IndieLisboa 2024

25 Canções de Abril

Luís Gaspar

<p>Presented now in 4K digitalisation by Cinemateca Portuguesa, this film captured a show at the Coliseu do Porto in 1977. In the year of the 50th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution, we go back in time to feel the weight of the artists who gave their work a political tenor and supported the revolution &mdash; like Adriano Correia de Oliveira, Jos&eacute; Carlos Ary dos Santos and Carlos Paredes. The film includes a reading of political manifestos from the revolutionary process to date.</p>

27

Flóra Anna Buda

<p>Alice is 27 years old today. Even though she is suffocating a bit, she still lives with her parents and tends to live in her dreams to escape her dreary everyday life.</p>

512x512

Arthur Chopin

<p>An Internet user enters the mental space of an artificial intelligence in search of Francine Descartes, the daughter of Ren&eacute; Descartes. This intelligence ends up functioning by itself, without human intervention, creating an alternative and emaciated world that contains all the memory of the world.</p>

78 dana (78 Days)

Emilija Gašić

<p>After their father is conscripted during the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia, three sisters begin a Hi8 video diary in their countryside home. They film each other putting on make-up, picking cherries, playing party games, getting into fights and helping their mother cook. This fragile, intimate world is perhaps their only shelter from the reality of bombings, sirens and war.</p> <p>In her debut feature&nbsp;<strong>78 Days</strong>, Emilija Ga&scaron;ić fashions a touching coming-of-age tale throbbing with life. Set in the first half of 1999, when the NATO started attacking Serbia during the Kosovo war, Ga&scaron;ić&rsquo;s film zeroes in on a particular time and place to chart the limits of the children&rsquo;s carefree existence. The narrative adeptly interweaves the perspectives of the three sisters, each one at a different point on the road to adulthood, producing a composite picture of growing up during wartime.</p> <p>Not only does&nbsp;<strong>78 Days</strong>&nbsp;recreate the look, texture and poetics of home movies from the nineties with documentary accuracy, it is also attentive to the way cameras mediate the relationships between people. In observing the social dynamics of a domestic space with one shared camera,&nbsp;<strong>78 Days</strong>&nbsp;functions equally as an insightful work of technological ethnography.&nbsp;</p> <p><em>&ndash; Srikanth Srinivasan</em></p>

9 to 5 (2024)

Helena Miranda

<p>At night, the city breaks up into quiet and hustle and a magnificent yet deafening garbage truck disturbs it. It takes away leftovers and everything else forgotten in the fridge, it takes away tokens belonging to past lives. In the truck, it all gets crumpled and broken up.</p>

A Fidai Film

Kamal Aljafari

<p>In the summer of 1982, the Israeli army invaded Beirut and took advantage of the opportunity to seize the archives of the Palestinian Research Center. These archives contained many historical documents on Palestine, including a rich collection of photographs and films. These images have since been renamed and re-indexed according to the vision of their new custodians, the Israeli Ministry of Defense. Against these acts of dispossession and appropriation (one sequence shows the quiet violence of their authors), A Fidai Film offers a counter-narrative based on this loss, in order to restore the traces of the plundered Palestinian history. Kamal Aljafari re-examines these images, here exclusively cinematographic or televisual, and points out the complexity of their status as well as their mode of existence as a political object. A double movement unfolds, that of making these images resurface, sometimes precious testimonies restoring the life, the struggles of the Palestinian people, but also that of rethinking the implicit gaze of those who produced them (the colonial gesture). Kamal Aljafari kneads them, sometimes mistreats them, in order to bring out the underlying ideology, the exoticizing gaze as well as the gestures of dispossession: crossing out the comments of the victors and occupiers (from the British mandate to today), adding, colorizing, removing superimposed texts, modifying sounds, recombining, editing. A gesture of anger and struggle in action as much as a restitution of a distorted or erased memory, A Fidai Film claims to be a form of cinematographic sabotage, a combative film as the title unequivocally indicates. Nicolas Feodoroff</p>

Uma Mãe Vai À Praia (A Mother Goes To The Beach)

Pedro Hasrouny

<p>Teresa, a single mother, spends a day at the beach with her six-year-old son, Benji, and her sister Marga, who is back in Portugal for a summer vacation. What could have been a happy family day turns uncomfortable with Marga&#39;s constant critical comments about Benji.</p>

Yeohaengjaui Pilyo (A Traveler’s Needs)

Hong Sangsoo

<p>Nobody knows where the woman comes from. She is sitting on a park bench and diligently playing a child&rsquo;s recorder. She says she is from France. With no money or means of supporting herself, she has been advised to teach French. This is how she comes to have two Korean women as her pupils. The woman likes to walk barefoot and to lie down on rocks. And when she is feeling up to it, she tries to see each instant in a non-verbal way and to live life as rationally as she can. But things remain as hard as ever. She relies on the Korean alcoholic drink of makgeolli to provide a bit of comfort every day.</p>

À Mesa da Unidade Popular

Isabel Noronha Camilo de Sousa

<p>The Popular Unity Table was part of the furniture that, in the post-Independence period, the Mozambican State intended to attribute to all families and brought together the socialist idea of equality and social justice with the concept of National Unity, Frelimo&rsquo;s basic assumption for the harmonious development of the country. Today, we sit down at that table again, to revisit the process of building a Nation and the utopia of a more just society.</p>

Ade (on a Sunday)

Theja Rio

<p>In 2002 Nagaland, eight-year-old Ade lives with his troubled, alcoholic father, a constable, and his mother, a rice beer seller. Ade and his friend, Abu, ditch Sunday school for a swim but are chased off. This detour unexpectedly introduces them to the complexities of adulthood. Shot on 16mm film. ADE(On A Sunday) will have it&#39;s World Premiere at the presitigious International Film Festival of Rotterdam(IFFR) in January 2024.</p>

All of Us Strangers

Andrew Haigh

<p>British director Andrew Haigh, whose 2011 feature breakthrough&nbsp;<em>Weekend</em>&nbsp;is among the most widely beloved queer romances of the 21st century, has returned with an expertly modulated, emotionally overwhelming love story suspended in a metaphysical realm. Adam (Andrew Scott), a melancholy screenwriter living alone in a newly built, nearly empty high-rise on the outskirts of London, meets and tentatively begins a passionate relationship with the more extroverted Harry (Paul Mescal), his apparent only neighbor in the building. At the same time, Adam begins another, parallel journey, venturing out to the city&rsquo;s suburbs to confront his troubled past and perhaps reconcile his unsettled present. Adapted from a 1987 novel by Taichi Yamada,&nbsp;<em>All of Us Strangers</em>&nbsp;is uncommonly perceptive about the desires, fears, and traumas of a specific generation of gay men while extending into the universal&mdash;or perhaps the cosmic&mdash;in its depiction of familial love and estrangement. And in a quartet of superb performances, Scott, Mescal, Jamie Bell, and Claire Foy pierce straight to the heart.</p>

An American Chronicle

Alexandre Gouzou Jean-Claude Taki

<p>A film about a film that never existed. In the 1970s, Michelangelo Antonioni wrote a screenplay, entitled Two Telegrams, with the American Rudy Wurlitzer. In the 1980s, Portuguese producer Paulo Branco agreed with the director to make the film in the United States. For various reasons, the film didn&rsquo;t happen. In this film, the imagination of the two directors picks up on what this unfinished project could have been.</p>

An Asian Ghost Story

Bo Wang

<p>A history of imperialism and post-war through the most innocuous object: the wig. We start with the export of hair for wigs, which was one of the biggest sources of Asian income in Mao Zedong&rsquo;s China, move on to Hong Kong&rsquo;s fundamental role as a trade hub and arrive at the American embargo on what they called &ldquo;communist hair&rdquo;, as a way of curbing Asia&rsquo;s economic growth. All this is told with an unusual sense of humor.</p>

Un Movimiento Extraño (An Odd Turn)

Francisco Lezama

<p>Buenos Aires, 2019. Lucrecia, who works as a museum security guard, foresees a sharp rise in the dollar&rsquo;s value with her pendulum and falls in love with the employee of a currency exchange office.</p>

An Unusual Summer (2020)

Kamal Aljafari

<p>In 2006, Kamal Aljafari&rsquo;s father installed a camera facing the street in order to catch the rascal who kept damaging his car. In this attempt, he films the whole neighbourhood, the comings and goings of the neighbours, the mundane dynamics of society. After his father&rsquo;s death, the director constructs a narrative through these captured images, illustrating, narrating and contextualising life in Ramla, a Palestinian district in Israel nicknamed the &ldquo;ghetto&rdquo;.</p>

And There Was No More Sea

Bert Haanstra

<p>A work commissioned by the Dutch state, this is a journey through the customs and traditions of this country and its connection to&nbsp;Lake IJssel, through a gaze that is both poetic and piercing.</p>

Anima (2024)

Joana Patrão

<p>Anima, the Latin word for air, breath, wind and vitality translates here into a slow wandering. The air flowing through an ocarina guides the movements of light and shadow as they reveal themselves, leaving their burnt impression on film.</p>

Anything but the Movies

Lourenço Crespo Afonso Mota

<p>In the film festival, everyone talks about anything but the movies.</p>

Architect A (2022)

Jonghoon Lee

<p>A magical film about the power of creativity to overcome painful memories or traumas. The architect in this film builds his houses using objects from his clients&rsquo; lives. When he gives up his profession, a new client pulls him back into life.</p>

Architecton

Victor Kossakovsky

<p>A journey through the material that makes up our habitat: concrete and its ancestor, stone, and their impact on a changing planet.</p>

As If It Could (2023)

Ada Güvenir

<p>When a plant isn&rsquo;t growing well, you have to try to move it to a different location so that it gets more sun. This metaphor is the basis for an animation about the concept of borders and integration and what is needed for successful re-planting.</p>

Atlas Of An Amateur Cinema: Mapping the Discarded

Luísa Homem Inês Sapeta Dias

<p>It is estimated that around 99% of amateur cinema and home movies are lost. Cartography of the Discarded is the first episode of a series that explores what remains of this private cinema. It is an introduction to an enormous blind field in the history of cinema, with testimonies from Jos&eacute; Manuel Costa, Amarante Abramovici, among others.</p>

Attica (1974)

Cinda Firestone

<p>In 1971, inmates at the American prison of Attica revolted. In an organized effort, they managed to take control of the D-yard and took 35 hostages after numerous peaceful attempts failed when it came to reforms within the institution. The film reveals the systemic&nbsp;injustices and abuses of power that resulted in this historic event.</p>

La Boulangerie De Boris (Baking With Boris)

Maša Avramović

<p>Every morning, Boris the village baker makes a fresh batch of crusty bread and pastries for all his neighbours until&hellip; Achoo! He can&rsquo;t stop sneezing. He has become allergic to flour. How will he manage to keep baking for everyone in the village?</p>

Balconies (2003)

Kamal Aljafari

<p>An experimental short film that looks at all the balconies left unfinished in director Kamal Aljafari&rsquo;s hometown of Ramla, in the central district of Israel. What are we to think when, to paraphrase Garc&iacute;a Lorca, our home is no longer our home?</p>

Banzo

Margarida Cardoso

<p>In 1907, Afonso arrives on a tropical island not far from the African coast, where he has been tasked with treating a group of workers plagued by a mysterious affliction called banzo, also known as slave nostalgia. Those affected feel an intense homesickness, fall into apathy, lose the strength to live, and eventually die. Alonso slowly discovers that it is not enough to treat the physical symptoms; he must understand the soul of those who have been uprooted. The oppressive atmosphere of the isolated tropical island forms the backdrop for a story from the dark colonial past in which humanity is put to the ultimate test. Banzo is also a reminder that there is more than one way to interpret the past, and that behind every story is a person telling the story.</p>

Battery Mommy

Seung-bae Jeon

<p>Battery Mommy works at a nursery. One day, she finds out the Christmas tree in the nursery is on fire. She urgently runs to the fire alarm to safely rescue the sleeping children.</p>

Between the Temples

Nathan Silver

<p>A cantor in a crisis of faith finds his world turned upside down when his grade school music teacher reenters his life as his new adult bat mitzvah student.</p> <p><em>Between the Temples</em> is a rare, offbeat comedy buoyed by its casts&rsquo; lively yet heartfelt performances. Indie stalwart Nathan Silver reteams with co-writer C. Mason Wells for a script that delivers both jokes and emotional depths with a confident hand. Jason Schwartzman and Carol Kane are a natural fit as our loving leads, while the rest of the film is peppered with a way-too-funny cast including <em>Triangle of Sadness&rsquo;</em> standout Dolly De Leon and comedy writing legend Robert Smigel. They create a film that delights in frenzied misadventure while being carefully driven by a warm heart and loving embrace of human connection.&mdash;CS</p>

Between Us (2021)

Simon van der Zande

<p>A short film that plays with different fears and ways of reacting to the unexpected and unknown. We&rsquo;re in Brussels, it&rsquo;s late at night, and siblings Ousmane and Tiguidank&eacute; just need a little help, which they ask a passing couple for. An uncomfortable moment ensues.</p>

Beyond Beach (2018)

Clara Winter Miguel Ferráez

<p>Just before the apocalypse, we can still live in an illusion, a pastel-coloured dream. This moment of carelessness is explained by the absolute inability to have a care in the world.</p>

Birds Whose Legs Break Off

Dirk Verschure

<p>Have you always wanted to see a short film whose premise is the presentation of increasingly absurd, hilarious and rollicking ways in which birds (and others) become legless? Then this is the movie for you.</p>

Boléro (2023)

Nans Laborde-Jourdàa

<p>Fran is in his hometown to rest and visit his mother. Following the jerky rhythm of Bolero, this journey along the paths of memory and desire will lead him and the whole village to a joyfully chaotic climax.</p>

Butterfly (2024)

Suncana Brkulj

<p>We take the idea of a butterfly that flaps its wings and everything changes, and that&rsquo;s exactly what happens in this painting-turned-cinema. A butterfly arrives and upsets all the daily harmony of these beings who live around a fountain in a garden.</p>

Adieu Tortue (Bye Bye Turtle)

Selin Öksüzoğlu

<p>Inci&rsquo;s mother died during the night. The five-year-old wanders alone through the vast hilly landscape by the Black Sea. She meets a young woman in a red sweater and is fascinated by her. Zeynep, who grew up here as well, has returned after many years away. Her luggage is heavy and the journey is long. Together, they walk through the sunshine and the clouds, from one father to another, from dawn until darkness.</p>

Campanha de Dinamização Cultural e Acção Cívica do MFA no Porto

Arquivo Rtp

<p>The GNR&rsquo;s philharmonic band, a folk dance group, Jos&eacute; Jorge Letria and Carlos Paredes are brought together for an event aimed at cultural revitalisation by the Armed Forces Movement, at Porto&rsquo;s Crystal Palace.</p>

Campanha de Dinamização Cultural e Acção Cívica do MFA no Estoril

Arquivo Rtp

<p>The Armed Forces Movement carried out a Cultural Dynamisation and Civic Action Campaign in the deprived social housing area of Bairro Novo do Pinhal, also known as Bairro Fim do Mundo.</p>

Campanha de Dinamização Cultural e Acção Cívica do MFA no Alto Minho

Arquivo Rtp

<p>Journalist Carlos Soares travels to Alto Minho to report on a cultural dynamisation and sensibilization campaign carried out by the Armed Forces Movement.</p>

Campanha de Dinamização Cultural e Acção Cívica do MFA em Unhais da Serra

Arquivo Rtp

<p>Exploration of the political awareness and resistance activities of the residents of Unhais da Serra, located in the parish of Covilh&atilde;, which resulted in the occupation and administration of Quinta da Vargem and the textile factory &ldquo;A Penteadora: Sociedade Industrial de Pentea&ccedil;&atilde;o e Fia&ccedil;&atilde;o&rdquo;.</p>

Campanha de Dinamização Cultural e Acção Cívica do MFA em São Pedro do Sul

Arquivo Rtp

<p>The return of a brigade from the Armed Forces Movement (MFA) to show the images that resulted from the inaugural visit to the village of Covas do Rio, in S&atilde;o Pedro do Sul, on the 1st of April 1974. In addition to this civic action campaign, roadworks are being supervised in the area.</p>

Campanha de Dinamização Cultural e Acção Cívica do MFA em Lisboa

Arquivo Rtp

<p>In the Lisbon neighbourhood of Casal Ventoso, which is fighting for better conditions, a Q&amp;A and cultural revitalisation session is promoted through the efforts of the Armed Forces Movement.</p>

Campanha de Dinamização Cultural e Acção Cívica do MFA em Bragança

Arquivo Rtp

<p>As part of the &ldquo;May-Northeast&rdquo; campaign (which was, in turn, a result of the Cultural Dynamisation and Civic Action Campaigns), the Armed Forces Movement promoted the visit of the Loures amateur theatre group to the parishes of Salsas and Aveleda.</p>

Campos Belos

David Ferreira

<p>In a small factory village on the banks of the Ave River, three characters follow the course of life in a single shot.</p>

Chantal Akerman’s First Gaze

Chantal Akerman

<p>Four short films that Chantal Akerman made as part of her entrance exam to the Institut Sup&eacute;rieur des Arts. They were filmed in 8mm, show life in the city of Brussels and in Knokke, on the Belgian coast, and include Akerman&rsquo;s sister and mother, who will be a recurring figure in her&nbsp;work.</p>

Christmas, Every Day

Faye Tsakas

<p>&quot;Christmas, Every Day&quot; gives a slice-of-life glimpse of preteen influencers Peyton and Lyla Wesson, ages 11 and 12, as they perform for their online fans under their mother&rsquo;s watchful guidance. Shot in a series of highly composed, locked-off takes, the film examines everyday cultural practice under late stage capitalism, juxtaposing rural life with the patina of the virtual world. As Peyton and Lyla shift between performance and reality, ideas of self-presentation as empowerment, female confidence, and self-branding come to the fore.</p>

Chuvas de verão (Summer Rains)

Mário Veloso

<p>Interrupting the silence, punctuated by the late summer rain, a group of boys shatters the matriarchal memory of an old bedroom. In the face of impending danger, the older boys vie for leadership. As the afternoon stretches on with the intensity of the rain and the heat inside rises, they resort to violence. In the vulnerability of a wounded body, Chico, the young misfit, encounters a tragic portent of desire.</p>

Cidade; Campo

Juliana Rojas

<p>Two tales of migration. In the first, after a tailings dam disaster floods her hometown, rural worker Joana (55) moves to São Paulo to find her sister Tania, who lives with her grandson Jaime. Joana enters the universe of insecurity, replying to an application for house cleaning. She bonds with her colleagues, and their struggle for better conditions gives Joana&rsquo;s life a new meaning. Her relationship with young Jaime brings back old memories. In the second part, after the death of her estranged father, Flavia (32) moves to her farm with her wife Mara. The couple suffer a shock of reality when facing the harshness of rural life. The contact with the abandoned house reveals to Flavia unknown aspects of her father. She begins to suspect that there is something supernatural in the&nbsp;woods.&nbsp;</p>

City of Wind

Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir

<p>In this quietly told Mongolian drama from debut filmmaker Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir, a 17-year-old shaman is in for a world-changing shift, one that pits his traditional customs with the allure of modern society, when he becomes enamored with a peer who needs heart surgery.</p>

Clotilde (2023)

Maria João Lourenço

<p>In a planet where reproduction is mandatory in the daily life of its inhabitants, there is an alien who just wishes to pleasure herself.</p>

Cobweb

Kim Jee-woon

<p>Cobweb is dramatic, hilarious, scary and campy. It&rsquo;s the story of a director who feels the need to change the ending of his film. Consumed by criticism of his lack of originality, he decides that this last film has to be his masterpiece. The crew is forced to return, including the actors, and the attempt to save the film is made with time constraints, back-and-forth with the censors and all sorts of shenanigans.</p>

COQUILLE (Shellfish)

Justine Aubert Cassandra Bouton Grégoire Callies Maud Chesneau Anna Danton Loic Girault Gatien Peyrude Justine Raux

<p>In a rocky French inlet, a small and selfish hermit crab named Bernard loses his shell, and must face the dangers of the beach to find another.</p>

Cosmic Miniatures

Alexander Kluge

<p>At 91 years of age, the director is solidly regarded as a trailblazing figure in New German Cinema and the avant-garde. He remains active and curious about media, so it&rsquo;s no wonder that he recently began experimenting with artificial intelligence. He has been exploring a particular programme developed in Munich for medical research, which he systematically strains in order to find his images at the farthest ends of the system&#39;s creative faculties. With these, the director plays in the same essayistic fashion beloved from his television work &ndash; historical footage and a plenitude of texts, comics, charts and cabaret. In short: facts and fictions freely intermingle.</p>

Cosmic Routine (2023)

Agnieszka Kotulska

<p>How often do we think about the repetition of everyday gestures? Every day we repeat the same tasks, make the same treks. What would it be like to break free from that? Perhaps it would involve some inspiration from 1980s music videos, some neon and a desire for change.</p>

Crossing (2024)

Levan Akin

<p>Lia, a retired teacher, has promised to find her long-lost niece, Tekla. Her search takes her to Istanbul where she meets Evrim, a lawyer fighting for trans rights, and Tekla starts to feel closer than ever.</p>

À Mort Le Bikini! (Death To The Bikini)

Justine Gauthier

<p>Lili is a 10-year-old girl who hangs out with boys a lot. In the summer, she was used to always swim without a bikini top, but this summer her mother is forcing her to wear one. This brings up a question... why does she have to cover her chest when the boys don&#39;t? (Carolina Oliveira)</p>

Delta Phase I

Bert Haanstra

<p>Distributed in Portugal by Sociedade Portuguesa de Atualidades Cinematogr&aacute;ficas, this film shows the construction of the first dyke that regularised the Rhine delta, contributing to the achievements of Dutch engineering.</p>

Diamond Himalaya

Mila Olivier

<p>A fascinating dive into a particular niche of the Internet that revolves around luxury items, in particular the Birkin bag, which the Herm&egrave;s brand makes a difficult item to acquire due to its exorbitant price that discourages its purchase. Thus the desire for consumerism is generated.</p>

Direct Action

Guillaume Cailleau Ben Russell

<p>Taking its title from the tactical protest strategy of the same name &ndash; &ldquo;an action that seeks to achieve an end directly and by the most effective means&rdquo; &ndash; DIRECT ACTION is a contemporary portrait of one of the most important militant activist communities in France &ndash; a 150-person strong rural collective that survived multiple violent eviction attempts by the French state, successfully resisted an international airport expansion project, created an autonomous zone from 2012-2018, and spawned a remarkable new ecological movement in 2021. Through a collaborative and uniquely immersive observational approach, DIRECT ACTION documents the everyday of a diverse ecosystem of activists, squatters, anarchists, farmers and government-labeled &ldquo;eco-terrorists&rdquo; &ndash; so as to better understand how the success of a radical protest movement can offer a path through the climate crisis facing us all.</p>

Пепел и доломит (Dolomite and Ash)

Toma Selivanova

<p>Dina is a young Russian filmmaker working on a film about Stalinist repressions and the massive intergenerational trauma they caused that continues to resonate in modern-day Russia. Together with her friend Johan, a German sound designer whose grandfather went missing in the USSR during the Second World War, she embarks on a journey to the former Soviet labour camps. Almost deserted, the abandoned lands of Gulag still bear traces of those who perished there. Although this trip becomes somewhat therapeutic for the two of them, it also puts their relationship to the test.</p>

Dream Scenario (2023)

Kristoffer Borgli

<p>Kristoffer Borgli, who was in the festival&rsquo;s Mouth of Madness&nbsp;section last year with his Sick of Myself, now returns with a new black comedy, this time accompanied by Nicholas Cage, always ready for challenging roles, and the American production company A24. Dream Scenario sees Cage&rsquo;s character, a perfectly ordinary biology teacher, appearing in many other people&rsquo;s dreams. To the point of becoming famous and, then, to the point of becoming infamous.</p>

Eat the Night

Caroline Poggi Jonathan Vinel

<p>Pablo and his sister Apolline escape from their daily lives by playing Darknoon, a video game that saw them grow up. One day, Pablo meets Night, whom he introduces to his little deals, and moves away from Apolline. As the end of the game approaches, the two boys provoke the anger of a rival gang...</p>

Eléctricos (1994)

Pedro Sena Nunes

<p>A short film about an unabashed love of trams that leads a law student to leave everything behind to dedicate himself to his dream: becoming a brakeman. A school film by Pedro Sena Nunes, made at ESTC as part of the Lisbon European Capital of Culture activities in 1994.</p>

Felicidade numa Panela

Clara Jost

<p>While cooking, Yaxuan notices that her pot makes a peculiar sound. That sound will generate a rambling around food rituals, which appear as a bridge between past and present.</p>

Filante (2024)

Marion Jamault

<p>Paulette wishes upon a shooting star, hoping to find her mysteriously missing pet rat.</p>

Fishmonger (2023)

Neil Ferron

<p>Fishmonger is a delight. A movie that offers absolute surprises at every turn. Musical comedy, monster movie, fantasy story. Fishmonger has it all: sexual pacts, sea creatures and the threat of a soul burning in hell.</p>

Five and a Half Love Stories in an Apartment in Vilnius, Lithuania

Tomas Vengris

<p>We&rsquo;re in an old flat turned AirBnB. The stories that unfold are those of its consecutive guests, each with their woes and heart troubles &mdash; whether it&rsquo;s dealing with a frustrating marriage, infertility or the clunky moves when trying to impress someone you like. But there are also those who, after tidying up and, in the process, erasing the traces of their narratives, are living their own story.</p>

Flower Show

Elli Vuorinen

<p>Beautiful and slightly disturbing hand-drawn animation, in which multiple generations of women face different expectations.</p>

Kanata no uta (Following the Sound)

Kyoshi Sugita

<p>A filmmaker who focuses on the art of looking and gives his characters the space to do just that, to observe the other in their stillness and fullness. This story interweaves the narratives of two people at two points in time, and they meet again when the young Haru, who works in a bookshop, pretends to ask for directions from the older Yukiko, whose melancholy captivates her intensely.</p>

Foremost by Night

Víctor Iriarte

<p>Spanish artist and curator V&iacute;ctor Iriarte&rsquo;s debut feature unfolds across four epistolary chapters, following middle-aged Vera (Lola Due&ntilde;as) as she emerges from a years-long search for the biological son whom she gave up for adoption at birth.</p>

Para Sempre Cá (Forever Here)

Daniel Borga

<p>The first experience of grief is hard to forget. With the death of his uncle, Alexandre tries to find ways to deal with his pain.</p>

Game Rules (2024)

Christian Zetterberg

<p>This is an important tournament and the first for this very young handball team. We see the camaraderie between players, as well as the anticipation of future possibilities. But who can and can&rsquo;t play is called into question, placing one of the participants in trouble.</p>

Germaine Dulac’s Illustrated Records

Germaine Dulac

<p>These &ldquo;illustrated records&rdquo; from the 1930s are music videos&nbsp;avant la lettre. An endeavour by the Fondation J&eacute;r&ocirc;me Seydoux-Path&eacute; (with support by CNC)&nbsp;that recovers a forgotten production by the pioneer of French impressionism, starting to&nbsp;pair, only in 2023,&nbsp;the recordings with the original songs. The restorations carried out by the Fondation J&eacute;r&ocirc;me Seydoux-Path&eacute; in 2023 were based on the original nitrate negatives held in its collections. 4K work carried out at the L&rsquo;Image Retrouv&eacute;e laboratory, with the support of the CNC.</p>

Our O World (Gold Songs)

Ico Costa

<p>On-board camera, as if pulled along by her characters, Ico Costa creates a melodramatic fiction in close collaboration with the locals, capturing their realities as closely as possible while working on typical situations. &ldquo;The simpler the stories, the truer they are&ldquo;, said Fassbinder. Domingo and Neusia play themselves. They are young and in love. He works in a car wash but his boss does not pay him. She is pregnant. He decides to go to the other side of Mozambique to work in the gold mines to support his future family. Ico Costa embarks on a sensual and patient rewriting of reality, dissecting the heart of an exploitative system based on gold panning and the resulting way of life. Very concrete, O ouro e o mundo exposes a social status: the heavy bags of dirt carried under a blazing sun, the barefoot walks on muddy paths, the labour and the waiting, the men on one side gathered around the same plate, the women on the other, their eyes turned towards the future, with the pending hope of the return of those who are far away. While the general economy of the film plays with the visual mechanics of the documentary, oscillating between crudity and coyness to blur the lines &ndash; the use of fiction makes it possible to set up head-on scenes that dig deeper into the violence and brutality with which the characters are confronted: such is the case with the tragic death of a comrade crushed in the mines. But the dense and precious raw material of the film remains the improvised or rewritten conversations. They unravel the dreams, motivations and disillusions of these men and women who clearly see the circulation of their desires subject to the gold that has become more precious to others than their lives.</p>

Grandmamauntsistercat

Zuza Banasińska

<p>An emotive portrait of a multispecies matriarchal family composed using found footage from communist Poland.</p>

Les Yeux Verts (Green Eyes)

Sacha Teboul

<p>The myth of Pygmalion has a new interpretation here. A man who has lost his wife has only his memories and some videotapes that help him remember every detail about her. He wants, of course, to recreate her in all her glory. And now all he&rsquo;s missing are her green eyes.</p>

Greice

Leonardo Mouramateus

<p>An art student moves between Portugal and Brazil to find her true identity in a plot full of entanglement, fabulation and forgery. A film of loves lost and found, with high-speed dialogue and endless deceits, Greice gives a proud nod to Hollywood&rsquo;s classic screwball comedies.</p>

Mãos no fogo (Hands in the Fire)

Margarida Gil

<p>While exploring old manor houses along the Douro river, the young film student Maria do Mar finds herself trapped in a house of horrors. She needs the recordings to complete her doctoral thesis on reality in film.</p>

Histories of Smugglers

Agnes Meng

<p>Tour&eacute;m is a frontier village on the border between Portugal and Spain. It has a reputation as a &ldquo;smugglers&rsquo; nest&rdquo;, with many villagers involved in the business, in the past. They smuggled goods due to shortages at the time. They risked their lives for a living.</p>

Hoofs On Skates

Ignas Meilunas

<p>Piglet and Cow are having a blast ice-skating on a frozen lake, when suddenly a strange beast cracks the ice beneath them!</p>

Hors Piste (2018)

Léo Brunel Loris Cavalier Camille Jalabert Oscar Mallet

<p>A helicopter, two rescuers, a mountain full of snow and a&hellip; terrible mishap. Suddenly, everything seems comically hopeless. But there&rsquo;s a solution to everything.</p>

Hypnosuggestion (2023)

Per Bifrost

<p>A montage of motionless images generated by Artificial Intelligence that makes up a science fiction thriller in which the clues are our memory and subconscious and the method is hypnosis.</p>

Nunca Estive Tão Perto (I Have Never Been This Close)

Francisca Dores

<p>In a rural periphery in the midst of transformation, agricultural machines devastate the fields and the places are haunted by an eternal gloom. Out of the flames, the bells are reborn, invoking the presence of the community.</p>

Ještě nejsem, kým chci být (I’m not Everything I Want to Be)

Klára Tasovská

<p>Libu&scaron;e has been capturing her &ldquo;rock-n-roll&rdquo; life full of twists and turns in thousands of pictures and autoportraits. Yet the sudden photographic success after 53 years of work has not helped her to see her real self in the mirror. She is still searching for herself, the place where she belongs, as she goes through piles of negatives and diaries while working on a new book.</p>

In Praise of Slowness

Hicham Gardaf

<p>Due to economic and technological forces reshaping the city of Tangier, the profession of the bleach street salesmen, along with their insistent chanting, is disappearing. The film explores modes of resistance against the relentless pace of capitalism.</p>

In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon

Alex Gibney

<p>The legendary singer has finally received the major portrait film he deserves. Oscar winner Alex Gibney unravels Paul Simon&#39;s life&#39;s work, from his time with Art Garfunkel to solo highlight &#39;Graceland&#39; to his latest album.</p>

It’s a Long Way from Amphioxus

Kamal Aljafari

<p>Moments that should be more human are pierced by time-consuming and dehumanising bureaucracy, turning people into numbers and their life stories into mere statistics. In the waiting rooms of Berlin&rsquo;s immigration institutions, everything is reduced to something sterile and lacking in empathy.</p>

It’s Not My Film (2024)

Maria Zbaska

<p>On a beach by the Baltic in winter, a broken couple, on the brink of separation invent a game to decide their future. The result could be deciding to stay together, or it could be leaving the beach and never looking back, their relationship over, their lives torn apart. The rules of the game are not necessarily simple and what is at stake is the most important thing: love.</p>

Jabal (2023)

Zayd Lahham

<p>The Promised Land is less a real place and more an eternal promise. This is a quest on which three friends embark, where the destination is a Palestinian community in the middle of the United States.</p>

Kharms (2023)

Svetlana Andrianova

<p>Daniil Kharms was an avant-gardist and poet of the absurd, whose short stories are transformed into chapters in this animation that emphasises the charm of this Russian writer&rsquo;s surreal and enticing world.</p>

Kinds of Kindness

Yorgos Lanthimos

<p>A man seeks to break free from his predetermined path, a cop questions his wife&#39;s demeanor after her return from a supposed drowning and a woman&#39;s quest to locate an extraordinary individual prophesied to become a renowned spiritual guide.</p>

Kudibanguela

Bernardo de Magalhães

<p>Zito is a young political prisoner whose family does not know his whereabouts. On the eve of a visit from Muxima&#39;s wife, an older prisoner, Zito tries to convince him to send a message to the outside.</p>

La Chimera

Alice Rohrwacher

<p>With her customarily bewitching mixture of earthiness and magical realism, Alice Rohrwacher (<em>Happy as Lazzaro</em>, NYFF56) conjures a marvelous entertainment set in a rural Italy eternally caught between the ancient and the modern. Josh O&rsquo;Connor (<em>The Crown</em>) stars as Arthur, a ne&rsquo;er-do well Englishman, handsomely rumpled and recently out of prison, who returns to a rural town in central Italy where he hesitantly reconnects with a ragtag group of&nbsp;<em>tombaroli&nbsp;</em>(tomb raiders), for whom he uses his uncanny powers of divination to locate graves that date back to the Etruscan period and teem with antiquities of immense value to collectors and museums. Yet the melancholy Arthur has other ghosts on his mind, including his long-lost love Beniamina, who haunts his memory like her own ghostly civilization. Featuring gorgeous rough-hewn textures from the great cinematographer H&eacute;l&egrave;ne Louvart and outstanding supporting work from Isabella Rossellini, Carol Duarte, and Alba Rohrwacher,&nbsp;<em>La Chimera</em>&nbsp;is a dreamlike descent into a majestically tattered world right beneath our own.</p>

Lüum and the Magic Forest

Pierre Valdivielso

<p>In the middle of the desert, a chameleon has no choice but to go beige. But as it encounters small animals, such as multicoloured insects, the possibilities take on new life. Except when you&rsquo;re a chameleon with bad eyesight. But there&rsquo;s still magic in the air.</p>

Lambs (2013)

Gottfried Mentor

<p>It&rsquo;s not always, but every now and then things happen that can&rsquo;t be explained. This family of lambs has a baby lamb that they adore. But now they&rsquo;re worried: why does he say &ldquo;moo&rdquo; instead of &ldquo;baa&rdquo;?</p>

Late Night with the Devil (2023)

Cameron Cairnes Colin Cairnes

<p>Late Night with the Devil revolves around the remarkable performance by David Dastmalchian (a frequent James Gunn collaborator) as host of the talk show Night Owls with Jack Delroy. The film is presented along the lines of classic vintage found footage joint: a lost recording of a 1977 Halloween episode, where the interviewees are a parapsychologist and a girl who appears to be the only survivor of a mass suicide in a satanic church.</p>

Like a Cloud (2023)

Christine Grulois

<p>A mother of two, a kindergarten teacher, gets an extra job: voicing a character in an animated film. This step out of everyday life leads to an encounter with a person who opens the door to a beautiful dream, whether it comes true or not.</p>

Lil Nas X: Long Live Montero

Carlos López Estrada Zac Manuel

<p>The story of the icon behind the monster hit &#39;Old Town Road&#39; and his exhilerating journey as he defies musical boundaries and redefines what it means to be a superstar in the 21st century.</p>

Little Birds (2023)

Gabriela Badillo

<p>With the help of delicate animation imitating crayons on-screen, migrant children tell their stories from the safety of a shelter in northern Mexico. The stories are of hope in a hostile area, and the little birds will find their destination.</p>

Look On the Bright Side (2023)

Yuyan Wang

<p>In uniform darkness, we are driven to shine. In an age of wire and string, futuristic visions anchor in lithic time. In the dark, people are driven to shine in the most spectacular ways. Light, emitted from our digital extensions, has roots traversing millions, even billions of years.</p>

Louder Than You Think

Jed I. Rosenberg

<p>Pavement, fronted by Stephen Malkmus, are one of the most influential indie bands to come out of the American underground in the 90s. But this bittersweet documentary focuses on the story of Gary Young, the hippie drummer at whose house the band started recording their initial songs. Young &mdash; an unpredictable force on stage, always running or doing a headstand &mdash; ended up leaving the band after the Slanted and Enchanted tour, but his legacy is still felt.</p>

Love is What You See

Nuno Mendonça

<p>Oranges, or &ldquo;apples of paradise&rdquo;, once considered the source of eternal youth, can be eaten or squeezed. They can be sour or sweet, like love. In the morning it&rsquo;s gold, in the afternoon silver and at night it kills. Modern myths about insomnia and other emotional plagues.</p>

Love, Your Neighbour

Jethro Westraad

<p>During the COVID pandemic, everyone withdrew into their homes, and social interaction came to a virtual standstill. But in the neighborhood in Durban, South Africa, where filmmaker Jethro Westraad comes from, this was hardly any different from the normal situation.</p> <p>He realizes this when he returns home during the lockdown and sees with outsider&rsquo;s eyes the way his neighbors live in isolation, barricaded behind high walls with barbed wire, security cameras and vicious guard dogs. There&rsquo;s no opportunity to make contact with the neighbors&mdash;so Westraad tries it via the intercom.</p> <p>In his short, vignette-like film Love, Your Neighbour, Westraad shows how living in a high-security bubble fuels racist prejudices and fear of the other. The tone is light and ironic, but the message is serious. The title can be read as the loving conclusion to an appeal to neighbors, but without the comma as a commandment with biblical connotations.</p>

Malqueridas

Tana Gilbert

<p>With photos and videos taken by prisoners, this raw yet poetic debut film paints a rich picture of hitherto hidden life in a Chilean women&rsquo;s prison. The focus is on mothers serving long sentences. They can keep their babies with them until they are two years old. Then the women lose control over who takes care of their children and whether they will be allowed to have contact with them at all.</p> <p>The experiences of more than 20 mothers have been condensed into a collective memory, recounted through the voices of two women. They talk about powerlessness and longing. The prisoners themselves also give and receive affection and motherly love.</p> <p>The film opens with the cold rattle of a prison door and the warm sounds of a mother singing her child to sleep. A photo of a woman tenderly kissing her baby slowly emerges from the blackness. As well as being extremely intimate and unique, the videos taken secretly with mobile phones are fragmented and imperfect. Yet they are indispensable building blocks in telling this story.</p>

Mama Africa (2011)

Mika Kaurismäki

<p>Miriam Makeba, the voice of the (still) famous song &ldquo;Pata Pata&rdquo;, is a figure that&rsquo;s not only historic for her music. She is also a name that has become intertwined with South African politics, having become a civil rights activist and a powerful voice against the end of apartheid. Seen here in all its guises, especially when travelling the world spreading a political message for an end to racism and poverty on the African continent.</p>

Mambar Pierrette

Rosine Mbakam

<p>In a captivating new film evoking her superb 2018 documentary&nbsp;<em>Chez jolie coiffure&nbsp;</em>(New York African Film Festival 2019), which followed the proprietor of a hair salon in the African Matonge district of Brussels, director Rosine Mbakam returns to her home country of Cameroon to follow an equally charismatic protagonist: the good-natured yet exhausted seamstress Mambar (played by the director&rsquo;s cousin, Pierrette Aboheu Njeuthat), struggling to make ends meet in the city of Douala. In trying to pay debts, raise children, and keep her business going, Mambar contends with continual mishaps and setbacks, each fortifying her against an uncompromising world. A drama of quotidian elegance fueled by the observational beauty of Mbakam&rsquo;s nonfiction work,&nbsp;<em>Mambar Pierrette</em>&nbsp;quietly sneaks up on the viewer in its powerfully subtle representation of the ways in which women exist under patriarchal oppression.&nbsp;An Icarus Films release.</p>

Man of Aral

Helena Gouveia Monteiro

<p>As one of the most striking examples of human-caused climate catastrophe, the Sea of Aral is gradually running dry. Various hand-processing techniques overlay a time-lapse of this slow demise as the erosion and cracking of the emulsion mirrors that of the landscape. The soundtrack is inspired by the original score composed by John D. H. Greenwood for<strong>&nbsp;Man of Aran</strong>&nbsp;(Robert J. Flaherty, 1934).</p>

Manga D'Terra

Basil da Cunha

<h6><span style="font-size:14px">Rosa, twenty years old, leaves her two children in Cape Verde to settle in Lisbon in the hope of giving them a better life. Caught between the harassment of kingpins and daily police violence, Rosa tries to find consolation in the women of the community. But music provides her real escape...</span></h6>

Matt und Mara (Matt and Mara)

Kazik Radwanski

<p>Mara - a young professor struggling through marriage - meets Matt, a man from her past who wanders onto her university&nbsp;campus.</p>

Molecular Delusions

Quentin L'helgoualc'h

<p>Molecular Delusions is a tale of illusion and an exploration of new, possible worlds.</p>

Monisme

Riar Rizaldi

<p>Several professional actors and non-actor professionals portray a dynamic of human-nature relationship in one of the most active stratovolcano in the world, Mount Merapi. In the shadows of recent eruptions, these actors play a story that is written together with volcanologist, sand miner, and a mystic&mdash;people who have a close bond with the mountain, potentially illustrating fiction and nonfiction situations that could and would have happened in Merapi. Formed in between factual and fictional, future and past, material and incorporeal, scientific and magic, Monisme trips to the place where actuality is intertwined with myth and legend.</p>

Mr Chicken Goes to Mars

Katrina Mathers Leigh Hobbs

<p>Someone who likes traveling likes any destination. It&rsquo;s not just the destination that&rsquo;s important, it&rsquo;s also the people you meet along the way. Mr Chicken has traveled a lot and met a lot of people. Now he has a new and exuberant goal: to go to Mars.</p>

Mutiny in Heaven: Nick Cave's The Birthday Party

Ian White

<p>MUTINY IN HEAVEN is the story of The Birthday Party&rsquo;s ascent, apex and inevitable collapse - a thrilling tale of epic struggle, artistic genius and total dysfunctionality. Told in the group&rsquo;s own words, MUTINY IN HEAVEN brings the band&rsquo;s story to the screen for the first time. This is a twisted tale of ascent, realisation and implosion whilst dealing with issues of artistic muse, creativity, addiction, fame, interpersonal conflict and the unique relationship between creative vision and self-destruction - all underpinned by the dark, wry humour of the individual band members.<br /> Utilising exclusive, incredibly candid interviews, a wealth of rare and unseen archives, original artwork, unreleased tracks, studio footage, animation and multimedia content - the film is as visually rich as it is narratively riveting - a revealing look back at its key members&rsquo; origins, dreams, hopes and motivations.</p>

Natatorium

Helena Stefánsdottir

<p>In town for an audition, eighteen-year-old Lilja decides to stay with her estranged grandparents. She feels at home in their middle-class mansion, but unbeknownst to her, she becomes entangled with the dark past of her family, learning secrets that will threaten her life.</p>

Never More is Too Much Time

Bruno Ferreira

<p>A film director and producer meet a professional fortune teller to get information about the narrative of their&nbsp;next short film. Later they find themselves in a delicate situation, where the predictions about the film&rsquo;s casting were quite right.</p>

Night Shift

Kayije Kagame Hugo Radi

<h6><span style="font-size:14px">One night, an actor prepares to go on stage while a museum guard makes her rounds. The two gradually immerse themselves in these dormant institutions, on the fringes of shows and exhibitions.</span></h6>

No Other Land

Basel Adra Hamdan Ballal Yuval Abraham Rachel Szor

<p>This film made by a Palestinian-Israeli collective shows the destruction of the West Bank&rsquo;s Masafer Yatta by Israeli authorities and the unlikely alliance which develops between the Palestinian activist Basel and Israeli journalist Yuval.</p>

Nocturno para uma floresta (Nocturne for a Forest)

Catarina Vasconcelos

<p>A still life is interrupted by Pope Gregory XV stuffing a plastic skull with carnations. Verdant landscapes are prowled by monks in ghillie suits. The raucous annual assembly of women&rsquo;s immortal souls debates the destruction of a suggestive painting, Josefa d&rsquo;Obidos&rsquo;s&nbsp;&ldquo;Holy Family,&rdquo; secreted away in a male-only Carmelite monastery in a mountaintop of Bu&ccedil;aco. With an irreverent wit, Catarina Vasconcelos stages a droll iconoclasm.</p>

Nome

Sana Na N'Hada

<p>In Sana Na N&rsquo;Hada&rsquo;s Nome, the veteran director from Guinea-Bissau revisits the years of his youth, and the turbulent struggle against the Portuguese colonial army from 1969 to the mid 1970s. His approach is minimal and stylised, yet bursting with lyrical beauty and spiritual mystery. The tale begins in a village far from the armed conflict, observing the daily life of Nome, his mother, and the woman he loves. Nome leaves home to join the guerrillas and becomes a heroic leader &ndash; but the personal relationships he has abandoned will return to haunt him during the complicated and confused post-revolutionary period. Nome probes the hopeful, utopian dimension of African revolutionary movements and confronts, with the wisdom of hindsight, the seeds of corruption and betrayal that always existed. But never embraces despair. A special feature of Nome is the archival footage from the time originally shot by Na N&rsquo;Hada and his comrades. These images do much more than guarantee documentary authenticity &ndash; in their very fragility they allow the film to elevate the materiality of scratched, battered frames into a full-blown poetic language. &ndash; Adrian Martin</p>

not A fairy tale

Malgorzata Rybak

<p>Unusual manoeuvres promoted by a street lamp, which brings the strangest animalistic visitors to the city. It could be a lie, but it&rsquo;s the purest of truths.</p>

Nube (2023)

Diego Alonso Sánchez Christian Arredondo Narvaez

<p>After witnessing an old dark stormy cloud rain in pain and die in sorrow, Noma, a puffy white cloud realises that her daughter Mixtli, a dark stormy cloud, is in danger of raining prematurely.</p>

Nun Or Never!

Heta Jäälinoja

<p>The nuns live in the monastery in contentment and harmony, fused together. One of the nuns finds a man underground while digging potatoes. The nun begins to dream of the man, goes mad and loses a common rhythm with others.</p>

Offline (2023)

Daniel Fure Schwarz Mauritz Brekke Solberg

<p>The presentation of a marketing video made by an agency for a company leads to awkward moments, especially problematic these days. With a strong ironic touch, it&rsquo;s a comedy of embarrassments.</p>

Ojitos mentirosos (Deceitful Eyes)

Elena Duque

<p><strong>Ojitos mentirosos</strong>, the latest work from Elena Duque, takes us to Madrid, where trompe-l&#39;&oelig;il is used in both modern and classical architecture. But what is cinema if not an instrument to deceive the eye? In an elegant game of reflections and details, Elena Duque uses her surroundings and the unique texture of 8mm to pay tribute to the magic of film.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p> <p><em>&ndash;&nbsp;Rebecca De Pas</em></p>

On Plains of Larger River & Woodlands

Miguel de Jesus

<p>Steeped in the isolation of suburban Tasmania, Imogen and Audrey reflect on their lives, families and dreams between puffs on bongs, vapes and cigs. Dark clouds approach in the conversation and landscape as local wildlife looks on indifferently. Beyond the drugs and arcades, what possible routes of escape remain?<br /> <br /> <em>&ndash; Leonie Woodfin</em></p>

On the Go

María Gisèle Royo Julia de Castro

<h6><span style="font-size:14px">Milagros (37) stretches out a carefree youth in her last years of fertility while Jonathan (24) seeks solace in Grindr to overcome abandonment issues. Milagros is looking for sperm. Jonathan needs to escape. A delirious road movie, entirely shot in 16mm, full of music, where a mysterious mermaid with a magic crown will set the course of the journey.</span></h6>

Os Amigos do Gaspar: Uma Reunião na Cidade

Duarte Coimbra

<p>Commissioned by Batalha, this new musical by Duarte Coimbra revisits, more than 30 years later, the children&rsquo;s programme Os Amigos do Gaspar, which left a mark on a generation, bringing back iconic characters from the series created by Jo&atilde;o Paulo Seara Cardoso and Jorge Constante Pereira.</p>

Oyu

Atsushi Hirai

<p>It is the last day of the year and night falls on the small town of Toyama, Japan. A man goes to the public bath to retrieve a forgotten object. But once inside, the promise of a hot bath compels him to stay.</p>

Paradiso, XXXI, 108

Kamal Aljafari

<p>As chilling as it is absurd, Kamal Aljafari&rsquo;s Paradiso repurposes found footage from Israeli military propaganda and turns it into a fictional drama of men playing at war. Aljafari takes the title from a short story by Borges and describes the work as a &ldquo;cinematic self-portrait&rdquo; questioning our interpretation of screen violence, its relationship to real-world horrors, and troubling our positionality as spectators. Described by its maker as a &ldquo;work of sabotage on archival materials&rdquo;, in Paradiso XXXI, 108 Aljafari considers the ways narratives of war are constructed, creating a war film in which the supposed enemy is never seen. Found footage of military exercises in the Al-Naqab desert in the south of Palestine are subverted through editing to make a new narrative of war visible. Featuring no additional dialogue from the artist, European classical music is used heavily throughout, a dramatic soundtrack to these acts of violence. The resulting film is an uncanny and ambiguous watch, examining the ways that violence is naturalised through.</p>

Pearfall (2017)

Leonid Shmelkov

<p>Beware of pearfall. It happens suddenly, we need to be prepared.</p>

Toll

Carolina Markowicz

<p>Suellen, a Brazilian toll booth attendant and mother, falls in with a gang of thieves in an attempt to keep her family afloat. In doing so, she realizes she can use her job to raise some extra money illegally for a so-called noble cause: to send her son to an expensive gay conversion workshop led by a renowned foreign priest.</p>

Pepe

Nelson Carlos De Los Santos Arias

<p>A voice that claims to belong to a hippopotamus. A voice that does not understand the perception of time. A voice that tells of a historical event as if in a trance. &ldquo;Am I making that sound that comes out of my mouth? And what is a mouth anyway?&rdquo; The only thing the animal knows for sure is that it is dead. The first and only hippopotamus ever killed in the Americas. The Colombian press called him Pepe. Between encounters and misunderstandings, epiphanies and sadness, we enter a world full of stories replete with even more stories. In a serious and playful way, both authentic and deceptive, images and sounds narrate the overwhelming orality of places full of beings who, like Pepe, died without ever knowing where they really were.</p>

Piblokto

Anastasia Shubina Timofey Glinin

<p>On the Arctic Ocean coast of Chukotka live a people cut off from the world. Their life revolves around hunting walruses and whales and protecting villages from bears coming from the tundra. This theme turns the film into a reflection on death. Marine animals become the primary source of food for the people, animal leftovers are used to feed arctic foxes on a fur farm, human cemeteries become targets for bears. It appears that all the inhabitants of this region are involved in the cycle of food and death. The film departs from the typical rhythmic structure of cinema and instead adopts the structure of a shamanic ritual, which is a meaning-forming event for the northern peoples.</p>

Piranha (1978)

Joe Dante

<p>It was 1978, Steven Spielberg&rsquo;s Jaws (1975) was a smash hit at the box office and Hollywood wanted something similar. Enters Piranha, the first in a series of B-movies to capitalise on the lode of deadly aquatic animals. Between horror, sci-fi and comedy, Piranha has gained cult film status. The plot involves, of course, genetically altered and deadly piranhas terrorising a summer resort.</p>

Port of Memory (2009)

Kamal Aljafari

<p>The port is Jaffa, and the protagonists are Palestinians who are waiting for the inevitable, namely the imminent expulsion, like an alarm clock in the morning, by the Israeli authorities. In a place that is being forcibly transformed, the only weapons left are the daily rituals that make those who live there human.</p>

Pousse (2024)

Oana Lacroix

<p>There&rsquo;s nothing more difficult to overcome than grief, but this young crocodile will&nbsp;have to learn to deal with this complicated process.</p>

Public Surfaces

Gillian Waldo

<p>In 1964, Baltimore became the second city in the country to pass a 1% for Art law, allocating one percent of the construction budget for any public building to commissioning a new piece of art. Most of the buildings were public schools, and by 2016, it was revealed that many of the pieces had gone missing. Through landscapes of the city and depictions of the sculptures, the film explores the history of the program, the failures of modernism, the neglect of the school system, and asks who public art can really serve.</p>

Quando a Terra Foge / Quand la Terre Se Dérobe (When the Land Runs Away)

Frederico Lobo 

<p>Amid the fog and the labyrinth of time, while machines probe the geological depths of the mountain, a shepherd searches for an errant cow. Childhood finds its way back, the mountain transforms itself, the cycle continues.</p>

Reel no. 21 aka Restoring Solidarity

Mohanad Yaqubi

<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&mdash; 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>

Rally (2023)

Myojung Noh

<p>Without words, because they&rsquo;re not needed, we see how Tyrano, who can&rsquo;t find a partner to play tennis with, teams up with Brachi, whose aptitude for the sport isn&rsquo;t strong. Determined, he&rsquo;ll do anything not to break up the partnership, until he realises that we all have our problems.</p>

Recollection (2015)

Kamal Aljafari

<p>Kamal Aljafari takes Israeli and North American films (there was a Chuck Norris in between), shot between 1960 and 1990, to recover the port city of Jaffa from its gaze. The protagonists are removed and all that remains are the places, the houses, the roads. What was invisible is now in the foreground. Editing as political activism.</p>

Red Wood Pigeon

Nanni Moretti

<p>A 1989 comedy that works as political satire. Michele Apicella (Nanni Moretti) heads the Communist Party, but he&rsquo;s also a water polo player and has to take part in an intense game that will last a day and part of the night. During the game, in conversations with different people, he will try to find himself again after an accident in which he lost his memory. With references such as Doctor Zhivago or Bruce Springsteen, this pool game has never been so exciting.</p>

Rehearsal & Repetition

Igor Dimitri

<p>A group of friends performs an experiment about space and duration, body and dance. One of them jumps from a structure repeatedly, others just watch, while someone else inhabits the house under construction.</p>

Report on Brazil: Torture

Chris Marker

<p>Chris Marker&rsquo;s film interweaves the narratives of the Brazilian revolutionaries who faced the oppression of the dictatorship and those who took part in the kidnapping of the US ambassador in 1969. Through interviews, he reveals their terrible experiences and the demands made.</p>

Ricardo Martins: Resonate

Carlos Miranda

<p>Journey into Ricardo Martins&rsquo; creative continuum. The conception of the album &lsquo;Distraimento&rsquo; as a visual moment of a perpetual cycle of transformation, where music evolves as a living organism.</p>

Tongo Saa (Rising Up at Night)

Nelson Makengo

<p>Darkness falls over Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and its 17 million inhabitants. It is just before Christmas and people are struggling to gain access to electric light. Kudi is mobilising the residents of his Kisenso neighbourhood to collect money for a new power cable. On Mount Mangengenge, a holy place overlooking the city, Pastor G&eacute;d&eacute;on delivers a sermon about the light of Christ as the path to life and truth. Davido is searching for a place to stay after his house was flooded by the Congo River. Together with other young men, he kills time by working out and dreams of a better future.<br /> <em>Tongo Saa</em>&nbsp;is a sensitive portrait of the residents of Kinshasa as they face the challenges of life in an environment plagued by violence and coloured by the uncertainty of tomorrow.</p>

Rocó and Noï

Nadia Shah

<p>Roc&oacute; and No&iuml; are the kind of friends who would do anything for each other, and that includes creating their own fantastic, colourful world where only they exist, far away from the problems of the world. Like Roc&oacute;&rsquo;s parents&rsquo; divorce.</p>

Rotting in the Sun

Sebastián Silva

<p>A totally sarcastic movie that is not without its incredibly moving moments. Told in a manner reminiscent of a mockumentary, without actually being one, Rotting in the Sun starts by being about a director with suicidal ideations, a tendency to take ketamine and an encounter that can be both amorous and careerist with Instagram personality Jordan Firstman. But everything takes a turn and a sofa is to blame.</p>

Sacco & Vanzetti

Giuliano Montaldo

<p>A film inspired by the real events surrounding the trial of Italian immigrants Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two anarchists who were arrested and charged with murder and armed robbery in Massachusetts, United States. The music was composed by Ennio Morricone, including a ballad sung by singer and activist Joan Baez.</p>

School of Development (2020)

Anastasia Sokolova

<p>At just six years old, this little girl already has a regimented life: she goes to the ballet, the swimming pool, English lessons and singing. It&rsquo;s all timed. Except when something comes up that destabilises the whole routine, like a lost tooth.</p>

School Time (2024)

Francisco Torres

<p>During his internship at ANIM &ndash; the Portuguese Moving Images Archive, director Francisco Torres deeply engages with the film collection of his own former film school, ESTC &ndash; Lisbon Film School. Alongside Manuel Mozos, the two dove into the past of the school that educated them.</p>

Scrubby

Paul Vollet

<p>Scrubby lives a secure and warm life in his mothers fur, until she loses it.</p>

Shelter (2023)

Julie Daravan Chea

<p>There&rsquo;s nothing better than adventures with friends. These&nbsp;two friends&nbsp;in a summer camp, making the most of it. When they are surprised by the violence of a storm, all they have to do is take refuge in each other&rsquo;s company and create stories to pass the night.</p>

shifting bodies to fluid fiction

Daniela Gutmann

<p>Curves, angles, creases; bending, grazing, rubbing. In this striking Super8 short, filmmaker Daniela Gutmann artfully turns cinema&rsquo;s typical erotic gaze on its head, creating an exhilarating exploration of the naked body. Featuring gorgeous interplay of shimmering light and cast shadow, and miraculously evoking all the senses despite being purely visual, this experimental film marks a renewed conception of how bodies reach and meld into one another &ndash; at once liberating, beguiling, and playful.</p>

Shrooms (2023)

Jorge Jácome

<p>Gently nodding to Bruce Conner&rsquo;s cinematic fungi hunt, Jorge J&aacute;come&rsquo;s leisurely portrait film follows an amateur forager and breeder of carrier pigeons in his quotidian routines, searching the woodlands on Lisbon&rsquo;s outskirts for psilocybin mushrooms and rhapsodizing about their therapeutic properties. With its soundtrack of insect chatter, birdsong, cat purrs, and whirly tubes,&nbsp;<em>Shrooms</em>&nbsp;traces circuits of habit, attention, and care between the animal, fungal, and human worlds.</p>

Dormir de Olhos Abertos (Sleep With Your Eyes Open)

Nele Wohlatz

<p>A coastal metropolis in Brazil. Heartbroken, Kai lands from Taiwan for a vacation. A broken air conditioner leads them to Fu Ang&#39;s umbrella shop. He could become a friend, but the rainy season doesn&#39;t come and his business disappears. While searching for Fu Ang, Kai discovers the story of Xiaoxin and a group of Chinese workers in a posh skyscraper. Imported products made in China deliver problems to their rich, white neighbors. In Xiaoxin&#39;s story, Kai finds himself strangely reflected.</p> <p>Main characters come and go unexpectedly in this quiet comedy of misunderstandings, played by amateurs and actors. From one foreign city to the next they follow the needs of work more than a classic dramaturgy. But over the course of a hot, slow summer, tender bonds grow between them like islands in a sea full of sharks.</p>

Slimane

Carlos Pereira

<h6><span style="font-size:14px">In a Germany in the not too distant future, queer people have become even more marginalized and under threat. On the last day of winter, Omar is released from prison and, unannounced, visits Ava.</span></h6>

So small, looking all grown up

Tânia Dinis

<p>This film&nbsp;combines fictional and documentary treatment and uses photographic archives, real images and the oral testimony of women from the regions of Tr&aacute;s-os-Montes, Beira, Alto and Baixo Minho who, between the 1940s and 1980s, came to Porto to work as domestic servants.</p>

Solar Fullness (2024)

Carolina Caramujo

<p>An illustrator observes and draws women illuminated by the sun, who sing as part of their daily lives. The film explores the relationship between Drawing and Cinema in the director&rsquo;s creative process, emphasizing women&rsquo;s strength and the life of their forms, on paper and on screen.</p>

Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat

Johan Grimonprez

<p>In 1960, United Nations: the Global South ignites a political earthquake, musicians Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach crash the Security Council, Nikita Khrushchev bangs his shoe denouncing America&rsquo;s color bar, while the U.S. dispatches jazz ambassador Louis Armstrong to the Congo to deflect attention from its first African post-colonial coup.</p> <p>Director Johan Grimonprez (<em>Double Take</em>, 2009) returns to Sundance with this magnificent essay film that vibrantly embodies the historic and continually evolving colonial machinations that underpin what author and Congolese writer In Koli Jean Bofane refers to as an ever-evolving &ldquo;algorithm of <em>Congo Inc</em>.&rdquo;</p>

Steppenwolf

Adilkhan Yerzhanov

<p>A civil war rages across a vast, seemingly unpopulated landscape. As men fight and die, a mute woman searches for her son who has been kidnapped by child organ traffickers. She is accompanied by &lsquo;the Steppenwolf&rsquo;, a reformed ex-convict now hardened into a ruthless investigator. They resemble a bloody odd couple, but are determined to see their mission through, removing every obstacle &ndash; most of them human &ndash; in their path.<br /> <br /> Following the success of Assault (IFFR 2022), prolific filmmaker Adilkhan Yerzhanov returns with Steppenwolf, his fifteenth feature in twelve years. Maintaining his signature absurdist touch, Steppenwolf stands as a testament to his prowess, skillfully interweaving classic elements from Westerns (with John Ford&rsquo;s The Searchers, 1956, a key inspiration) road movies and revenge dramas. Yerzhanov&#39;s mastery lies in reducing these genres to their elemental core, presenting them in a clean-cut manner, almost resembling the structure of a video game &ndash; shoot, get treasure, repeat. This film is his most stylised, visually arresting and genre-defying work to date and as before, he doesn&rsquo;t hold back on violence: it is bloody, furious and copious. Formally striking, Yerzhanov makes the most of the breathtaking landscape the action unfolds across, its beauty contrasting with the film&rsquo;s bloodier elements, whose impact might be unbearable had Yerzhanov not leavened it with humour, albeit of the darkest kind.</p>

Stone, Hat, Ribbon & Rose

Eva Giolo

<p>A map &ndash; a world &ndash; unfolds on a table. We take an audiovisual tour through Brussels, which at the same time forms a cinematic message to Chantal Akerman. Gray morning light reveals parked cars in quiet streets, a swimming pool without visitors, an empty metro platform. We&rsquo;re taken to places where people spend a gray day: a gymnasium, a museum, a lost and found, a library, a cinema. Like Akerman often appeared on camera in her own films, we see Giolo, resting in a hotel room &ndash; the open window subtly lets in the sleeping city. Stone, Hat, Ribbon and Rose celebrate the passing of time in stillness and movement. Between the sounds and images of the city, silent, surreal scenes with objects are shown in a sky-blue studio: an inflated swimming ring, a red toy car, a still life, a vase, a rolled-up movie screen. An image of a subway corridor is suddenly reminiscent of an empty cinema screen, an open window, and the frame of a painting. The alternating, associative images function as absurd, critical, and poetic comments on everyday life.</p>

Summer 2000

Virginie Nolin Laurence Olivier

<p>Punk-pop songs, skater videos, 2000s aesthetics. The film focuses on Sarah, who spends time with&nbsp;Raphaelle and two of her friends. The game of discovering love is interrupted by something that will make one think about questions of identity and consent.</p>

Summer 96

Mathilde Bédouet

<p>In summer, there are always traditions, even if more relaxed. Here, it&rsquo;s a picnic on August 15th. But this year is different, because Paul doesn&rsquo;t belong to the world of children anymore, and not yet to the world of adults. Stuck in limbo, it&rsquo;s going to be a different kind of picnic.</p>

Sunflowers - A Strange Feeling Of Existential Angst

Carolina Bonzinho Leander Meresaar

<p>-</p>

Sur La Stre Nuro – Uncharted Soundscapes

Luis Fernandes

<p>This film centers on the artistic and conceptual processes employed by various contemporary Portuguese sound artists. A narrative emerges from the multiple conversations that reveal numerous approaches to the experimentation processes.</p>

Sweet Juices

Sejon Im Will Suen

<p>Facing eviction and incarceration, blackmarket cooks Shirong and Tony attempt to clear their names by crafting the perfect squirting dumplings.</p>

T-zero

Daniel Roque Vicente Nirō

<p>In an attempt to sell strangely furnished houses with high rents, a real estate agent is confronted by the new and old residents of the city and by her own problems. (Eduarda Silva)</p>

Tako Tsubo

Fanny Sorgo Eva Pedroza

<p>Mr. Ham decides to have his heart removed to free himself from his complicated emotions. The doctor assures him that, in this day and age, this procedure presents no problem. Of a pensive disposition, Mr. Ham keeps his heart for a while after the removal in the hope of understanding it better someday.<br /> Takotsubo syndrome, also known as stress cardiomyopathy or broken-heart syndrome, is a rare, acute and often serious dysfunction of the heart muscle that usually arises from extraordinary emotional or physical stress.</p>

Contos do esquecimento (Tales of Oblivion)

Dulce Fernandes

<p>Excavations in the southern Portuguese city of Lagos unearthed a huge 15th-century landfill site a few years ago. Alongside a variety of implements, the archaeologists found human remains. There were more than 150 skeletons in all, of men, women and children&mdash;and some of them were tied up.</p> <p>Genetic analysis confirmed that they were the skeletons of Africans who had been enslaved by traders and brought to Portugal. Perhaps they died during the voyage or shortly after their arrival; in any case, they were not given a proper burial. This shocking discovery exposed the concealed history of Portugal. Over the course of four centuries, six million people were transported in this way under the Portuguese or Brazilian flags.</p> <p>In Tales of Oblivion, Dulce Fernandes investigates the traces left in today&rsquo;s landscape by this horrific trade in human beings. The calm camera tracks steadily from site to site&mdash;the former landfill is now a parking garage topped by a minigolf course&mdash;and museum objects bearing witness to the history of colonialism. In a quiet but thorough way, this essayistic film reveals a hidden past.</p>

Tanganhom (2023)

Vítor Covelo

<p>Melga&ccedil;o, Parada do Monte. The memory of a chance encounter on the border between the real and the imagined, the affection and superstition, has been passed down from generation to generation.</p>

La Bête (The Beast)

Bertrand Bonello

<p>A filmmaker consistently unafraid to wade through the weird miasma of contemporary life, Bertrand Bonello (<em>Nocturama; Coma</em>, NYFF60) works from the outside in, dramatizing the psychological toll of the political and cultural world around us. Here he has created a dynamic and disturbing parable that jumps between three different time periods (1910, 2014, and 2044) to diagnose our acute&mdash;and perhaps eternal&mdash;feelings of estrangement and alienation. Using Henry James&rsquo;s haunting 1903 short story &ldquo;The Beast in the Jungle&rdquo; as his film&rsquo;s provocative inspiration, Bonello tells the story of a young woman (L&eacute;a Seydoux) who undergoes a surgical process to have her DNA&mdash;and therefore memories of all her past lives&mdash;removed. In so doing, she realizes her fate has long been intertwined, for better and worse, with a young man (George MacKay). Touching on modern anxieties of AI and incel culture, which may recur throughout history as commonly as love and hate,&nbsp;<em>The Beast</em>, like all good science-fiction, asks essential questions about the ever-shifting status of humanity itself.</p>

The Best of All Worlds

Rita Nunes

<p>Lisbon, 2027. Marta and Miguel are both researchers that are part of a scientific group and a couple in their private lives. Their relationship will be put to the test on one decisive night when the parameters that Marta is analyzing point to the very high probability of a major earthquake hitting Lisbon. The group splits, debating whether or not to warn the population of the possible impending tragedy.</p>

The Bridge (2023)

Sohyun Kim

<p>The Golem didn&rsquo;t do it on purpose, but he turned out to be a bridge linking cliffs in a peaceful forest and, thus, allowed all the animals to cross the path without a second thought. An unexpected community service.</p>

The Creators (2024)

Madeleine Homan

<p>In another dimension, the Creators are working on a project. Gradually they come closer to a result. But creating a world that mirrors their imagination is not an easy task.</p>

The Day Spring Comes

Sooyeon Shin

<p>A film about finding the courage to leave our comfort zone, here following a lion seed that is afraid to blossom. But when the wind takes him to meet a gardener, the flowers he meets give him the strength to bloom.</p>

The Diary of a Sky

Lawrence Abu Hamdan

<p>The COVID pandemic brought air traffic in Lebanon to a standstill. Despite this, the noise caused by planes over Beirut increased dramatically. At the peak of the lockdown Israeli fighter jets and drones overflew the city up to 50 times a day. Their altitude would suggest that they were not there for surveillance or reconnaissance purposes, but with the aim of producing noise. However, the city&rsquo;s countless diesel generators, reconstruction work following the explosion and the numerous civil protests relegated these noises to a hum in the background whose threatening origins could almost be forgotten. The artist and Turner Prize-winner Lawrence Abu Hamdan calls himself a &ldquo;private ear&rdquo;, an independent audio investigator. In the course of the last year, he has collected over 800 recordings of Israeli aircraft which he places at the centre of his new audio-visual essay that explores the link between territoriality and atmospheric violence.</p>

L’ Empire (The Empire)

Bruno Dumont

<p>Beneath the exterior of the common life of the inhabitants of a fishing village on the Opal Coast, arises the parallel and epic life of knights of interplanetary empires. In prey to the bloody fights of these clans at the announcement of the birth of Margat, child of a young separated couple.</p>

The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed

Joanna Arnow

<p>In her unsparing, acerbically funny feature debut, Joanna Arnow stars as an emotionally detached young Brooklynite drifting through unremarkable days and nights. Neither her on-again-off-again BDSM relationship with a mildly disinterested older dom, nor her nondescript corporate job, appear to bring her any satisfaction, and her relationship with her unpleasable New Yorker parents only compounds the tiresome cycle of her routine. Arnow, who also wrote, directed, and edited this sharp and observant take on modern-day malaise, is known for her autobiographically tinged works of brutal honesty and deadpan self-deprecation. Here, she finds a core of poignant truth about the ways people search for those elusive, ever-shifting things like emotional happiness and sexual gratification, refusing to judge them while at the same time unafraid of presenting their flaws. A Magnolia Pictures release.</p>

The First Dinosaurs Were Apples

Emma Lafarge

<p>Between puppets and animation, two little sisters try to decipher the beginning of History on Earth. If it was the dinosaurs, how it all happened. But what if everything happened a little&hellip; differently? Perhaps the first dinosaurs had a more curious beginning.</p>

A Menina Com Os Olhos Ocupados (The Girl With The Occupied Eyes)

André Carrilho

<p>Once upon a time there was a little girl who was always distracted. With her eyes fixed on her phone, she couldn&#39;t notice the world around or who wanted to play with her.</p>

The Good Omen (2024)

Alba Bresolí

<p>A ritual involving the preparation of wool, dyed red, to cover a stone. The symbolism is linked to the protection of a shepherd who takes care of his sheep before he becomes obsolete.</p>

El Auge Del Humano 3 (The Human Surge 3)

Eduardo Williams

<p>Armed with a 360-degree camera, Argentinean director Eduardo Williams returns to the bold, time-and-continent-skipping world of his 2016 film&nbsp;<em>The Human Surge</em>&nbsp;(NYFF54) and constructs something even more immense, fearless, and breathtaking. As in that earlier film, groups of friends from different parts of the world interact in the downtime between work, drifting and existing in constant motion along with the camera. Yet Williams here pushes things even further into a kind of hypnotic abstraction, filming in Taiwan, Sri Lanka, and Peru and achieving an unprecedented fluidity between spaces and feelings, natural splendor and human sensuality. Working as always without a locked script, Williams highlights the beauty of language and the sensations of people traversing liminal states of being, moving toward a kind of otherworldly queer utopia.</p>

The Illusion of an Everlasting Kiss

Marta Sousa Ribeiro

<p>A November day in Porto, in a square where skaters jump up a flight of stairs. Three characters share a moment, which is divided into three subjective shots and which, without dialogue, are intended to characterize them emotionally. The idea of shared love is called into question.</p>

The Kite

Martin Smatana

<p>Grandpa gives a kite to his grandchild, they play with it together. One day, the wind picks Grandpa up and takes him away.</p>

The Little Bird and the Squirrel (Der kleine Vogel und das Eichhörnchen)

Lena von Döhren

<p>It&rsquo;s autumn. A single yellow leaf hangs at the end of a branch. A little bird comes along to water it, but a squirrel nicks the bird&rsquo;s watering can. The bird chases the thief. Will it get its watering can back? And what dangers await in the forest? A film about surprising friendships and creative solutions.</p>

The Lodge (2005)

Gunilla Heilborn Mårten Nilsson

<p>A pair of directors who often combine dance, performance and cinema, this film is part of a trilogy. Here the &ldquo;lodge&rdquo; of the title is not in Twin Peaks, but focuses on a group of people who get together in a country cottage to see how they react to each other.</p>

The Lovers

Carolina Sandvik

<p>Love can make you fall apart. In this stop-motion romance, a couple is forced to deal with their physical and emotional transformations.</p>

The Men I Loved

Tereza Trautman

<p>Pity and Dido are married, but that doesn&rsquo;t prohibit extramarital relationships; on the contrary, they are encouraged. The film questions rigid cultural standards and what a woman is allowed to do. Directed by Tereza Trautman when she was just 22, a film banned by the Brazilian military dictatorship for its inclusion of sexual and feminist content, presented in a new digital print restored by the Cinemateca Brasileira.</p>

The Missing (Iti mapukpukaw)

Carl Joseph E. Papa

<p>Withdrawn animation artist Eric lives under the loving supervision of his supportive mother. He has a crush on his kindly colleague Carlo, an affection he doesn&rsquo;t dare voice. Nor can he, as Eric cannot speak and interacts with others using a whiteboard that hangs from his neck. But when Eric is asked by his mother to check in on his estranged uncle Rogelio, he is wrenched out of his isolation and confronted with repressed childhood memories and sinister extraterrestrial beings.</p> <p>Filipino filmmaker Carl Joseph E. Papa&rsquo;s absorbing, animated psychological drama&nbsp;<strong>The Missing</strong>&nbsp;tells a highly personal tale of trauma and reconciliation. The film&rsquo;s composite visual style, blending rotoscoping and traditional 2D animation, both retains the subtlety of actors&rsquo; performances and heightens the expressivity of their physical environment. More importantly, it allows the viewer to experience the world as Eric does, in defiance of conventional logic and true to his changing emotional state.</p> <p>Despite its sophisticated approach,&nbsp;<strong>The Missing</strong>&nbsp;is a transparent work that does not rely on narrative twists or eye-popping spectacle to hold attention. Even as it borrows elements of sci-fi and fantasy, the film remains focused on Eric&rsquo;s inner life, tracing his journey from alienation towards healing and self-realisation.</p> <p><em>&ndash; Srikanth Srinivasan</em></p>

The New School (1973)

Jorge Fraga

<p>Documentary about education in Cuba, highlighting the educational revolution in rural secondary schools, where theory and practice merged. Fidel Castro is a prominent figure in this film by Jorge Fraga.</p>

The night of the minotaur

Juliana Zuluaga Montoya

<p>In a fantastic tale spun from archival material, Juliana Zuluaga Montoya explores the origins of pornographic cinema in Colombia, sparked by Luz Emilia Garc&iacute;a. In early-20th-century Colombia, in a small village surrounded by enigmatic wilderness, Garc&iacute;a becomes the master of ceremonies presiding over the debaucherous Night of the Minotaur.</p>

The Oasis I Deserve

Inès Sieulle

<p>Films playing with the integrated use of Artificial Intelligence are beginning to proliferate and in this short film we navigate through a world of images created in this way, but also through conversations with a chatbot that reveals all the tendencies and prejudices of human beings.</p>

The Revolution Hunter (2014)

Margarida Rêgo

<p>Nostalgia can be paralysing and that&rsquo;s what is examined in this short film that explores the relationship with the Portuguese Revolution of 1974, animating an archive photograph to understand what lies between the weariness of the past and the vigour of struggling for a country.</p>

The Roof (2006)

Kamal Aljafari

<p>Meditation and a familial and personal portrait. This documentary takes Kamal Aljafari, who lived in Germany at the moment, to visit relatives in Palestine. He walks through his father&rsquo;s family&rsquo;s Ramla and his mother&rsquo;s family&rsquo;s Jaffa, weaving the history of the country with that of his parents, the memories of 1948 with the conversations with his sister&nbsp;who, like him, also holds an Israeli passport.</p>

The Royal Hotel

Kitty Green

<p>Backpackers Hanna and Liv take a job in a remote Australian pub for some extra cash and are confronted with a bunch of unruly locals and a situation that rapidly leaps out of their control.</p>

To kalokairi tis Karmen (The Summer With Carmen)

Zacharias Mavroeidis

<p>While having a day-long swim at Athens&rsquo; queer beach Limanakia, best friends Demosthenes and Nikitas recall the events of a recent summer in the prospect of turning them into a screenplay for Nikitas&rsquo; feature debut. Imagining their lives as a film, brings the two face to face with the pending conflicts in their colorfull friendship.</p>

The Survivors (2024)

José Barahona

<p>In the mid-19th century, a group of survivors from a wrecked slave ship, both black and white, end up on a deserted island, lost somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean. The fight for survival and power will flip the moral and social values of those days. The Survivors tells the story of how masters and enslaved people may or may not coexist under extreme circumstances.</p>

Them Fado Bicha (2024)

Justine Lemahieu

<p>This is Justine Lemahieu&rsquo;s encounter over several years with Lila and Jo&atilde;o, the two artists and activists from&nbsp;Fado Bicha band, whose songs embody and give voice to LGBTQIA+ stories and struggles. Backstage, words and glances intersect, questioning our relationship with appearances, gender norms, language, and sexuality.</p>

There is no Friend’s House

Abbas Taheri

<p>Two friends, school mates, try to break the rules, just like any other teenager in the world. These are rites of passage that countless generations have lived through. But in this case, the two friends are Iranian and society&rsquo;s rules will make the consequences more painful.</p>

This Excessive Ambition

Cris Trenas Rogelio Gonzalez Santos Bacana

<p>C. Tangana is a global phenomenon. He&rsquo;s also an artist who values his ability to write lyrics, who doesn&rsquo;t feel totally part of hip hop culture, who likes Tolstoy and who thinks he can&rsquo;t sing &mdash; but does it anyway. C. Tangana is a Spanish rapper that has conquered the world and now presents his vulnerability as an artist in a documentary about the production of a concert, in a struggle between artistic vision and logistical limitations.</p>

Raíz (Through Rocks and Clouds | Durch Felsen und Wolken)

Franco García Becerra

<p>Eight-year-old Feliciano spends his days herding alpacas in a remote region of the Andes. His only companions are Ronaldo, a young alpaca, and Rambo, an old dog. Feliciano chats with them about football and the Peruvian national team&rsquo;s World Cup qualifying matches. But behind this apparently monotonous and peaceful routine lies a threatening reality: a contaminated lake and his parents&rsquo; deep-seated anxieties. A mining company is pressuring the community to sell their land and is resorting to radical means of intimidation: several alpacas are found with their throats slit. The authorities ignore all pleas for help; Feliciano and the village are on their own. When Ronaldo disappears one day, Feliciano embarks on a desperate search. Meanwhile, his parents and neighbours band together to take action against the company...</p>

Tiger (2015)

Kariem Saleh

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

Tits

Eivind Landsvik

<p>Following an unpleasant run in at the beach, teenagers Oscar and Iben are left behind by their friends. When one of them makes a friendly gesture, they experience what might be the beginning of an unexpected relationship.</p>

Tornadoes (2023)

Annabelle Amoros

<p>Annabelle Amoros delves into the world of tornadoes at the heart of the United States, within communities affected by these meteorological phenomena and the ways in which capitalism has to respond to the fears of those who want to protect themselves.</p>

Transylvanie

Rodrigue Huart

<p>Ewa is a 10-year-old girl living in a high building in a quiet town. She&#39;s an odd, lonely child and for good reason: she&#39;s convinced of being a vampire. Fascinated by Hugo, 15, she dreams of turning him into a vampire too, so that she can overcome her loneliness. When Ewa opens up to him, she gets bullied by teenagers from the neighborhood. Hurt in her body and soul, she&#39;s ready to act in the creepiest, sickest ways to prove her identity to the world.</p>

Opéra Tulipe (Tulip Opera)

Marie-Sarah Piron

<p>Tulips to be tended break into operatic and epic lyrical song to welcome spring and perhaps play with a gardener with a rip in his trousers.</p>

Tupamaros

Jan Lindqvist

<p>The film focuses on the Uruguayan urban left-wing guerrillas, the so-called Tupamaros, and was filmed at the height of their operation and within their members &mdash; the filming was clandestine and carried out by various people who didn&rsquo;t know the real purpose of the film, which shows the history of the struggle and the desperation that led to the guerrillas&rsquo; operationalisation.</p>

Deux Un Deux (Two One Two)

Shira Avni

<p>An animated portrait of parenthood of a neurodiverse child and mother and their separation into two beings.&nbsp;<em>&ndash; DeWitt Davis</em></p>

Two Wars (Kaksi Sotaa)

Jan Ijäs

<p>Two Wars is a work of thought, imagination, and narrative divided in two chapters, World War I and World War II. The first chapter is set in Monte Cassino in Central Italy and the second ten kilometres to the south in the village of San Pietro Infine.</p>

UNDR

Kamal Aljafari

<p>Helicopter footage examines the desert, surveying ancient natural formations and human interventions. Dynamite changes the face of the land. Farmers work their fields. Children play hide-and-seek. Employing archival footage,&nbsp;<strong>UNDR</strong>&nbsp;constructs an eerie narrative of calculated incursion. We cannot help but recall that Palestine remains a land subjected to aerial surveillance that seeks to appropriate the landscape.</p>

Kājām gaisā (Upside down)

Dace Rīdūze

<p>When you&rsquo;re a bat, you sleep upside down and everything is seen upside down. But imagine that instead of sleeping during the day, you take the opportunity to wake up and feel the sun on your wings? And maybe meet a new friend? He&rsquo;s a little mouse and he doesn&rsquo;t walk upside down.</p>

زورو العراق(Visit Iraq)

Kamal Aljafari

<p>The offices of the Iraqi Airways in Geneva have been abandoned due to the embargo on the country in the 1990s. But the place remains, like a haunting ghost, with all the elements of the time. Neighbours are interviewed and fears and fantasies are revealed.</p>

Void

Iwasaki Yusuke

<p>Asagi&#39;s classmates don&rsquo;t seem concerned when her friend Satake suddenly dies in a strange way: they just continue their conversations about food and karaoke. While Asagi struggles with her loss, everything around her becomes increasingly absurd. A promising, idiosyncratic psychological horror debut with a generous dollop of dark humour and an eerie atmosphere.</p>

VOYAGERS

GAUTHIER AMMEUX VALENTINE BAILLON BENJAMIN CHAUMÉNY ALEXANDRE DUMEZ LEA FINUCCI MARINA ROGER

<p>A tiger, escaping his hunter, ends up in a space station occupied by an astronaut and his goldfish...</p>

À tona d'água (Water Hazard)

Alexander David

<p>A child is spending the holidays with their family. The setting is perfect for relaxation and for wondering. Next to the house, workers are building a pond. Attracted to it, the child senses a presence, someone familiar yet still unknown. Alexander David captures on screen all the beauty of a childhood self-discovery and the first uncertain steps taken outside of parental control. Evocative and mellow,&nbsp;<strong>Water Hazard</strong>&nbsp;explores queer identity with a delicate and empathetic eye.&nbsp;</p>

Uns Geht Es Gut (We Are Fine)

Michaela Taschek Sandra Wollner Britta Schoening

<p>A couple&rsquo;s relationship is seen in a decontextualised way, through slides that were found at a flea market in Vienna. These pieces of personal history intersect with the historical context.</p>

We are Fugazi from Washington, DC

Joseph Pattisall Joe Gross Jeff Krulik

<p>Fugazi are a post-hardcore band from the United States, with a particular political and social conscience &mdash; and an influence that reverberated in the future of punk and alternative music. Always with a &ldquo;do it yourself&rdquo; ethic, they never wanted to leave the independent music industry for the big labels. This documentary is a testament to that ethos, comprising rare archive footage captured by fans at the band&rsquo;s numerous gigs.</p>

Estamos no ar

Diogo Costa Amarante

<p>A son, his shy mother and unhappy grandmother share a desire for a different life to the one they have. They&rsquo;re left to live them out in their dreams, fantasies or online. Diogo Costa Amarante&rsquo;s impressive debut is a refreshing portrait of modern family life.</p>

À Boleia da Ciência (What’s It All About)

Pedro Lino Jerónimo Rocha João Miguel Real André Jesus

<p>Preview of Pedro Lino&rsquo;s series &Agrave; Boleia da Ci&ecirc;ncia, showing three episodes: &ldquo;Tornado is coming&rdquo;, &ldquo;Let&rsquo;s help the dolphins&rdquo; and &ldquo;Mother Lynx&rdquo;. We&rsquo;ll follow a family of scientists who, using their van with its unique properties, will explore the mysteries of science.</p>

Who’s Wrong? (Vems fel?)

Linda Hambäck Stina Wirsén

<p>A day to explore every child&rsquo;s favourite toy in the classroom, and Teddycat has brought out her superhero. But before she presents him, she&rsquo;ll have to deal with Little Dog.</p>

Conte sauvage (Wild Tale)

Aline Quertain

<p>A feline and a bird meet, get together and develop a codependent relationship, until it becomes toxic. Liberation comes, but not before a transformation that upsets their dynamic.</p>

Writing Home (2024)

Eva Matejovičová

<p>A bark beetle girl, who should be spending her days relaxing in a forest, sees her world upended when a fire separates her from her family and traps her in a city where all the dangers are gigantic.</p>

Tú Me Abrasas (You Burn Me)

Matías Piñeiro

<p><em>T&uacute; me abrasas</em>&nbsp;is an adaptation of &ldquo;Sea Foam&rdquo;, a chapter from Cesare Pavese&rsquo;s &ldquo;Dialoghi con Leuc&ograve;&rdquo; published in 1947. The ancient Greek poet Sappho and the nymph Britomartis meet beside the sea and have a conversation about love and death. Sappho is said to have thrown herself into the ocean from lovesickness. Britomartis apparently tumbled off a cliff and into the water while fleeing from a man. Together, the two discuss the stories and images that have emerged around them to try and understand, at least for a moment, the bittersweet nature of desire. The film adapts not only the text but also footnotes and gaps in the story. For example, the fact that, in 1950, a desperate Pavese committed suicide in a hotel room with this book by his side. Or that Sappho&rsquo;s poems have survived only in fragments. Or that sea foam is historically and scientifically associated with fertility and bacteria, that is, with life itself. &ldquo;Everything dies in the sea and comes back to life,&rdquo; says Britomartis.&nbsp;<em>T&uacute; me abrasas</em>&nbsp;introduces new readings and translations that go beyond the myths by Pavese and Sappho.</p>

Yours truly, Fear

Telmo Soares

<p>In a world where we&rsquo;re more apart from each&nbsp;other than ever, we meet a band that pulls the rug out and teaches us empathy. 5&ordf; Punkada embark on a European tour and give us the chance to know them intimately while opening a window into the world of artists with disabilities.</p>

Zima (2023)

Kasumi Ozeki Tomek Popakul

<p>Set in a fishing village, this delicate animation is about the weight of loneliness in a community, where humans and animals face the hardships of winter.</p>

Zinzindurrunkarratz

Oskar Alegria

<p>In this gem of minimalist and poetic magnetism, filmmaker Oskar Alegr&iacute;a and adorable donkey Paolo embark on a journey to bring provisions to the last shepherd of the Andia Mountains. Retracing the seasonal route his grandfather made with his flock, Alegr&iacute;a collects a trove of memories from a disappearing world, embodied in sounds and degraded silent images captured with his father&rsquo;s Super-8 camera. Ancient songs, sounds, and encounters chart a way of life mostly forgotten. &ndash;&nbsp;<em>Ruth Somalo</em>&nbsp;</p>