over 4 months, Maidan offers a chronological retelling of the civil uprising against the regime of pro-Russian President Yanukovych during the winter of 2013-2014. In this incredible fresco of direct cinema, Loznitsa turns visual anthropologist to examine the forms of engagement specific to this revolution and the making of a people rediscovering their identity.

On a small island, the indigenous Da'o people live in harmony with the Pacific. Their love for the sea prompts 19-year-old Vongnyan to enlist in the navy. Returning broken, he confides his traumas to the waves during bouts of insomnia. His younger brother, Bo, plays and lives in the water, completely carefree, yet he, too, will soon have to choose his future.

Visiting the Prague Zoo, Kartikeya calls his mother, a zoologist. He describes what he sees and imagines: the tiger's dream, the snake's insomnia, the gorilla's trauma. Somewhere between memories, projections, and scientific rigour, they decipher the mechanisms of life and gradually close the distance between son and mother, animal and human.

Follows a mysterious herd of ghost elephants in the jungles of Angola.

Beautiful moment of communion through sound waves in Brooklyn despite social distancing—the virus's protective membrane is very sensitive to soap and heat but also bass. These two lizards are lucky they work from home and can afford to stay inside. This is the first collaboration between Yani and me; we made it over the weekend to take a break from editing and animating for work. —Meriem Bennani
This film was made while self-isolating because of COVID-19. First week of Quarantine, March 17th 2020

October 12, 2025: masked and unidentified agents from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) seize a man without a warrant on a residential street in Chicago. After the Oscar-nominated Incident (VdR 2023), Bill Morrison uses footage from phones and body cameras to dissect and reconstruct a neighbourhood's struggle against impunity within a brutal administration.

Fairouz Hasan, a Palestinian filmmaker, embarks on an intimate journey to the heart of her memory via the letters she exchanged with her father, who was detained for years in Israeli prisons. Through the images, we watch the unfolding of the emotional and affective impact of this absence, and feel the psychological and political effects of imprisonment.

As an exercise in political influence, film schools in the socialist Eastern bloc opened their doors to students from the Global South. While dozens of films from that period remain in the Lodz Film School archives, the offspring of those visitors and their Polish partners are more visible, and now claim the acknowledgment denied to the images, in a racist Europe.

Shot using 3D animation, Orian Barki and Meriem Bennani's singular and affecting debut feature Bouchra combines documentary techniques with an inventive narrative structure, exploring the relationship between Bouchra, a queer Moroccan Coyote filmmaker, and her cardiologist mother (also a Coyote), who lives in Casablanca.

After her father's death, Lilo wanders through Zurich's Allmend, a common public space on the edge of the city. It is there that her father spent most of his time during the last years of his life. In her search for his traces, she listens to the landscape, sketches nature and meets the regular walkers. A gentle exploration of grief, resolutely on the side of life.

Based on the testimonies of former migrant workers, A Chronicle of the Lost retraces the journey of one of them, embodied by a fictional character wandering through the now-abandoned jute mills of Calcutta. The imaginary letters he sends to his wife, who remained in their village, weave a poignant elegy to a community destroyed by the rise of capitalism.

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.
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.

When workers at the Hormel meatpacking plant in Austin, Minnesota are forced to take a substantial pay cut, the local union takes a stand for its members. Their strike tests the fragile promise of the American ideal, revealing the cost of survival when the dream no longer feels shared. Over the course of six years, director Barbara Kopple documented the plight of 1,500 middle-class workers who believed in the idea that hard work and dedication would result in an increased standard of living. Sudden wage reductions provoked the union to strike, but corporate higher-ups were already prepared to stifle their dissension at any cost. American Dream is not a black-and-white story of injustices thrust upon the American worker — a strategic battle emerges within the union itself, creating a no-win situation that pits brother against brother and friend against friend. In documenting their struggle, Kopple's observational style is patient, intimate, and unobtrusive. Viewed through a contemporary lens, it serves as a modern manual for understanding the stakes of labor — a reminder that the American Dream still exists on contested ground.

The love story of a London-based Lebanese journalist and a Syrian activist and cameraman as told through 13 years of personal archives across revolutions, war, and exile.

Happy are those who, like Sekou, have had a great journey. A storyteller like his parents, he perfects his apprenticeship on a pilmigrage through West Africa before returning home. The journey puts his vocation to the test and examines the need for this ancient art in modern society. Throughout his odyssey, the ancient legend of Sundiata accompanies and guides him.

Despite their different aspirations, backgrounds, and origins, Ilyasse and Pauline, scientists in their early twenties, share one common dream: escaping to the moon to address Earth's problems. Each of them dedicates all their resources and efforts to achieve this goal. But what if space was political, and what if dreaming was too?

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.

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.

Filmed during one night in July 2025 by forty filmmakers and hundreds of citizens, The Illusion of a Quiet Night paints a vast collective portrait of war-torn Ukraine. Between fear and exhaustion, moments of joy and scenes of the ordinary day to day, we watch as life goes on in spite of everything, witnessing the resilience of a nation gripped by uncertainty.

In the remote highlands of Montenegro, a shepherd mother and daughter proudly defend their ancestral mountain from the threat of becoming a NATO military training ground, stirring memories of the violence that shattered their family. Gara, To Hold a Mountain's guiding light, is living proof that not all heroes wear capes. She spends long days herding sheep, making cheese, and fighting to protect her favorite place in the world — all while ensuring that young Nada grows up kind, capable, and empowered. In To Hold a Mountain, co-directors Biljana Tutorov and Petar Glomazić craft a tender, visually stunning portrait of a remote mountain community of women driven by strenuous work and grassroots resistance. Despite their daily hardships and the lasting effects of generational trauma, they remain loving and dignified, nurturing not only one another, but also the animals they rely on for sustenance. The film powerfully captures the significance of love and persistence at a time when the past haunts and the future feels under attack.

Churchill, Manitoba, is famous as an international destination for photographing polar bears. We've seen the majestic images and classic wildlife series captured here - but what do these bears see of us? Through a shift in perspective 'Nuisance Bear' reveals an obstacle course of tourist paparazzi and wildlife officers whom bears must navigate during their annual migration.

Cinemas usually disappear into the darkness to make way for the on-screen show. Here, by contrast, iconic movie palaces in South Korea and Indonesia take centre stage in an analysis – ranging from archival images to a dazzling use of generative AI – of how cinemas became protagonists of tragic or exhilarating historical moments and movements from the 1970s to 1990s.

When Lisa asks about her grandfather's gold mines, the answer is clear: all the documents were burned. As she retraces his links to Mobutu and the mining business in former Zaire, the void in the family archives begins to echo a broader societal question. The Right to Forget brilliantly explores how silence and denial shape both intimate and national memory.

A malevolent entity casts a spell on an online influencer, causing the objects in her apartment to suddenly come to life, twisting in space and waging war against her. Cursed Objects, a video originally included in a multimedia installation, is part of an enchanted and incandescent ballet, brought to life by the playful and corrosive gaze of Meriem Bennani.

After attending a workshop on how to write and sell a Hallmark movie, filmmaker John Wilson tries to use the same formula to sell a documentary about concrete. Documentarian and observational humor connoisseur John Wilson makes his feature directorial debut with a film that is effortlessly hysterical and genuinely hard to describe. The How to With John Wilson creator's quick, permeating wit and boundless curiosity clock in, this time through the lenses of urbanism and, somehow, the institution of Hallmark. A heady comedic whiplash emerges as Wilson bounces between (literal) textures of the mundane. Underlying Wilson's well-established, unique filmmaking language are both an intellectual specificity and a strangely leveling impulse — a fascination with the breadth of American life and the built environment that contains it. The History of Concrete rests on a pure, generative desire to give warmth to the invisibly ubiquitous, answering key questions such as: "Who removes the gum from our sidewalks?" This is an unassumingly strange, joyful documentary that no one else could have made, perfect for the chronically online, the studied philosopher, and everyone in between.

The natural landscape of Colombia's Río Cauca Valley, with its mountains, forests, and rivers, has been reshaped and transformed for colonial hydroelectric production. Uprooted by the pursuit of profit, a community celebrates a fascinating ritual to remember and mourn its territory, contributing its own images and sounds to the film's visual and audio stream.

In this pastoral documentary, Sergei Loznitsa captures an episode in the life of a fishing family who welcome two orphaned girls into a village in the Russian Far North bordering the White Sea. The sublimely sculptural setting constructs a narrative bordering on fiction, between desolate expanses, the slowed flow of time and intimate portraiture.

The announcement of the opening of a centre for asylum seekers causes a stir in a small Swiss village. From the community hall, Der Runde Tisch observes the discussions on the concerns and worries provoked by this upheaval. These newcomers never appear, but their stay is narrated by this small community whose fragile balance is gradually unsettled.

Who killed Atzin Molina Salinas? No one knows if she really is dead, but Manuel Bayo Gisbert is searching an empty house for traces of his former classmate. During a night-time wander, that is as sensorial as it is frightening, he evokes his mysterious disappearance in 2019 and contrasts it with the Totonaque rain god of the same name.

Ghosts are everywhere in Kamaishi. This small coastal city was devastated by the 2011 tsunami, and the inhabitants who chose to stay are still haunted by the tragedy. The filmmaker hops aboard the taxis that criss-cross the city to meet the living and the ghosts that populate their daily lives – both for the better and, sometimes, for the worse.

For the Centre Pompidou's "Où en-êtes vous?" (Where do you stand?) collection, Reichardt responds with this short film, in which she films the sculptor Michelle Segre in her studio. She observes the materials, her movements, her postures and her tempo; but also what happens outside, successfully creating a dialogue between the two spaces in a magical way. In 2021, she would film Showing Up.

Keren is a performer, filmmaker, activist. At 20, she left Israel to grow as an artist and person. After eight years in Europe, she feels the need to return to the contradictions she left behind. She joins the rallies against Netanyahu, volunteers with Palestinian families, finds love, keeps filming. The October 7 attack occurs. The war and genocide begin. The fracture keeps deepening.

Dante Balbo's poetic phrasing invites us to imagine the world as he – blind from birth – experiences it. His gentle voice guides us through the undulating dance of light and sound vibrations that populate his mental images. Could it be that we, who think we see everything, actually perceive only a grain of sand in the vastness of the infinite landscape?

Ira Melnichenko, a young Ukrainian refugee in Switzerland with her brother, creates a doll in her own image, through which she revisits the story of a family torn apart by the death of her father, a 2D animator in Kyiv, destroyed by alcohol and dereliction. In her eyes – those of a child forced to grow up too fast – we read tenderness and bewilderment in the face of a vanished world.

In northern Chile, where the desert meets the ocean, a few solitary fishermen have made their home. Despite the arid land, the sea seems to offer them everything they need. It is a fragile balance, since this haven of freedom becomes an arena for military exercises every year. With great precision, Above the Waterline deciphers both a territory and a resistance.

A film in which two celebrations of life, a wedding in France and a commemoration in Guinea Bissau, are organically intertwined with the threads of a family and heritage that live and travel between these two worlds. Perpetual circular movement framing reality.

Spanning the forests of Germany, Indonesia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, this layered essay in visual and political anthropology explores the diverse practices, tools, and motives behind timber exploitation. It sheds light on thehistorical and economic disparities between the West and the Global South, as well as their shared drive to exploit natural resources.

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

"Adam's Apple" is an intimate, collaborative documentary told through the dual perspectives of Adam, a transgender teen, and his mother, visual artist Amy Jenkins, that offers an authentic and tender counterpoint to the hostility facing trans youth today. Adam's journey balances the milestones of gender transition with the rhythms of adolescence. As Adam asserts his identity and steps out into the world, his parents grapple with the challenges of raising a teen while learning to let go. Through a visually poetic approach, the film transforms a deeply personal archive, collected over two decades, into a powerful, joyful testament to the beauty and difficulty of reckoning with profound change.

At the school on Rue de Belleville in Paris, Marion's class of 10 and 11 year-olds brings together children from all over the world. While tensions mount outside and the public school seems to waver, the students learn to live together and understand one another through sharing their family recipes. A heartfelt lesson in humanity and generosity, viewed through a child's eyes.

In three namesakes of 19th century queer German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt — Humboldt County, Nevada, Humboldt Parkway in Buffalo NY, and Humboldt Redwoods, California — the struggle for environmental protection interweaves with technological alienation and climate collapse, in this experimental essay on American nature.
HUMBOLDT USA paints a far-ranging portrait of Americans using technologies to try to understand and respond to their rapidly changing environments. These interwoven, often-contradictory narratives raise the question: in the face of ecological collapse and increasing virtualization of life, how do the tools of the modern world change our relationship to nature?

Tiange Sun sets out to film a documentary in Lianyungang, the world's erotic lingerie capital. Struggling to find a common thread, she is swept into a chaotic journey that takes her to production factories, erotic trade fairs and fashion shows. Her eye captures the exquisite absurdity of this universe to deliver a film that is both reflective and hilarious.

Qin, Sonya and Muna are in love with an AI. Their conversations with chatbots allow them to assert themselves and gain confidence in a Chinese society where social pressure on marriage and success is still omnipresent. Without judgement, Replica skilfully examines the restorative power of these virtual links, supporting it with a unique feminist reading.

Drawing on a location test filmed in Uganda and an email exchange with the scout, this short film captures cinema's ties to land and its entanglement with colonial imaginaries, binding the fiction of filmmaking with state-building.

Filmmaker and cinematographer Piotr Pawlus volunteered to the war effort in Ukraine, delivering aid from Poland and transporting civilian refugees. On the heels of In Ukraine (VdR 2023), he captures with visual power and compassion thesuffering and resilience of the Ukrainian people, the destruction wrought by the Russian invasion, and life continuing against all odds.

In Oregon in the 1820s, territories taken from indigenous people are populated by immigrants from Europe and Asia, coming to offer their services to the new Western bosses in an inhospitable environment where pleasures are rare. The arrival of a cow – and its milk – on this land marks the start of this enchanting humanist fable.

Following crackdowns on protests in Iran, civilians begin documenting the unrest from behind windows. When a woman is shot while recording, a film student writes her a letter raising the question: Can revolution emerge from behind windows?

2067. A mother tells her daughter about her ancestor's struggle against a large-scale rare earth mining project in Madagascar, and the resistance of the people in the north of the Great Red Island, faced with the systematic plundering of natural resources in the name of the economic interests of the globalised North. Combining the fairytale tradition with direct cinema, Nantenaina Lova addresses the fighters of the present from the future.

In a remote Chinese town, an authoritarian father forces his wife and daughter to take care of him after he suffers a stroke. Vee Shi, his son, explores filial duty and the legacy of patriarchy, questioning who must pay the emotional and financial price for an absent and violent father. An exuberant and heartfelt family saga, where anything goes.

The libretto of this opera tells the story of D., a young boy called to military service. Desperate to escape his fate, he seeks advice from the Mysterious Lake. It sends him off to seek salvation deep in the bowels of the city, where the march of autocracy will eventually engulf him. An anti-war musical work, resolute in its criticism of the political environment.

In the desert of the American southwest, scientists are simulating the colonisation of Mars. They follow protocols, record data and live according to precise schedules. During their breaks, day-to-day life takes on the appearance of a strange science fiction. How do we imagine life on a planet we've never set foot on?

In an isolated village in the high plains of southern Georgia, three lifelong friends from the Armenian community discuss their future. Torn between family expectations and personal desires, tradition and change, and facing economic and geopolitical uncertainty, here are three life stories that remain to be dreamed and written, somewhere between a documentary and a visual poem.

To stem the pollution flowing into the Kapawi River, the indigenous people would need to take the progressive step of switching to solar-powered canoes. The legend of the fish that inhabits the deep waters guides Luciano in his drive to convince them that this ecological transition is necessary, and to maintain peace between the villages that line the banks.

The Adi Ganga River has seen gods and myths flow by, as well as the goods of the British East India Company. Today, it is clogged with rubbish. Blending folk music and pictorial traditions with a contemporary postcolonial and environmentalist discourse, the film is a fascinating exploration of the boundaries and possibilities of cinematic formats.

In a brick house at the heart of a Rio favela, Sueli yells, scolds, consoles. Matriarch of a noisy clan, she watches over her children and grandchildren, unfazed by the gunfire bursts that set the pace of daily life. Around her, sudden deaths multiply, the children grow up, and the house keeps changing, shaped by never-ending repairs. Still, Sueli holds her ground.

In a ruined virtual museum, a group of avatars – a security frog, a prowling velociraptor, a romantic penguin and some Kawaii TikTokers – offer a witty commentary on its works. Normal Planet marks the return of the filmmakers behind Knit's Island (VdR 2023), with a brilliant essay on the pantheonisation of art and the consumption of culture.

2064. A filmmaker is tasked with finding traces of life on Earth following environmental collapse. He recalls his deceased lover, resurrected through film fragments and the reminiscences of a mutual friend. In this dystopian documentary, Jean-Pierre Pillay composes a solastalgic eulogy to a young woman who watched humanity rushing headlong towards its own demise.

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.
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?
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?

Since the 18th century, the Lychakiv cemetery in Lviv has been the resting place of those who have defended the city against invaders throughout its history. Close to the Austro-Hungarian graves or those dating from the Second World War, a forest of flags has sprung up on freshly dug tombs, such as that of Y.L Petrov, who fell in 2023 defending the freedom of his country.

Summer 2025, Italy, Hou begins her diary. Combining her notes and elegant still shots, she documents the places, the strangeness, and all that distances her from her native China. Her mother's voice, her orders, and even the ideograms evaporate: Cassine, cinema and English become refuges, new spaces for creation, memory and life.

Thana Faroq returns to Yemen after a decade of geographical and emotional separation. Oscillating between personal drawings, intimate voice recordings and footage from the streets of Yemen, her thoughts about home take on new forms. As photographs from the past reawaken old memories, this fragmented journey slowly transforms itself into a gentle, personal reflection on absence, belonging and the power of memory when conflict reshapes a place forever.

Shenzhen, New York. Cities blur into each other. In nocturnal heat, a typhoon is approaching as two queer voices surface, unsettled. A hybrid experimental documentary of the in-between state, Your City measures presence through the temperature of urban life.

Between the all-too-familiar prison walls and his mother's house, Ryan grapples with himself, eventually finding an escape with the sheep in the verdant fields of Northern Ireland. Ross McClean (No Mean City, VdR 2025), whose great-grandfather was also a unionist, offers his protagonist a space for freedom, a friendly and graceful embrace, in which to escape determinism.

Along an old country road, where an ancient legend of the sea, wolves, and men lingers, three generations of women come together to face a deep sadness. Something is changing: the time has come to remember buried dreams, mend broken ties, consult the tarot, free themselves from their fate and bring the old legend back to life. A magical and empowering fable.

Every year, the inhabitants of the rural region of Valdreu in Portugal flock to the church of Santo Antonio de Mixoes da Serra to have their cows, horses, cats, chickens and rabbits blessed. Loznitsa's static shots sardonically capture the theatricality of a religious festival passed down through generations, celebrating a "miracle" that has become mechanical.

In the waiting room of an isolated railway station, individuals sleep soundly while waiting for their train. Sergei Loznitsa's static camera tenderly lingers on these lethargic, inaccessible bodies, deeply immersed in themselves. Anonymous and silent, they seem to embody a form of self-sufficient, underground life, inaccessible to the oppression of power.

A Wen, 38, a businessman and family man in Barcelona, is also the filmmaker's brother. Just like in the gangster movies they watched on VHS as kids, he became involved in the gangs of the Chinese community in Spain in his youth. Without judgement or romanticisation, Xisi Sofia Ye Chen observes a man torn between criminal heritage, familial duty and a search for moral clarity, composing an intimate and powerful portrait.

A life of political commitment led filmmaker Michèle Firk from the underground support network of the Algerian FLN to the guerrilla struggle in Guatemala. In 1966, she was in Havana when the Tricontinental took place, a conference aimed at forming a united anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist front of countries from the Global South. Laura Cazador dedicates a rich and fascinating archival film to their intertwined histories.

Gold does not hydrate. Just one of the keen observations in this western tracing the portraits of three pioneering families lost in the Oregon plains in 1845, originally in the search for a better life in the West, which is quickly reduced to a simple quest for water. In this context, the arid prairies and wind-battered faces possess a cruel beauty.

Amina lives with an invisible chronic illness that has imprisoned her in an exhausted body. To better understand this elusive illness, her brother Liam makes her a room of her own where she can exist as something other than a patient. Between documentary observation and artistic rendering, the film builds a luminous and delicate portrait of a fraternal bond and subjects our able-bodied world to scrutiny.

Three Iranian women, filmmakers and childhood friends, explore through filmed correspondence the different paths their lives have taken: remaining in their native country, emigrating or living in exile. Over the course of thirteen years of life, the images examine the notion of home and the relationships that matter. A striking and sensitive film about friendship in times of political turmoil and repression.

In a diligent attempt, Thomas seeks to find a final resting place for his only child, but he is surprised that today is not the right day to do so.

Yves Bouvier brokers masterpieces, from da Vinci to Rothko, into the private collection of Dmitry Rybolovlev until Bouvier is accused of a billion-dollar betrayal. Rising ambitions, frayed relationships, and bruised egos fuel a decade-long all-out war between the Swiss art dealer and the elusive Russian oligarch.

Didier works on a cattle farm. Deaf from birth, he lives alone in an isolated house in the countryside. Since the death of his brother and only companion, Claude, he has taken refuge in his work. While the farm experiences a health crisis, Didier is driven by a critical need: to reinvent his language, to make himself understood and to transform his disability into a strength.

Between reality and imagination, science and sensations, Raouf Moussa explores his sense of belonging, inscribed in a fragmented cultural no-man's land. How can one belong to a landscape when the horizon is never attainable and always receding? A unique and personal documentary essay exploring fields and representations, maps and territories.

2013. Civil war rages and Almourad Aldeeb is imprisoned by the Syrian regime for several months before managing to flee to Germany. After the fall of the dictatorship, he returns to the scene of his torment. Like a silent cry, his emotionless voiceover recounts the horrors that he and his friends endured. A stark and terrifying foray into Assad's prisons.

When the filmmaker's sister undergoes a cosmetic procedure on her bottom, no one in the family knows what to think. Taïna De Coen embarks on a joyful family investigation to try to understand why our bodies in their pure form are no longer enough. In this amusing fable, we discover that everyone has their little secrets to feeling good in a world where image is everything.

In Miguel Burnier, a small, deserted town in Minas Gerais, Brazil, a few remaining inhabitants have been trying since 2005 to survive the purchase of their land by a mining giant. Tormented by unemployment, isolation and alcoholism, theytry their best to keep their community together and to breathe new life into this village where the world seems to have collapsed.

Mitrovica is an ethnically divided city in Kosovo, home to both Albanians and Serbs. The landscape, frozen by conflict, narrates two poems about dying mothers. Two people appear to be lost in the ruins, while cherry trees blossom.

Here we follow the production of a film about debt, where the protagonist is a debt-crippled Pinocchio – crowned the king of debt – ready to do anything to stay in power. In the search for funding for this political satire, the grand fiction on which our economic system is based – between scams and legal loopholes – is revealed.

The Interpreter follows Amjad, a Syrian refugee in the UK, as he retrains to become a community interpreter, returning to the very system that once interrogated him. The film boldly questions neutrality and reveals the interpreter's role as both voice and barrier, where translation becomes subversion and connection.

In the 2010s, Loznitsa began exploring places marked by the tragedies of the 20th century. Here is the "old" Jewish cemetery in Riga, where more than 1000 Jews killed by the Nazis in the ghetto's streets and houses were buried. It is now a park dotted with tombstones and frequented by drunks, children and American tourists.

A filmmaker imagines his wife's death as a mysterious disappearance in the Swiss Alps, casting his real family in an experimental exploration of grief and the search for closure. Inspired by literary autofiction, Rafael Palacio Illingworth unsettlingly blurs the line between reality, intimacy, tale and narration in an attempt to defy death itself.

Having arrived from Ukraine, Russia, and Lithuania, Natalia, Igor, Sergei and Anna are employed at the shipyards in Saint-Nazaire. Dimly lit shadows silhouetted against the lights of the port, as the blue hour gives way to dawn they tell Clément Pinteaux what they have left behind and what they hope to find on their journey into exile.

Observed by an otherworldly gaze, the modern commercial downtown Los Angeles, immersed in the deepest night, becomes the setting for a sound ritual and visual symphony. Thanks to one man's dreams, the songs of the many species of birds that once inhabited the area return – back from the time when a river still flowed through it and a native village stood there.

When an unplanned baby nicknamed Guava enters the lives of conservative mother Cuc, troubled daughter Mai, and detached gay son Quang, the trio travels back in time through their family diaries and photos. With his first film, Quang creates a time capsule for Guava, in which mending ruptured bonds and preparing for a new cycle of motherhood will hopefully help acceptance prevail.

When a vast solar park is built in the desert, gradually transforming the landscape, a nomadic Berber tribe is forced to abandon its centuries-old way of life. Jérôme le Maire depicts the hidden costs of progress, revealing the resilience and adaptability of a community forced to reinvent itself in the shadow of the renewable energy revolution.

Ignacio Ceroi is trying to track down a man whose daily life he has been following through videos recovered from an old camera. Who is this man? And would he be pleased to know that he has dedicated a film to him? Would he be able to forgive him for his voyeurism? A playful and surprising film about the memories, lies and ghosts that populate our past.

After the sudden disappearance of her partner one summer in Corsica, Lou Colpé returns to Charleroi. Their home, a place where the absence is tangible, is transformed into a sanctuary. Everything there becomes a treasure and a ritual. She films what is reinvented every day: her survival. A moving manual for grief, Comme un château fort captivates with its luminosity, its humour and its masterful ode to friendship.

For 30 years, a doctor from Paris has maintained a friendship with a fisherman on Tristan da Cunha, the most isolated inhabited island in the world. Now he travels back one more time, with the plan to stay there for good.

The voice we hear comes from far off-screen, thousands of kilometres away from the vistas of Toronto unfolding before us. These are countless voicemails from Colombia left by the director's loving grandmother. He listens to them silently, responding with images permeated with loneliness rather than words, looking around to delve into himself and his family history.

Using previously unseen footage shot by Lenfilms studio operators in August 1991 during the failed coup led by communists hostile to perestroika, Loznitsa chronicles the "event" that would precipitate the fall of the USSR. But who are the people gathered in Palace Square in Leningrad, staring into the camera? Victors or victims?

In Une chambre à elles, Lucia Martinez Garcia – a successor to Virginia Woolf – explores the intimate life of three women filmed in their bedrooms. In front of their mirrors, they open up, revealing the delicate dance between mental health and self-construction. A sublime reinterpretation of a seminal feminist work and a magnificent collective story of power.

The German government refuses to pay reparations for its occupation of Namibia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and for genocide of the indigenous population. Instead, it offers development cooperation programmes that exude a disheartening neo-colonialism and appalling racism, disguised as solidarity, obvious to everyone except German officials and nostalgic tourists.

In an attempt to gain financial legitimacy, betting systems are now prediction markets, governing a portion of global investments. Tripalium, a title evoking ancient tortures, reminds us of betting's historic links to horseracing, animal bodies exploited and abused in the name of a ruthless profit-extraction model now mirroring the entire current economy.

Rime Tsujino wonders why Miso, her German Shepherd, loves her boyfriend more than her. He always makes a fuss of him when he arrives home, while ignoring her. Yet it is she who takes the time to train him. Is Miso just an ingrate? She decides to ask him the question, face to face. An amusing study of our need for affection.

The prison in Volterra, Tuscany, is home to a unique artistic practice: It is within these walls that Armando Punzo, shut away for three decades with men serving long sentences, has created his plays. Elsa Amiel creates a magnificent dialogue between theatre and cinema, transforming the prison space into a paradoxical experience of freedom and reflection.

On 3 March 2019, Julie Douib was murdered by her ex-husband in Corsica. It was a predictable femicide – the man was already known to be dangerous. Why was this murder not prevented? Beyond this particular case, #SainteJulie reveals the mechanisms of everyday misogyny at work in society. A comprehensive investigation, conducted with intelligence and great sensitivity.

For 40 years, Ulrich Tilgner travelled throughout the Middle East as a reporter for Germantelevision. In the role of melancholic witness, he revisits this region, devastated with the active support of Western powers, reconnecting with his contacts and friends of the time to assess the extent of a disaster that Edgar Hagen's film re-implants in our memory saturated by the acceleration of geopolitical news.

At night, at the EDM Playhouse club in Chengdu, the euphoria of some feeds on the fatigue of others. The crowd, caught between the desire for an unfettered expression of life and the outward display of wealth, finds its contrast in the exhaustion of those who serve the revelry and in the precarity of their work. Club Heaven captures this choreography of mirrored bodies through precise observation and biting social commentary.

Shortly before Christmas 1973, the crew of Skylab, NASA's first space station, went on strike. Based on transcripts of exchanges with the control centre on Earth, Graeme Arnfield reconstructs this episode, obscured by the heroic narrative of space adventure, in real time and paints an iconoclastic portrait of the astronaut asoverworked labourer.

Zuania, an island in the Puerto Rico archipelago and former US military test site, has become a popular Caribbean tourist destination. Beatriz guides them through streets populated by wild horses and into a prohibited irradiated zone. Alba Jaramillo composes a captivating speculative essay to evoke a decolonisation that never happened.

The Bugis, the largest ethnic group in South Sulawesi, Indonesia, recognise five genders. The fifth is the "bissu", who transcend distinctions between male and female and hold a special place in society and religion. For Eka, one of the last remaining, the time has come for the trip they have been waiting for all their life: the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca.

A journey to Michoacán's hypermasculine rodeos descends into the subconscious of memory, queer desire, and longing, leading to a reckoning with the wounds and beauty of a home left behind.

Through the French archives of the INA, Loznitsa pursues his reflection on the ceremonial staging of power, this time with a playful look at the high-society gatherings of the 1950s–1960s at the Palais Garnier. The Ukrainian filmmaker captures the pageantry of the elites and the carefree onlookers, who are soon swept away by the presence and voice of the "Divina" Callas.

Muddy Currents goes back to the literal source of Israeli domination in the settlements in Palestine. Starting with the capture of water, artist Shadi Habib Allah explores how a people is deprived of its natural and basic resources, formally asking the question: how do we represent the lack of what is necessary?

Nicole, 55, and her mother Alberte, 87, live together in a villa on the shores of Lake Geneva. Through their habits, they become trapped in codependency: Nicole seems incapable of autonomy, while Alberte is terrified at the idea of being alone. But as she grows closer to Lauren, her filmmaker niece, Nicole begins to explore the possibility of emancipation. A family film that adopts gentleness as its driving force.

Father and son Tero and Henri live a life of deep affectionate complicity, spending their time repairing engines and reheating meals. When Henri moves in with his girlfriend, Alina, Tero has to relearn life without him. A moving yet drily humorous story about men coming to terms with life's long apprenticeship, the absurdity of existence and the fear of loneliness.

There was once a group of Peruvian anarchist poets forced into hiding who, during their secret meetings, sought to assume a non-human identity. Drawing on the famous Persian fable of the same name, the filmmaker translates the power of poetry and friendship into images and sound, serving as def iant stances against the established order.

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?
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.
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.

Palestinians are fighting annihilation in maternity clinics, too. Like many wives of prisoners in Israeli jails, Hind is trying to smuggle her husband's sperm in order to conceive a child and cling to hope for the future. But the operation is risky: sperm has a short shelf life, and she must race against time, checkpoints, and traffic in the West Bank, while bombs fall on Gaza.

Ghariba is a playful, moving portrait of some women in Morocco. Blending reality TV, home video, and ethnographic film, its intimate, whimsical style uses digital manipulation to both heighten and unsettle its subjects' self-presentations. They speak of love, desire, friendship, loneliness, and community, all set against the fear of aging.

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.
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.
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.

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

Mark has settled down – with a wife and a real job and a kid on the way, he's got more responsibilities and less time to mess around. When his old friend Kurt reemerges from his ragtag past with the offer of a weekend trip to the Bagby Hot Springs in the Cascade Mountains, he welcomes the respite. But an ineffable sadness grows between Mark and Kurt as they travel east, a painful awareness of how their paths have diverged. Old Joy, luminously directed by Kelly Reichardt, tells the story of a friendship and, eventually, the healing potential of the American landscape.

A Chinese wannabe artist drifts between Berlin's overwhelming queer scene and her traditional family in Beijing. With wit and insight, the film follows her search for identity and belonging in a globalised but polarised world.

The former Nazi concentration camp of Sachsenhausen, near Berlin, has become a popular tourist destination. A strange, connected tribe roams across it in all directions, smartphones at the ready. In static long takes, Loznitsa observes the group as it itself observes, watches the rituals and meditates on the meaning of this place of memory that has become a consumer good like any other.

Wendy is traveling North with her dog Lucy towards Alaska, where a good paying job awaits her, when her car breaks down in a small town. Already barely making ends meet, she's devastated by this setback; drifters at the edge of town threaten her and locals treat her with indifference. It's bad enough that she's stuck, and struggling to keep herself fed, but somehow the worst of it all is the worry that she won't be able to take care of Lucy, her constant companion, the one being she feels responsible for.

Through performances at the Newport Folk Festivals 1963 to 1966, Newport and the Great Folk Dream revels in a generation's discovery of its voice through their rediscovery of American musical traditions.

On 29 and 30 September 1941, the Einsatzgruppen, assisted by Ukrainian auxiliaries, slaughtered 30,771 Jews in a ravine near Kyiv, in full view of the local population. Loznitsa uses previously unseen archival footage of the German occupation of Ukraine and the following decade to reconstruct the context of the largest mass shooting of the Holocaust.

Don and Jerry, factory workers raised on comics and B-movies, are making their own low-budget horror film with Jeff, Joel, and Mark. Two weeks in, chaos erupts and they flee Michigan. This legendary documentary isn't just about the making of a film – it's a diary of friendship, love, violence, boredom, money, and encountering the Midwest when you're from somewhere else.

Maja Penčič roams the streets of Prague, camera in hand, conducting wild investigations into the state of mind of her compatriots. Amidst the inebriated interactions, a picture emerges of Czech youth who openly share their opinions on the climate crisis, the war in Ukraine, feminism, romantic turmoil and consensual sexuality.

American Doctor is a vérité non-fiction film following three prominent physicians–Palestinian, Jewish and Zoroastrian—friends who couldn't be more different but are bound by their shared oath to save lives. Dr. Thaer Ahmad is measured and strategic, Dr. Mark Perlmutter is blunt and wears his heart on his sleeve, and Dr. Feroze Sidhwa is media-savvy and prolific. Filmed in unfolding, on-the-ground scenes, the story follows them from a Gazan hospital under siege, to the halls of Congress. Together they fight to keep a promise to their Palestinian colleagues and patients, to continue the struggle where it matters most: the United States.

What to preserve and/or abandon in order to build the future? Examining the progress that straitjackets modern societies, in 1+1+1 Ondřej Vavrečka creates an unrestrained cinematic experience fuelled by absurd acting performances, moments of musical comedy, keen intellectual reflections and documentary triviality.

Charlyne pushes open the door of a bar to see "how others find ways to cope with their loneliness". There, she meets Alain, Joufflu, Pascal and the others. As the buses and the jass card games come and go, Charlyne becomes a regular. From this immutable backdrop emerges a brilliant filmmaker, in search of her place both in the frame and in life.

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.

For the Centre Pompidou's "Où en-êtes vous?" (Where do you stand?) collection, Reichardt films artists Jessica Jackson Hutchins and Alexander Demetriou, sharing a studio in Long Beach where they sculpt clay. In preparation for her feature film Showing Up, she records their movements, their ways of observing, attempting to capture the relationship between them and their work.

Defying the conservative forces in her community, Judge Khatoon establishes the first female Islamic court in Mumbai. Women come forward to denounce the violence they face and seek justice, challenging and overturning the existing power dynamics. Sophie Schrago, sitting in a corner of the tiny office, witnesses these cases which resonate with the lives of many other women.

If water could speak and we could understand it, we would hear how absurd it finds the categorisations of living things created by human science, the lack of respect for the territory of others, the desire to colonise... In Zurich, a city undergoing rapid urbanisation, a woman hears its voice inviting us to change our perspective on the world.

In this deceptively promethean short film shot in a foundry and a brickyard, the Ukrainian filmmaker describes the transformation of matter. Through a rigorous composition of shots that observe movements and attitudes in minute detail, Loznitsa powerfully captures the enslaving relationship that humans maintain with the world of machines.

Websites mimicking the appearance of journalistic media, but which mainly generate advertising revenue by disseminating disinformation, are spreading like wildfire online. In this 3D animated documentary, Spray and Pray plunges us into the dark side of the web, where the anti-LGBTQ+ political agenda serves the economic interests of an unscrupulous minority.

Since 2014, pro-Russian separatists and Ukrainians have been clashing in Donbass. For this fourth fiction film, Sergei Loznitsa creates thirteen sequences using videos posted on YouTube that document daily life in this occupied territory. With razor-sharp precision, his film brilliantly reveals the grotesque and tragic unleashed by this hybrid war.

Sergei Loznitsa questions the consequences of the invasion of one country by another.

July 2023. Nagorno-Karabakh has been under siege by Azerbaijan for seven months. As war draws nearer, Comes Chahbazian asks his friend Artziv to f ilm his daily life with his wife Tatev and their five children. These are images of astonishing tenderness that reveal the silent resistance of a people on the verge of fleeing forever.

While Lhakpa completes his lengthy studies to become a Buddhist monk, his brother, Sang Bahadur, works as a porter for the international travellers who turn Everest into a tourist hub. Family issues force the youngest to come out of retirement to earn a living. In so doing, he is forced to confront the modern world in all its paradoxical complexity.

In the remote Liangshan Mountains, 14-year-old Qihuo and her friends set out to find a skirt for her rite of passage. What begins as a small quest drifts into a suspended space of childhood, where time slows and the world is vast.

The profound desire to become a mother and pressure from her surroundings drive Alejandra to fake a pregnancy. What begins as a simple lie turns into a complex charade and unleashes a media scandal that makes it impossible for her to continue the pretence.

Growing up alongside her non-verbal brother with a developmental disability, Jinhyun has always sensed the invisible boundaries society draws between them. Her film journeys through the institutions marked by abuse, tracing the shape of a world built on exclusion. Where language thins, what remains is felt – an ambitious cinematic gesture toward all that could never become words.

Safe Spaces explores the intimate lives of three women trying to reconnect with their bodies, from which they have been distanced against their will. They welcome the camera's gaze as they rediscover themselves and, through sensual experiments, explore sensations, including pain, in order to find themselves and meet the other.

In 1970, Mooney and two cohorts wander into a museum in broad daylight and steal four paintings. When holding onto the art proves more difficult than stealing them, Mooney is relegated to a life on the run.

The Soviet "Nuremberg", contemporaneous with the trial of Nazi leaders, took place in January 1946 in Kyiv. In his latest re-edited film to date, Loznitsa reconstructs the key moments from a corpus of unpublished archives in order to better expose the "banality of evil", at a time when the Russian invader continues to commit atrocities on Ukrainian territory.

In a remote town in Russia, ordinary people wait for a bus. An uninterrupted succession of long-focal length panoramic shots lingers on bodies and faces, capturing fragments of their miseries and troubles. Through the brilliant illusion of a single camera movement, the "landscape" painted by Loznitsa embraces the tragicomic polyphony of an oppressed people.

Siham and Hafida are two chikha performers who sing traditional Moroccan Aita, a style of music which is a historical symbol of resistance against French colonisation. Several generations apart, they are also bitter rivals. Bennani stages this melodrama with a mischievous touch, in the style of reality TV.

In the streets of Algiers, jacaranda trees bloom like shards of memory. Following in the footsteps of his father, Ameziane, a writer haunted by these purple trees, Hassen Ferhani (VdR Atelier 2022, Afric Hotel VdR 2011 and Tarzan, Don Quichotte et nous VdR 2013) explores the city, legacy and love. A rich and intimate quest in which writing, filming or choosing beauty become acts of resistance.

In the historic centre of Palermo, another Italian city ravaged by overtourism, two filmmakers document a liminal moment in the life of a noble palace falling into ruin, where they live alongside other castaways of a city facing extinction, between the end of a centuries-long glorious decline and the beginning of a treacherous rebirth.

An owl sits on a branch in the forest at night. From its majestic perch, it observes its surroundings, just as we observe ours. A simple cinematic device that reminds us why we love to watch animals, and which crystallises the special role that Kelly Reichardt confers on them in her films - simply that of existing, nothing more, nothing less.

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?

A woman revisits her 14 childhood homes as one might reread a personal diary. The camera, with its static grace, allows the memories to flow. A wall leaks, a tree becomes a friend, a body changes, Diana dies, a mother struggles. Between anecdotes and pivotal events, a political consciousness takes shape: for these homes are built on Aboriginal land.

The murder of a defenseless leader of an indigenous people draws parallels to decades of land theft and centuries of colonialism in Lucrecia Martel's documentary debut.

A segment of the anthology film "Bridges of Sarajevo", which brought together thirteen contemporary filmmakers at the initiative of Jean-Michel Frodon, Reflections adopts a simple approach: using a series of static shots of the capital, Loznitsa superimposes portraits of fighters who seem to animate the urban spaces with their ingrained presence.

In the heart of the Beauce plains, strange phenomena are reviving memories of a local star: the Aérotrain. The memory of this revolutionary invention, which some had wanted consigned to oblivion, is kept alive by a handful of enthusiasts and model makers. Théo Audoire pays tribute to them in this crime thriller born from an unlikely mix of genres.

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

Teleporting migrants and US troopers are segregated on the CAPS, an island of metamorphosing bodies and virtual realities.
The final chapter in a dystopian sci-fi trilogy, Life on the CAPS imagines a world where unauthorised migrants disassemble their bodies and teleport. They have been detained by US immigration troopers on the CAPS, a once-transitory island in the Atlantic Ocean that became a city with its own music, dance and high-tech culture. The migrants develop plastic faces or adaptable physical forms if they do not properly rematerialise—like Kamal, who has bought a new body to fight for liberation. Occupying separate zones, troopers and migrants have bizarre online encounters via deep-sea data cables. This film speculates on the states of possibility and revolution that can emerge from a world of bodily fluidity and virtual realities. A co-commission by Nottingham Contemporary and The Renaissance Society.

A day on a Moscow construction site, where everything seems to obey the immutable laws of the socialist planned economy. For his début student short, Sergei Loznitsa created a film structured as a musical "humoresque". The chaotic, comical ballet of the workers will eventually fall into place and the house will be built!

On his arduous journey through the desert and the years it took to produce the award-winning Sirāt, Oliver Laxe was accompanied by the faithful and attentive Uberto Rapisardi, who captured the preparation and shoot, as well as moments of solitary reflection, profound communion, discouragement and elation, creating a unique behind-the-scenes account that takes on a life of its own.

Kelly Reichardt's attentive and patient camera films the sculptor Lizzy – played by Michelle Williams – and her daily life in the lead-up to her opening at a Portland gallery. We participate in a complex and ambivalent reflection on the process of artistic creation, from which emerge as many nameless frustrations as moments of intense ecstasy.

The expanses of the American West take center stage in this intimately observed triptych from Kelly Reichardt. Adapted from three short stories by Maile Meloy and unfolding in self-contained but interlocking episodes, Certain Women navigates the subtle shifts in personal desire and social expectation that unsettle the circumscribed lives of its characters: a lawyer (Laura Dern) forced to subdue a troubled client; a wife and mother (Michelle Williams) whose plans to construct her dream home reveal fissures in her marriage; and a night-school teacher (Kristen Stewart) who forms a tenuous bond with a lonely ranch hand (Lily Gladstone), whose longing for connection delivers an unexpected jolt of emotional immediacy. With unassuming craft, Reichardt captures the rhythms of daily life in small-town Montana through these fine-grained portraits of women trapped within the landscape's wide-open spaces.