Playlist
Smugglers transport people across the border to Europe during an endless, sleepless night. A cinematic film shot in pitch darkness, which should be experienced in the cinema at all costs.
A beech tree suffering from a strange form of anorexia writes a diary on its own bark for a year. In a world shaken by climate collapse, its fragile body becomes a reflection of our struggle to adapt.
As the blue sky meets the surrounding seas, the native-turned-archeologist Hassan Al-Failakawy returns to his abandoned island of Failaka, off the coast of Kuwait, after decades of displacement.
A woman talks to us from inside a machine that records her brain activity. She describes a men- tal labyrinth combining an old amusement park called Dreamland, 19th-century dream photo- graphs, contemporary experiments in mental de- coding using AI, and Prophetic, a start-up whose goal is to control dreams. But what do our dreams see when they look back at us? like moths to light is a meditation on the future of our dream worlds in the age of neurocapitalism.
Credits:
Cinematography: Artur Pol Camprubi
Edition : Dina Ekchajzer
Sound by : Laura Tomas
Music by : Hara Alonso
Image: Colour, black and white - 1.85:1
From the Mountain We See the Mountain blends haunting imagery and whispered myth to explore a land marked by ecological trauma and the colonial experience. As animals and humans cautiously re-emerge after a forest fire, rumours swirl: was it an accident, an act of nature, or something more insidious? Through eerie nighttime scenes, surreal lighting and interviews lit by the flicker of imagined flames, the film evokes a sense of environmental dystopia and quiet resistance. Balancing elements of myth, sci-fi and thriller, the film conjures a land reckoning with monsters it did not create.
In the art installation Krakatoa, having its world premiere at IFFR 2026, visual artist and filmmaker Carlos Casas takes you on an intense, sensory journey. Through images, sound and vibration, he conjures the echo of "the loudest scream ever": the 1883 eruption of the Indonesian Krakatoa volcano. That explosion, one of the greatest natural disasters of modern times, forms the starting point for Casas' exploration of nature, perception and our connection to the earth. The consequences of the eruption were visible across the globe: skies turned red, temperatures fluctuated and, with the rise of international news channels, reports travelled faster than ever before. The Krakatoa eruption sparked key ideas about ecology, the sublime in nature and apocalyptic imaginings that continue to shape art and culture today. Casas approaches the volcano not merely as an historic event, but as a prism through which to understand the current ecological crisis – a force revealing how creation and destruction go hand in hand.
OAO introduces us to Anna Wallace, a mezzo-soprano singer who is processing a family trauma. It is a portrait in which the protagonist seeks healing and rebirth through the medium of film.
Restaging Kathy Acker's volume of the same name, this 16mm essay renders dying landscapes and burning light leaks to contemplate the social isolation, psychosexual crisis, and interior reckoning precipitated by a diagnosis of breast cancer.
What do a hospice documentary, wildfires in Greece, and a diaphragmatic hernia have in common? Leave that to Anna Vasof – prop master extraordinaire and fervent maker of surprising connections. Just when you think you've got a handle on things, she turns everything on its head. Balancing her signature playful take on the everyday with a vulnerable openness and an engagement with urgent issues, she finds the unexpected in the familiar, and the familiar in the unexpected.
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.
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.
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.
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."
With a radical premiss that strips cinema of its artifices to expose its entrails, Víctor Ladera expresses a hypnotic journey of unconventional minimalist technique, filming with an analogue video camera, without editing, and with an obsessive soundtrack created with a cassette tape recorder.
In a subtly dystopian representation of reality, the neighbourhood of Fontainhas (Porto) becomes caught up in a murky plot of real estate speculation. Disappearances and other disturbing elements arouse the suspicions of one of the neighbours.
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.
After her mother's death, Nao retreats to a Zen temple to wrestle with grief. Blending family archives, hand-drawn animation and performance art, this seductively meditative documentary explores suffering, and the gentle art of transcending it.
The film brings together two individuals—an immigrant filmmaker from Belarus and a ten-year-old girl from a southern village in Kyrgyzstan. Through fragments of their lives, they discover invisible threads connecting their fears, hopes and longing for home.
Cairo, 2007. Abdellah searches for Omar, his old companion who has disappeared among the city's busy streets. A visit with the legendary Youssef Chahine, a nighttime film shoot at the pyramids, and maritime revelry are all captured on nostalgia-textured video while Omar—a brilliant structuring absence—haunts proceedings until, during a final encounter, comfort is found in cinema and personal touch alike.
The mourning for a father and the absences, intertwined with what remains. Letters, written by birds that used to visit the filmmaker when she was a child, now reveal secrets to her son, whom she watches grow up.
The night flowers in Daria's garden hide the secrets of a country that has turned love stories into routine crime scenes. A tale of patriarchal violence combined with botanical (mis)uses, told from the archives of Iranian cinema.