Playlist
In the Indian township of Durban, where post-apartheid violence still simmers, Lishana cares for her dying mother. Through her photographic practice, she reflects on life and death, past and present, navigating between the tangible and the mystical.
"I blame Michel Seydoux, with whom I have worked for forty years, for being responsible for the making and the release of my next film. After pushing me—and even grabbing hold of me, being younger and stronger—he forced me to finish putting into cinematic order my final desires to film. Having, it is said, reached a gentle serenity, may I ask him not to pass on any possible opinions about the film to me? I can already see his smile..." Having, it is said, reached a gentle serenity, may I ask him not to pass on any possible opinions about the film to me? I can already see his smile..."
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.
For more than thirty years, photographer Alessandra Sanguinetti has documented the lives of cousins Guillermina Aranciaga and Belinda Stutz in rural Argentina. Beginning in childhood and continuing into adulthood, the film follows their enduring friendship as they navigate dreams, motherhood, loss, and the passage of time. Blending documentary observation with the visual language of Sanguinetti's celebrated photographic work, The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer is a meditation on memory, identity, and the fleeting nature of youth.
The Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney delivers his most ambitious and epic work in exploring the history of the world's richest man, Elon Musk.
Welcome to Mississauga where lawns are clipped, neighbors are watchful and no blade of grass dares misbehave. Except at Wolf Ruck's place. His lawn grows wild, and so does the trouble.
When the ooligan vanishes from Bella Coola, its absence remains like a scar, pointing to a history that reaches far beyond the river. From ramshackled Nuxalk Radio, voices rise through crackling airwaves to trace the forces no one was meant to uncover. What begins as a local broadcast becomes an awakening as testimony, watercolour animation and rare archival weave a story of survival, return and the quiet revolution of a Nation that refuses to disappear.
Barbara Kopple (TIFF '76's Harlan County, U.S.A.) looks at three crucial labour battles as they unfold in New York City involving workers from UPS, Amazon, and deliveristas for DoorDash and GrubHub.
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.
Biologist Joanne Chory is undertaking the final mission of her lauded career: supercharging crop plants to sequester carbon deep into Earth's soil, with the goal of cutting the pace of climate change in half. But she's racing the two ticking clocks of ecological collapse and her own advancing Parkinson's disease.
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.
One hundred years after the first flight between Belgium and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Brussels Airlines approaches Collectif Faire-Part with a proposal to show their work on board their flights. Interwoven with archival footage and testimonies of activists and survivors of in-flight violence, the collective's internal dialogue in What We Said to Brussels Airlines poses a variety of questions and opens up space for critical reflection.
Pacífico is the name of a region, but also that of a force. A land where music accompanies life, where one can be reborn.
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.
An intimate portrait of two people bound by love, ambition, and the pursuit of the impossible. Elite ski mountaineers Jim Morrison and Hilaree Nelson fell deeply in love while reaching the pinnacle of their sport: Everest's north face.
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.
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.
Join a cadre of scientists as they venture far offshore in search of deep-sea corals. These elusive animals, which feed on marine snow, hold an incredible secret about the relationship between the atmosphere, the surface ocean, and the deep in the Gulf of Maine – which is warming faster than 99% of the world's oceans.
Joshua Oppenheimer is back with a short film about technology, self-deception, and the dream of immortality under the dazzling Californian sun.
Opening with a cat and mouse car chase between ICE agents and neighborhood observers, They're Here is a searing and dystopian dispatch from occupied Minneapolis. The film follows Edén Villa (pseudonym) and anonymous residents as they evade, resist, and surveil a masked paramilitary force abducting friends and neighbors. Using dashcam footage, crowdsourced data, and POV cinema, They're Here takes the viewer inside the occupation of an American city.
On the trail of the earthly remains of the victims of Franco's regime in a film that combines modern technology and paper archives in a historical investigation based on the director's own research through Forensic Architecture.
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.
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.
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.
A multilayered essay linking national, international, and personal histories through narrative fragments, documentaries, and industrial cinema to chronicle the 1976 Shiraz Art Festival boycott.
Follows filmmaker Mohanad Yaqubi as he responds to a 2018 collaboration invitation from Lebanese filmmaker Jocelyne Saab, who died before receiving his answer, through an exploration of her life and work.
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.
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.
Boys in Downeast Maine are shaped by the brutal winters, their harvesting of the ocean's bounty and the rigid codes of their fathers. explores growing up in a community where a man's worth is often defined by the strength of his back.
A newly intimate look at one of the 20th century's most celebrated — and imitated — artists, Jean-Michel Basquiat, from the perspective of the people who knew him best: his family.
Through never-before-seen archival footage and first-hand accounts of those who knew him best, the film traces Archbishop Desmond Tutu's rise as the voice of the oppressed, guided by faith, hope and an understanding of the power of forgiveness.
In a quiet Toronto apartment, an immigrant mother finds comfort in her Alexa—weather updates, love songs, and the time back home become a lifeline to the Philippines, reminding her of the family she left behind. In the Morning Sun is a gentle portrait of aging, migration, and memory. Inspired by the filmmaker's desire to preserve the warmth of his parents, the film reflects on the quiet sacrifices of immigration and the rituals that keep love alive across distance. As his nieces and nephews begin to face their own life choices, their reflections echo the journey his mother once made, revealing the duality of her experience—the little girl she was, and the woman she became to survive.
Set in the largest protected wilderness on Earth, Listen is a short documentary following Alaskan sound recordist Hank Lentfer as he cares for his mother in the final stages of dementia and listens to a wild world falling silent. Through long, immersive takes and minimal narration, Listen is a sensory immersion and a tender demonstration of how listening can help us remember our true nature.
Haunted by nostalgia for a place they have never known, three gallery workers steal a Mooi Indië landscape painting and set off in search of the paradise it depicts. As their journey unfolds, reality dissolves into a dreamlike passage where keroncong music, colonial imagery, and archival ghosts blur the boundaries between past and present. Conceived as the cinematic counterpart to the installation Silap Mata Bayang Berbalam and forming a diptych with Sola Fata, Obscura explores the enduring legacy of colonial representation and the illusion of an idyllic paradise.
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.
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.
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.
A twelve year old farmer brings his favourite goat to compete at a country fair in Maine, where a conversation about death changes everything.
A decade after his death, one of the most significant and compelling filmmakers of the past century has one last trick up his sleeve: a trove of never-before-seen footage that he believed to be the most important he ever filmed. Genre-defying director William Greaves searches for the divine origins of his own creativity at a cocktail party he masterminded in 1972 for the living luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance.
A visceral, formalist excavation of Salvadoran memory, witnessing unlikely survival through architectural scars and the sounds of civil war.
Set in rural Sardinia, a father and son are chosen to lead the ancient S'Ardia horse race. As the ritual approaches, their quiet world becomes entwined with centuries of faith, devotion, destiny, and danger.
Moving fluidly between performance and reflection, How to Clean a House in Ten Easy Steps imagines a world in which the director's mother Beatriz, a domestic worker in the US, is a best-selling author. Using the fabricated book as a framework to explore the complex conditions of her life, mother and daughter weave a fantastical and fragmented tale of immigration, domestic labor, authorship, and mythology.
Sea Change follows Abby Barrows, a Deer Isle oyster farmer examining how plastic-free aquaculture could save the waters that raised her.
An ex-guerrilla fighter and a farmer strive to adapt to life after war through competitive rafting in the Colombian Amazon, when political tides change.
Fish Film dives into the impact of salmon aquaculture on Downeast Maine's wild fish, and is a clarion call to help restore Maine's local watersheds.
Terunofuji, a Yokozuna —the highest rank in Sumo wrestling—is torn between his devotion to this tradition, his desire for its preservation, and the immense physical and emotional demands it places upon him. We encounter the beauty, discipline, and complexity of Sumo wrestling through an intimate, sensorial exploration of movement of wrestlers' bodies and sounds that compose their world.
Grace returned home to make a film about her father, estranged after years of his Oxycontin addiction. She knew it would be a black comedy, but she couldn't anticipate all that came next. Many years later, the trove of footage becomes the basis for a funny, tender, and poignant essay on family bonds—folding past and present, before and after—as a father and daughter search for understanding in the limited time they have left.
A divine vision inspired Hubert Taylor to pick up a home video camera and spend decades documenting the life of his Georgia hometown. His gaze keeps returning to his own father, the gospel singer Brother Theotis Taylor, whose legendary falsetto took him to Carnegie Hall. With co-director and music archivist Cyrus Moussavi, he unearths an unseen community archive and shapes it into a moving meditation on art, family, community, and legacy.
A visceral and intimate reflection on a Mi'kmaq family's multigenerational experience of assimilation, told through a collage of archival footage and sonic exploration.
It's all hands on deck to rescue Florida's last remaining corals, as a community of scientists and reef guardians unites against climate change and ongoing destruction.
When Phillips 66 closes a major Los Angeles refinery, a longtime worker and her daughter confront the hidden human cost of industrial labor.
As an invasive species threatens Maine's iconic ecosystems, a waterman, a chef, a science educator—and plenty of advertisers—share their plans to fight back.
After a sudden health crisis threatens to ground her forever, an elite skydiver considers the most ambitious high-altitude flight of her life and reclaims authority over her body and her future.
A young man new to the water tends a wooden boat through every Maine season, learning from an old boatbuilder how a coast is kept.
Across four seasons, the skilled craftspeople of Maine's Brooklin Boat Yard meticulously transform planks of Douglas fir, mahogany, and cedar into a 56-foot wooden sailboat—both a fading, time-honored tradition and a delicate business to manage. Sundance award-winning director Luke Lorentzen mirrors their patience, presence, and attention to detail in a reflection on the pride and value of labor that culminates in a breathtaking maiden voyage.
At dawn in western Hungary, 14-year-old Hunor and his family bring their greyhound dogs to clear wildlife from ZalaZone, one of Europe's most advanced autonomous vehicle test tracks. Their ancient knowledge quietly makes way for an ever more militarizing future.
Personal and institutional archives come together to resurrect the memory of Florida's Paradise Park, a waterpark that served as a site of Black leisure in Jim Crow America.
A newly born Highland cow, named Isla, and seven-year-old human child, also named Isla, go on an adventure, getting ready together to take part in a show.
Guided by a tribal historian, a Passamaquoddy elder honors her mother as she introduces the cultural practice of picking sweetgrass to her granddaughter.
In 1977, Carl Sagan fastened a Golden Record to the Voyager spacecraft, carrying Earth's images and sounds into deep space. Through archive, animation, and interviews, Nanette Burstein traces the astronomer's improbable journey from a research scientist to a gifted storyteller who inspired wonder, defended the value of evidence, and reshaped our understanding of the cosmos and our place in it.
During her glorious years as a sex worker in '90s and early 2000s Miami, Máxima documented the wild escapades she shared with her glamorous trans Latinx friends. Revisiting VHS tapes decades later, she reflects on where everyone ended up, what they carried with them, and the ghosts that linger. As past and present collapse, the images of their unfolding trajectories open a broader exploration of the conditions that have shaped their fates.
At the end of the Cold War, a motley crew of Soviet sailors builds their own sailboat, "Fazisi," and enters the perilous Whitbread Round the World Race. Sierra Pettengill crafts an epic journey through the crew's own words and layers of propulsive archival footage. As they navigate dangerous seas, personal tragedy, and the fall of the Berlin Wall, their improbable voyage becomes a modern history unfolding.
A farming cooperative in Western Maine prepares for their first winter while stewarding community with other Black farmers & cultivating Muslim foodways.
Revisiting family archives filmed by her younger brother, a filmmaker searches the memories of their childhood to understand how love and tenderness could have turned into anger and violence.