Playlist
The 23nd IndieLisboa will be held from April 30 to May 10, 2026.
<p>A defining work of the genre, this mockumentary introduces a certain Mr. Zelig, a man who lived in 1920s America and exhibited a rare condition: a “chameleonic disorder” that caused him to transform, both physically and psychologically, into those around him. The question that remains is: what identity, if any, was truly his?</p>
<p>An obsessive exploration of the three geometric dimensions in hopes of reaching a fourth.</p>
<p>Women of the Revolution is a film that celebrates the multitude of revolutionary women: the mothers of our democracy. Through the voice, gaze, silence, and actions of each of these women, we learn about the richness of their experiences, which together give us a legacy of trust, justice, perseverance, respect, and freedom. These are women who defeated fascism, colonialism, and social inequalities in Portugal and the occupied African territories and transformed the world around them.</p>
<p>This film celebrates the life and work of Zurita de Oliveira — musician, performer, composer, and author — widely recognized as the pioneer of rock & roll in Portugal. She turned music into an act of defiance, forging a path at a time when there was little room for free-spirited women. Through songs and testimonies, the film reclaims her memory and transforms her previously unheard lyrics into a gesture of resistance, sung and performed by the women of today.</p>
<p>We already knew it would come to this: in 2194, bodies bearing a human likeness are cultivated to host artificial intelligences. Transfers between the digital and physical realms have become daily routine. An immigration officer from the Department of Embodiments arrives to interrogate a being on the verge of transformation.</p>
<p>At a summer camp in 2007, João meets Ivo. We Were Just Brats is a possible narrative of a queer teenager who finds, in the dormitory and in the hip-hop and pop music of his world, a space that oscillates between self-discovery and punitive surveillance.</p>
<p>The mission is secret and the ambition utopian: a film to truly bring the world to an end. We Put the World to Sleep is a work about borders — a nine-year production that offers anything but certainty: performer or character, improvisation or script, death or persistence, the real or its satellite. This is the second chapter of the “spiritual trilogy” by Romanian filmmaker Adrian Țofei and his artistic partner Duru Yücel.</p>
<p>Gisberta, a immigrant trans woman, receives the news that she is HIV positive, causing her to lose all her sources of income and become homeless and addicted. In the building where she finds shelter, she is approached by an extremely aggressive young group.</p>
<p>In Linz Cathedral, the Hard-Chor, conducted by Alexander Koller, performs Bruckner. Sound and visual artist Stefan Tiefengraber invites us to listen to what is usually unheard. By removing the sonic source, the Austrian artist searches for what the pauses reveal — for reverberation, for echo: what remains when sound itself falls silent?</p>
<p>In the distant future, the world of the eternal present is inhabited by bio-mechanical-digital-electronic beings. But one of these beings does not believe that it has always been like this and sets out on a journey of discovery in 3 stages. Such stages are made up of moving paintings, images corroded by the glitch and 2D and 3D animation, intertwined by narrator-poets and music, in a sci-fi object combining subversion, adventure and childishness.</p>
<p>Fisheress, beware not to catch in your nets the sulfurous Seranha! The malefic Venenus, from her mouth injected, will inflame your sleeping ecstasy and transform you forever…</p>
<p>So vast, yet so private. Grief is a paradoxical entity — an old (un)familiar presence, a creature of many silhouettes. In this bookbinding workshop — devoted to extending the lifespan of a few volumes — it becomes the central character.</p>
<p>Arielle and Myriam contemplate and philosophize — their eyes fixed beyond, into the star-strewn darkness. They reflect on love, the sacrifices it demands, and the madness it can inspire. Two divas in a tribute to the very origins of cinema.</p>
<p>In this fantastical and sinister universe, the bird-people — human bodies crowned with avian heads — struggle to confront an imminent threat: their eggs are haunted. A violent, surreal, and fiercely imaginative animated film.</p>
<p>The messy life of a young couple and their clandestine cat in a room whose rent they cannot afford. A story of love, sharing, and hope — unshakable and resilient in its innocence in the face of the unstable and disordered life of our times.</p>
<p>A country house and a double date. It begins cordially, politely — of course — until alcohol starts laying down its own law, loosening tongues and inhibitions. In its wake come old conflicts between siblings and spouses, tensions, resentments, and the you-never-told-me-this revelations long left unsaid.</p>
<p>The age of video surveillance has not only taken over our avenues; it has trespassed into the natural world. Today, we live online, in a reality where we can choose to follow a family of owls 24 hours a day. Will this bring us closer to truly knowing these wild animals? Or does it push us even further from understanding what inhabits their gaze and consciousness? Is this an excess of control — or simply monitoring?</p>
<p>The Red Spectacles is the first installment of the “Kerberos Saga”, a trilogy conceived by Mamoru Oshii — best known for his work in animation, particularly Ghost in the Shell (1995) — imagining a Tokyo dominated by a Nazi Germany that emerged victorious from World War II. Kōichi Todome is a former officer of Kerberos, a paramilitary unit clad in seemingly invincible exoskeleton armor, who returns to his country’s capital only to find it in an even darker state than when he left. A noir classic presented in a new 4K restoration.</p>
<p>The Red Planet is under attack. Its inhabitants are forced to leave. They land on the Blue Planet, where people are not particularly welcoming…</p>
<p>On the 50th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution, I made a documentary about Álvaro Cunhal. Now, on the centenary of the 1926 military coup, it seemed only fitting to make one about Salazar. Conceived as a diptych, the film brings together figures such as the housekeeper, the cardinal, the minister of propaganda, the nurse, and the shoeshiner, who—through their memories—recount stories we all believed had not been forgotten.</p>
<p>In a spa surrounded by mountains of salt, guests relax and sunbathe, while workers collect the glowing crystals under the sun. Children run off, escaping the watchful eyes of adults, and a woman drifts through this landscape in a haze, detached from reality. As night falls, the space transforms, shaped by the desires of those who pass through.</p>
<p>First we giggle. Then we repeat syllables and words. Until something magical happens: we combine them and create something new. No longer just imitating, we begin to say something about the world around us. These are our first sentences, precious and unrepeatable. Based on the book of the same name, this short film brings together sentences that were spoken for the very first time.</p>
<p>The Intruder is a video essay rooted in the experience of a heart surgery. Inspired by texts by Jean-Luc Nancy and María Zambrano, it superimposes clinical, personal, and emotional images to form a dense visual archive. Accumulation and rhythm shape a non-linear narrative in which memory, body, and time are reconfigured through voice and heartbeat.</p>
<p>Lorenzo’s ear feels different. It was after a boat accident that the ringing began — and never left — growing louder and more insistent, seeping into the fabric of his everyday life. Through medical appointments and less conventional therapies, this is his search for relief — for something that might restore silence.</p>
<p>Metal detector in hand, the Hunter roams through forest and city in search of treasure. It is his way of life, his calling: the summons of Lord Gold. Along the way, however, he finds everything; his home resembles a museum, or a shop filled with objects rescued from anonymity.</p>
<p>Iceland’s icy beauty conceals a turmoil of lava. Earthquakes are becoming increasingly frequent, and Anna, Iceland’s leading volcanologist, fears the worst: a volcanic eruption is approaching that could destroy Reykjavík, yet no one seems to take her seriously. But this is not the only upheaval she faces: a Danish photographer enters her life, complicating her marriage and putting her family at risk. The Fires is based on a popular Icelandic novel and replicated the book’s success at the country’s box office.</p>
<p>Miguel is 9 years old and obsessed with singer Mariah Carey. He goes to a Catholic school and one day his class is challenged by the nuns to sell calendars of the Virgin Mary. When he finds out that he won’t be able to keep the profits from the calendar sales like he thought, he decides to take action. After all, his favorite singer is coming to perform in his town, just like a miracle.</p>
<p>Bea, a 50-year-old woman on the verge of divorce, calls the emergency line to report a break-in at her home. Denís, a 25-year-old trans man—adrift between precarious work and the pull of nightlife—is still there. What begins as a scare soon gives way to curiosity, and the weekend unfolds as an unexpected journey of mutual discovery.</p>
<p>Few artists can claim the historical significance of Jocy de Oliveira. A pioneer of electronic music in Brazil — carrying a weight comparable to such towering figures as John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen — she was also a brilliant pianist, performing as a soloist under the direction of Igor Stravinsky. In his film, Dácio Pinheiro gathers her legacy while keeping a clear gaze on the present — a time in which the Brazilian composer, now 90 years old, continues to create experimental opera.</p>
<p>It’s Carnival, and at school there’s a parade to choose the best mask. This is a portrait of a Romani family in which a mother prepares her two daughters for the big event: Amanda, the youngest, fears that things might not go as planned.</p>
<p>A woman and a man on vacation in Pico Island, in the Azores. The adversities of this journey, set in constantly changing nature, trigger arguments that conceal deeper issues within the characters and their difficulty in connecting.</p>
<p>A family from Lugo, Spain, owns the confitería Ritz, an institution in the Argentine city of La Plata. It is here that everything unfolds, through a series of strange, funny and melancholic events that suggest a succession of tableaux rather than a conventional narrative sequence—very much in keeping with Lucía Seles’ cinematic language. Lost characters drift through the story, caught in a quiet despair shaped by their inability to communicate.</p>
<p>Two women share the same space, in another time. As we contemplate the gaze of both, a question arises: why is one of them probably the most well-known Portuguese woman in the world, while the other has been almost erased from our history and collective memory? In this film-poem, I summon an image in an attempt to decipher the enigmatic gaze of filmmaker Bárbara Virgínia.</p>
<p>What do dogs love to do most? Roam freely and make new friends. Tatarang is no exception.</p>
<p>The son lives on the streets; the mother walks the avenues in search of traces. The only proof of life are the graffiti he leaves on the city’s walls — which she begins to document. Then, as if that paint were a letter, she takes up the spray can in search of a reply.</p>
<p>At night, somewhere in an old farmhouse, by the light of an oil lamp, a whistle sounds, the curtain rises and a show with talking puppets begins. Biblical fables are performed, such as The Story of the Creation of the World.</p>
<p>It snowed! Lou and Marius are playing in the street, building a snowman. But Mom calls them back home. Marius has to practice clarinet, and Lou has homework to do! Pfff! … Lou opens her notebook and begins her exercises. Marius plays a few hesitant notes, but… incredible! Outside, the snowman has moved!</p>
<p>A journey through the universe of musician and composer Vítor Rua, from pop-rock music to opera, passing through repetitive-minimalism and improvised music.</p>
<p>The hierarchy begins in the elementary school playground, the center of life at that age. The tumultuous episodes of early friendships can last forever.</p>
<p>The new school year brings challenges for 14 year old Sana. She is starting at a new school where she will learn all the ins and outs of the world of baking. In the evenings she is training hard for her very first international boxing match. In a couple of weeks she and her team mates are invited to fight at the Olympic Center in Pisa. How will she cope, combining these two big passions that are both demanding a lot of her? Will she manage to juggle both and succeed in finding her footing?</p>
<p>Through improvisation, we emerge into a visual and aural experience, where we follow a musician. Reflection, Improvisation is a film that introduces Gabriel Ferrandini, one of the biggest names on drums in Portugal. We follow his work from rehearsals to the production of his new album.</p>
<p>An adult woman heads to Disneyland Paris dressed as Snow White. As she approaches the gates, she is stopped by security, who prevent her from entering on the grounds that there is already a Snow White inside the park. The tourist is confused: isn’t this Disneyland? Aren’t people supposed to dress up as the characters?</p>
<p>Raw Material was filmed over a year in the Interior Douro region. Through testimonies from local communities, the film reflects on different, at times conflicting, notions of value in relation to the landscape and how practices of cultivation, preservation and extraction benefit and impact the people who live there. A film that explores ideas of what is contained but not immediately visible within the land.</p>
<p>The primary goal is to visit her cousin Angela. Yet more often than not, the journey and its misadventures surpass the destination. Mrs. Armitagem and her dog, Breakspear, set out to invent a bicycle: and that is their grand adventure.</p>
<p>On a forest home trip with her classmates, ten year old Marlene is struggling with her early pubescent, changing body. She feels ashamed of her boobs growing. Therefore, she avoids to shower with the other girls and hides her evolving body under large sweatshirts. When the other kids start making fun of an oddly developed tadpole at the forest home museum, Marlene is weirdly identifying with it and decides to set it free.</p>
<p>Everything happens on the screen. In Ploo, an elderly owner of a vector-technology shop confronts the idea of death with the precious help of a moth. The human condition, too, is a matter of mathematics.</p>
<p>Documentary film(mast)er Jan visits the (playing) drunk slave HD. Playing Drunk is the new film by Jan Soldat—a German filmmaker who has devoted his body of work to exploring sexuality, intimacy, fetish, and, ultimately, love — and marks his return to the festival after being featured in the Focus section at IndieLisboa in 2015.</p>
<p>Somewhat anguished, caught in that lonely feeling incapable of resolving anything, a small mouse makes a decision — perhaps as an odyssey of self-discovery — to climb an enormous mountain.</p>
<p>After losing their home, a father tries to protect his son from their new reality.</p>
<p>Originally from a remote Greek island, Daphne, a teenage judoka, moves to Athens to pursue her Olympic dream. Soon, all the obstacles inherent to this new life begin to rise before her: the pressures of competition, a coach with a hidden past, and confusing feelings she had never known before. A coming-of-age story set in the uncharted waters of sexuality, intertwined with the web of interests and lies behind the scenes of the sporting world.</p>
<p>It’s a scorching summer, and Pat and Mat prefer playing table football indoors. Even then, they’re hot, so they invent all sorts of ways to cool down.</p>
<p>The absurd walks in through the front door, and the house itself becomes the protagonist. In her debut film, multidisciplinary artist Matea Radic draws on hand-drawn animation, family photographs, and a distinctly personal sense of irony to return to war-scarred Sarajevo, the city she left behind as a child. What does attachment really mean?</p>
<p>In Roswell, New Mexico, aliens are everywhere — they’re the local mascot, the identity of this small town that claims to have witnessed the crash of a UFO in 1947. More than a search for answers, this is a film that carries us in its pocket and hurls us into the surreal. Annabelle Amoros (Special Mention for the Silvestre Award for Best Short Film at IndieLisboa 2022 with Churchill, Polar Bear Town) returns to the festival.</p>
<p>Maxwell Alexandre was born and raised in one of Rio de Janeiro’s largest favelas, Rocinha. At 28, he burst onto the contemporary art scene, and his works are sold for exorbitant prices. His success hides a painful wound and reveals a structurally racist system.</p>
<p>A brave mouse helps the fallen stars return to the sky.</p>
<p>After the Fall of the Berlin Wall, Olinda — a city on the outskirts of Recife, Brazil, whose fate was then overseen by the country’s first communist woman mayor — became known as the first city in the world to bankrupt a McDonald’s. “A McFilm by Douglas Henrique,” the credits read. With fries sauce, by the way.</p>
<p>When I look at my love, he looks at the boy in front of him, but we only see each other’s backs. Never the face. Because we’re not all dancing together. We’re in pairs. And in this dance, my love doesn’t exist. I drag him into it, but only his back. And it was his back that I fell in love with. His broad back, dressed in the most beautiful costume in the world, which is all the costumes he wore.</p>
<p>It is autumn, and a squirrel busies itself preparing its stores for the coming winter. In the process, it discovers a missing nut — only to come face to face with a brazen crow. What follows is a wild chase through the forest.</p>
<p>Siblinghood is a bond like no other. Jana, Nastka, Franek and Benek are four siblings on the threshold of adulthood, each grappling with their own anxieties and tangled stories — one believes they are haunted by a strange little monster, another faces troubles with drugs, while another tries to clear the fog of love. One thing is certain: within this web, no movement is ever truly isolated.</p>
<p>Lia is a shy girl who works in a convenience store. Although she asked to be transferred to the night shift to avoid serving customers, she discovers that the night clientele is even stranger.</p>
<p>Based on the legend of NABIA, the goddess of rivers and waters in Galician-Portuguese mythology, a wordless allegorical narrative unfolds, celebrating the integration of human cycles into natural cycles, to the extent that harmony allows.</p>
<p>The years go by, but Monty Python endure. It’s never too often to return to the most iconic comic sextet in British history. And, being the good Britons they are, in 1975 they turned their attention to the legend of King Arthur and the quest for the Holy Grail. One of those comedy classics that goes well with just about anything. The film is directed by Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones.</p>
<p>Alex witnesses his best friend being attacked, but an intimate secret keeps him from speaking up.</p>
<p>With an aesthetic rooted in hand-painted imagery, Me And You and Smoke is an imaginative and sensitive animated film, marked by a distinctive sense of humor. As a fire breaks out, a boy’s obsession with his love interest ignites and grows out of control.</p>
<p>Sometimes, if you want to become a hero, you just have to fly.</p>
<p>Gerd Osten was an important Swedish film critic who ultimately turned to that profession after numerous failed attempts to become a filmmaker. In Mamma, Suzanne Osten—her daughter, who unlike her mother would go on to become a filmmaker and a central figure in her country’s cultural life—tells the story of a woman (clearly based on Gerd) who, between the late 1930s and the 1940s, persistently tries to make films in a Sweden occupied by Nazi Germany.</p>
<p>Sometimes, the hardest step in a day is the first one. In Loose Sleep, our hero fights a battle against himself: is it worth it to leave the comfort of the duvet and live life outside? By means of a fragmentary narrative, built on dreams and associations, this short film follows the protagonist’s speculation on activity and passivity, the passage of time and the (dis)advantages of being awake.</p>
<p>In the 1970s, the MLAC (Mouvement pour la libération de l’avortement et de la contraception) was a key organization in the fight for the right to abortion and contraception. Filmed over several years, the film follows several women in a non-hospital setting, offering a portrait of remarkable intimacy and profound collective historical significance. This screening marks the international premiere of a new digital restoration presenting, for the first time, the film’s full-length version of this militant work.</p>
<p>At the edge of time, in an unknown realm, a primitive man comes face to face with a creature from outer space. A most singular intertemporal encounter.</p>
<p>Things cannot always go our way. Two characters connected by their hair explore the world around them. As they come to accept that they may want different things, the strand of hair stretching between them grows longer.</p>
<p>On a dimly lit plain, where life is scarce, the Organoid spends its days in a simple existence. At a certain moment, it begins to sense a threatening presence around it. It decides to flee and the confrontation happens.</p>
<p>The hen is supposed to lay eggs, just like the other chickens. But the swallows in the air have awakened a completely different longing in him: she wants to fly!</p>
<p>The sea is ailing. It is unclear whether this is a recent affliction or the accumulated toll of decades of human exploitation. Three desperate, forgotten fishermen turn to dynamite fishing as their cure. A catastrophe in every sense of the word.</p>
<p>Whether we classify it as a mockumentary or a pseudo-documentary short, this movie is a fun journey through the last days on the job of the presenter of the Azorean television variety program “Meia Hora com Emanuel Raposo”.</p>
<p>In modern-day Lisbon, two art students drift through a weekend of escapism and late-capitalist burnout. Sofia and Amandine’s toxic friendship is put to the test when Amandine crosses paths with Guilherme, a pretentious artist, at an independent exhibition. Kiss and Be Friends is an acerbic comedy exploring intimacy, identity, and a generation driven by irony, anxiety, and Instagram.</p>
<p>A film about the joy of community and creating together. As performed by ducks.</p>
<p>The installation It’s not the sun who is moving proposes an abstract contemplation, where the immobile reveals its own invisible choreography. A dissonance arises between the illusion of what we perceive as constant and what is really changing. Motionless… we gaze upon the suns. What is yet to come?<br /> This immersive, multi-room installation, in which film projections of the sunrise, sunset and full moon footage recorded through a system that rotates image by 360° unfold across three spaces, invites the audience to move freely among them and engage in an immediate relationship with the celestial bodies over the course of a single day.<br /> —<br /> At a time when watching films (and series) has become a solitary habit shaped by streaming platforms and an exhausting abundance of choice, many of us nonetheless find a consolation from the weight of everyday life in this lone, convenient, screen-bound ritual. Therefore, it is not surprising that expanded cinema live performances are often audiences’ favourite once they get themselves exposed to this shared, in-person experience that transforms viewing from a flexible act, prone to distraction, into a spatial, collective and engaging one.<br /> Emerging in the 1960s alongside experimental film and performance art, between intermediality and media convergence, expanded cinema practices continue to be on the forefront of the novel audiovisual expressions, evoking unexpected emotional responses and creating memorable impressions. This uniqueness is the result of the real-time blend of technique and creativity, a kind of a skilful exchange with the machine: devices become instruments, the filmstrip or pixel a material, the audience and performer(s) together with space active parts of the work, offering a form of art that is ephemeral and unrepeatable.<br /> <br /> This performance is part of a series of six analog live performances by Luis Macías, presented across the member festivals of the European Short Film Network throughout 2026. The project is realised in cooperation with THIS IS SHORT and curated with the support of 25 FPS Festival.<br /> An expanded cinema installation with free admission, to see at Palácio Sinel de Cordes in collaboration with Trienal de Arquitectura de Lisboa during the first day of Open House Lisboa.</p>
<p>June 2006, Stockholm. Two men enter a bank wearing helmets and carrying weapons. It was this event that Ruben Östlund, the multi-award-winning Swedish filmmaker, drew upon for this short film, which would go on to win the Golden Bear at the 2010 Berlin International Film Festival. The film reconstructs a failed bank robbery, shot in a single take and choreographing more than ninety participants.</p>
<p>A roadside strip club run by an entire family — and, as always in João Canijo’s cinema, a family with more beneath the surface than it first appears. It is time to return to In the Darkness of the Night (2004), one of his most significant works, presented here in the director’s cut — in essence, the film’s original version, running 17 minutes longer than the one premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2004. A tribute screening dedicated to one of the masters of national cinema, who passed away this past January.</p>
<p>Four children guide us from the entrance to the visiting room of a prison — a place they go twice a week to see their mom or dad. Prisons aren’t built with children in mind, yet in Belgium, over 16,000 kids have a parent behind bars. I’d love to see you gives a voice to the children of prisoners and shows how they end up in a situation they never chose.</p>
<p>I first met Jay at Kanaal40, a bar located in Amsterdam’s Warmoesstraat. I worked behind the bar, Jay worked as a security guard at the door. At the threshold of the club, Jay found a sense of security: a space to express themselves and explore who they want to be. Even after the bar closed its doors, the experience continued to shape Jay’s life in deeply personal ways.</p>
<p>A grandfather dies and tries to leave his home. Unfortunately, his family don’t want to believe that he’s gone for good. Every time he tries to run away, they take him back to them.</p>
<p>It’s winter and there is no rain. Sofia returns to her grandmother’s house. In the mountains, she finds a land where only the Wind lives. All that’s left of the house is dust and ashes. In the attic, Sofia finds pieces of lives other than her own. That’s where the house listens.</p>
<p>A choreography of people and kindred creatures moves toward a bizarre tower. As if under a spell — a hypnotic occurrence — the group is unable to stop, estranged from command over their own faculties. Yet there is someone who seems to vibrate at a different frequency.</p>
<p>In an old movie theater, the oldest question of all: how do I know if I love someone? Life has moved with his mother to the Times Theatre, in downtown Manila, and finds himself stumbling through the tentative first steps of love. Everything within this setting matters: the films, the venue’s fading grandeur, and the quiet wisdom of its projectionist — their confidant.</p>
<p>Mounted on his Gravity Racer, a vehicle born in his garage, a four-year-old boy takes on the steepest hill in his neighborhood. And now? Has what he imagined turned out to be far more dangerous than he ever expected?</p>
<p>Born in the favela, it has spilled into major avenues and taken over every corner — street parties, underground dances, and upscale nightclubs alike. Funk, more specifically funk putaria, is now Brazil’s most popular music genre, proudly raising its anti-prudish flag and foregrounding the body — particularly the female body — as a site of resistance, desire, and self-assertion. Funk U All, the new film by Ana Rieper (I’ll Raffle Off My Heart, IndieLisboa 2012), brings funk to the center of sex, or sex to the center of funk.</p>
<p>As Anna wanders through the snow, she meets an unexpected playmate.</p>
<p>The little cloud is looking after a pretty flower. She loses her temper when a pesky plane gets in the way.</p>
<p>Three baby birds, one big challenge — their first flight! But as the frogs begin their peculiar performance, the sky turns into a whirlwind of improvisation. Some birds twirl, some hover, and others just hope for the best.</p>
<p>A single mother, her two children, sun, beach, ice creams, holidays. The games, so close at hand, seem to be unfolding miles away. A deafening silence heralds Fanny’s despair.</p>
<p>A lovely kid named “O” is very curious and busy discovering the world around. Despite all the obstacles “O” manages to gather some personal experiences and to gain some new skills. Will they prove useful? A short story told from a child’s perspective. For parents. And little humans.</p>
<p>Love, cinema and naivety. They meet randomly in the street: João is unemployed, Clara is a cinema production assistant. A boy-meets-girl story where the consummation is cinema itself. The protagonist’s world reflects that of a young generation: an inner world, melancholic, sensitive, naïve, and imaginative. A world that allows a film camera to speak.</p>
<p>As a gift for his wife, Álvaro buys at auction a mirror that, at the beginning of the twentieth century, once belonged to a brothel. He installs it in their bedroom, and it soon becomes clear that anyone reflected in it is suddenly seized by an inexhaustible sexual appetite. Based on a play by the playwright Vicente Pereira, this 1985 classic by Antonio Carlos Fontoura is an exuberant dance of bourgeois moralism. From the director of The Devil Queen (IndieLisboa 2023), the film is presented in a new digital restoration.</p>
<p>In Eloise’s Summer, a nine-year-old girl discovers the world of her curly hair and Cameroonian roots. Eloise is mixed: her mom is Belgian and her dad is from Cameroon. Though her hair can sometimes be challenging and even painful, she learns to love it and explores the endless possibilities of her hair. She captures her summer adventure in a self-drawn book.</p>
<p>Up the stairway, two movers struggle to carry an enormous piano. Sometimes hardship gives way to discovery.</p>
<p>Four film critics, accompanied by the discreet presence of a director, analyse the origins of their cinephilia. The May 3 screening will be followed by a discussion with invited guests after the film.</p>
<p>Two little girls are playing with a ball. But after a petty quarrel, they get angry with each other and take offense. Their umbrage makes them inflate like balloons, they fly all the way up to the clouds. Girls get stuck up there, with no idea how to get down and save their kitten stuck in the tree.</p>
<p>Maria Joana navigates the discoveries and transformations of adolescence. She experiences her first night of independence at the local Saint John street celebration, testing her limits and confronting her inner fears — but not without consequences.</p>
<p>The true story of a dog abandoned in his own home, at a time when my grandfather was beginning to experience his widowhood and I was returning from London, a place where I felt more alone than ever.</p>
<p>The disappearance of an activist becomes the latest case for the young and enigmatic detective Smiley. Sleeves rolled up, she crosses a less obvious France, tracing the missing man’s footsteps in a lo-fi odyssey about the B-side of a generation — and of a nation.</p>
<p>Nothing emerges from nothing. There is always an initial spark, a stubborn impulse that gives rise to a trend. That is precisely the case with David Holzman’s Diary, a 1967 film by a young director who decides to document his daily life and turn that footage into a film — in essence, a proto-YouTuber or TikTok-style influencer. An egocentric and strikingly prophetic satire, and one of the earliest examples of self-referential cinema.</p>
<p>Bunny and the viewer are locked in a relationship; yet the bed of roses, the sensual game, quickly drops its mask, unleashing violence that erupts and repeats itself relentlessly. How is an aggressor made?</p>
<p>A chant from another time reveals the ancient everyday gestures of a Gypsy family, anchored by the errant couple Maria and Arménio. In the flow of days and life cycles, we find resistance and celebration.</p>
<p>Mr. Gnome is sunbathing in his garden when, out of nowhere, a little cloud comes around and hides the sun. He gets very angry but luckily he knows exactly what to do.</p>
<p>A very tiny fish sails in a vast underwater city. Is he too small to see the world like the big ones do?</p>
<p>In a rural region of Brazil, a family raises and sells chickens to make a living. Their mother sends Dadá and Tato to deliver one from their coop to Seu Vicente’s restaurant, where the pot awaits as its final destination. Along the way, a special bond begins to form between Chica, the chicken, and Tato.</p>
<p>Loss often takes the slow silhouette of apathy. As if the gaze drifts away, as if walking were suffering and speaking a mountain to climb, Miguel and Laura drag themselves through pain in search of an embrace. Youth is an unspoken sentence.</p>
<p>The past haunts Emily, who carries the guilt of tragedies that struck early in her life. A youth camp, her father suggests, might offer a fresh start—looking after children and finding redemption in the midst of nature. She is warmly welcomed by a group of counsellors she quickly grows close to, but a voice from the bushes urges her to leave.</p>
<p>Almost always performing in full nudity, setting guitars on fire and bringing weapons onstage was all in a day’s work for the Butthole Surfers, the legendary Texas band formed in the early 1980s after two accounting students, Gibby Haynes and Paul Leary, crossed paths. Their psychedelic rock, steeped in radicalism, chaos and unpredictability, left a lasting mark on a generation of musicians, from Nirvana to The Flaming Lips, as well as the early era of the Red Hot Chili Peppers.</p>
<p>The color, one might say, is that fluorescent green so typical of the jackets worn by municipal waste workers. Raphaël Kaddour’s debut film guides us through the daily life of Recypark Buda: more about the people, less about the trash.</p>
<p>The Mayflower Dog Show is unquestionably one of the most important events in America. A film crew follows the backstage preparations of each champion dog and their eccentric owners. The tricks, the rivalries, the superstitions. As in any respectable dog show, the strangest creatures walk on two legs.</p>
<p>The cosmos needs Barbarella. Always in revealing outfits, the futuristic heroine sets out on a mission to defeat a villain. But much happens before she gets there. A science-fiction classic by Roger Vadim, the film stands as an important milestone in the careers of both Jane Fonda and the director himself. It’s time to watch it — or revisit it — with your feet in the water.</p>
<p>With a banjo tucked under her arm, a young woman walks through a long train in search of self-understanding. In each carriage, an encounter; with every meeting, new realizations.</p>
<p>From the window, a bird observes the world outside. Soon, what it sees seems overtaken by what it imagines, a clear reminder that the gaze is almost always defeated by reverie. A film about the possibilities of music, through the flute of Amina Mezaache and the longing for freedom.</p>
<p>That time of day has arrived: time to stretch one’s legs and switch on the television. A penguin wants nothing more than to watch his favourite show in the comfort of his armchair. But a pigeon, newly moved into the building, is determined to throw the best party in the neighbourhood.</p>
<p>A theatre having national as part of its name, at the top of a square, reflecting a country’s history. But which one? This is a voyage through the various narratives about D. Maria II National Theatre, forged through the intentions of the several regimes that intended to convey their own ideologies within the theatre’s mission. This is also the story of those who fought against it, opposed the institution and became part of it. How can one become heir of these stories, even if never having set foot inside.</p>
<p>A photographer at the peak of his career abandons his success to pursue writing, facing financial hardship and personal struggles as he chases his true passion.</p>
<p>Those last days of summer break, a window about to close — don’t go, Summer. Outside, charcoal strikes the first notes of the barbecue. Balthazar’s cousins are getting ready for the big night, while his older brother pretends he doesn’t exist. That leaves Tom, the one he texts with — the only one who doesn’t remind him that he is thirteen.</p>
<p>América is a ten-year-old girl living in a remote village in the Andes whose dream is to buy a bicycle so she will never be late for school again.</p>
<p>António, an absentee father, is in charge of feeding his daughter’s old cat while she’s on vacation. When the cat doesn’t show up, António convinces himself that something bad might’ve happened as he stumbles on small clues. Do these signs corroborate his beliefs or is António projecting his worst fear, facing death? Cat sitting turned into an existential thriller.</p>
<p>In a tradition dating back to the dawn of humanity, Costa da Caparica was born through the Arte-Xávega. Today, a community of fishermen adapts this fishing technique to the modern world, in a choreography between machine, waves, and Man.</p>
<p>Saura, Filipe, João, Beatriz, Rita, and Marchana have a language of their own, shaped by the growing pains of childhood and the uncertainties of adult life. During the summer, Saura and Filipe, once deeply connected, begin to drift apart. As they try to understand what still remains between them, their language also begins to change, and with it the group of friends they share.</p>
<p>In a new daily life, Abril, a trans woman, chooses her mother Helena as her primary caregiver for a facial feminization surgery. With maternal gestures, Helena cares for Abril with the same gaze she had when her daughter was little.</p>
<p>If a box of photographs, letters and VHS tapes hadn’t been found by Sergio Oskman beside a trash container in downtown Madrid, the life and work of the Modlins might have gone unnoticed by the world. Elmer and Margaret devoted their lives to seeking artistic recognition — he as an actor, she as a painter. They eventually ended up in the Spanish capital, withdrawn from society alongside their son, quietly shaping their own story.</p>
<p>In an abandoned rural Romania, where most people have emigrated to Germany, the four seasons pass while the river remains by the house. It is a place Lavinia promises to beautify, to make comfortable—we hear her tell Dani, who is 14. A mother who, despite her emotional instability, impulsiveness, awkwardness with feelings and a turbulent relationship with her ex-boyfriend, only wants a better life for her son.</p>
<p>In the 60s, Edviges Pisco wrote a diary about her experience as a school teacher in the village of São Brissos, in Alentejo. Inspired by her diaries, the film portrays the present day in the region, where the echoes of the past still resonate.</p>
<p>When grandma’s dog dies, granddaughter Luna helps with the burial. But what happens when you’re dead and buried underground? Grandma evades the answer, so Luna is tempted to see for herself what’s going on down there.</p>
<p>In a drought-stricken Portuguese estate, landowners and servants recount the same story from irreconcilable perspectives, revealing a fractured world on the edge of collapse.</p>
<p>The assignment seemed simple: to follow a fire brigade patrol on a night shift. The siren sounds because an elderly woman is locked inside her apartment — and perhaps it should have stayed that way, given her transformation into something far from human. Soon the entire building appears to be heading down the same path, and the camera keeps rolling. A film that proved hugely influential and unexpectedly crossed Spain’s borders.</p>
<p>(as)sento is a video that reflects on human presence without showing the body. Through images of seats displaced from their usual context and a subtle sound construction, it evokes human action and impact on the spaces we inhabit. The video creates an atmosphere of suspended time, where suggestion matters more than evidence.</p>
<p>Alternative Routes is a documentary by Rui Mota Pinto that reveals the musical diversity of a city, celebrating it and expanding its history through textual, sonic, and visual narratives that inspire new generations. It is a portrait of Viseu’s alternative music scene from the 80s and 90s, where musicians, radio broadcasters, programmers, and other music lovers are invited to confront their experiences throughout those decades.</p>
<p>A group of teenagers gathers for a camping trip. While two of them try to define their romantic relationship, they are surprised by a swarm of fireflies that leads them deep into the forest.</p>
<p>Whispers in the middle of outer space. In an interstellar journey, Brazilian archivists carry Earth’s last living remnants and their digitized copies. An intelligent system, Museo, becomes a portal into the crew’s diaries and a fractured archive of humanity. Below, a lone wanderer, perhaps the last man on Earth, roams a recovering planet Earth in ruins. Here, sounds and images collide replicas and their originals in a fractal dimension like waves crashing on the shoreline, transforming into galaxies.</p>
<p>In the backwoods of New Jersey, a young man navigates the serpentine mystery surrounding his long-missing sister and their family home.</p>
<p>At a time when elements of fascisation are becoming ever more apparent, ever more pervasive, artist Vika Kirchenbauer takes a personal look at what is in the air in present-day Germany.</p>
<p>"This Is Spinal Tap" shines a light on the self-contained universe of a metal band struggling to get back on the charts, including everything from its complicated history of ups and downs, gold albums, name changes and undersold concert dates, along with the full host of requisite groupies, promoters, hangers-on and historians, sessions, release events and those special behind-the-scenes moments that keep it all real.</p>
<p>It’s the end of summer. Danielius, a new father in his mid-thirties, leaves his family in Norway and travels to his native Lithuania to sell his parents’ flat. He tries to reconnect with old friends, but the strong bond he once had with them is now broken. Instead of rushing back to his young family to escape the deafening loneliness, he decides to stay, allowing himself to be guided by his solitude. In his feature debut, director and cameraman Vytautas Katkus indirectly builds on his own short filmmaking endeavours, in which he works deftly with an authentic space familiar both to himself and his protagonists, while at the same time adopting a loose conception of time. Here, time seems to have stopped completely in a world which lights up the fragility of the human soul and images of a home that is no longer ours.</p>
<p>The round-bellied wolf lived with a full belly but entirely empty. One day, by chance, he discovers a hidden talent to finally fill his stomach.</p>
<p>Kim, a woman in her early thirties, struggles to find her footing after a sudden breakup. Living alone in Berlin, she drifts through sleepless days haunted by memories of her youth in Seoul</p>
<p>Blues musician Al Cook lives in an apartment filled with memories. Outside, the world carries on without him. But when his home is slated for demolition, out of the ruins of his existence, a long-forgotten dream suddenly resurfaces.</p>
<p>After attending a workshop on how to write and sell a Hallmark movie, filmmaker John Wilson tries to use the same formula to sell a documentary about concrete. Documentarian and observational humor connoisseur John Wilson makes his feature directorial debut with a film that is effortlessly hysterical and genuinely hard to describe. The How to With John Wilson creator’s quick, permeating wit and boundless curiosity clock in, this time through the lenses of urbanism and, somehow, the institution of Hallmark. A heady comedic whiplash emerges as Wilson bounces between (literal) textures of the mundane. Underlying Wilson’s well-established, unique filmmaking language are both an intellectual specificity and a strangely leveling impulse — a fascination with the breadth of American life and the built environment that contains it. The History of Concrete rests on a pure, generative desire to give warmth to the invisibly ubiquitous, answering key questions such as: “Who removes the gum from our sidewalks?” This is an unassumingly strange, joyful documentary that no one else could have made, perfect for the chronically online, the studied philosopher, and everyone in between.</p>
<p>“In The Girl Chewing Gum a commanding voiceover appears to direct the action in a busy London street. As the instructions become more absurd and fantasized, we realize that the supposed director (not the shot) is fictional; he only describes—not prescribes—the events that take place before him. Smith embraced the ‘spectre of narrative’ (suppressed by structural film) to play word against picture and chance against order. Sharp and direct, the film anticipates the more elaborate scenarios to come: witty, many-layered, punning, but also seriously and poetically haunted by drama’s ineradicable ghost.”</p>
<p>In Claire Denis’s absorbing and intimate film, set at a white-run construction site in West Africa, Albouny (Isaach de Bankolé) demands the return of his brother’s body, killed in a mysterious work accident, but the site’s foreman (Matt Dillon) is clearly hiding the truth.</p>
<p>Edinburgh, 1810. Two female teachers find themselves at the centre of a scandal when one of their pupils accuses them of having a love affair. A drama about prejudice, survival and the courage to stand up for the truth.</p>
<p>The traumatic event sometimes replays itself within the trivial. The death of a fish awakens the sorrows of a lifetime. The Mother’s great losses take shape in the form of doubles, drawing her toward the center of a pond where her depression crystallizes. The Daughter uses dance to hold her back, as words seem devoid of meaning. The figure of a Heron, both symbolic and ordinary, urges the girl to accept her powerlessness and find her place.</p>
<p>Eight junkies play jazz music together in a seedy New York apartment, while they wait for their dealer to arrive. All the while, pretentious filmmaker Jim Dunn, played by William Redfield, is trying to shoot a documentary about these drugged-up men. In this provocative feature, director Shirley Clarke treads the line between documentary and fiction to poke fun at cinema verité. Hothead Dunn exhorts the men to act naturally, saying, “I’m just trying to make an honest human document.”</p> <p>The Connection (1961) was to become one of the most influential works of US independent cinema, with its restless camerawork, improvised dialogues, and understated jazz score by pianist Freddie Redd and sax legend Jackie McLean. Clarke’s raw approach captures both the bebop-infused counterculture of the early 1960s and the feelings of disillusionment.</p> <p>The director’s subversive reworking of Jack Gelber’s eponymous play, featuring actors from Living Theater, was immediately banned for its use of obscene language. Despite Clarke winning the ensuing two-year legal battle, the film went unseen for many years.</p>
<p>The Blood Countess and her maid embark on a quest for the red elixir of life and a book that threatens the vampire realm. Hot on their heels are a police inspector, two vampirologists, a vegetarian nephew and his therapist.</p>
<p>The unlikely love story of two blind Malian musicians, Amadou and Mariam, who have toured all over the world. Now they are returning home to Mali to play a big concert and record one last album.</p>
<p>Three students decide to go into the Maryland backwoods to cover the mystery behind the Blair Witch incidents. However, they lose their map and things take an unexpected turn.</p>
<p>In a stifling mise en scène that leaves no room for spontaneity, affection or rebellion, father, mother and daughter perform their rigid roles. Each follows their own script, out of sync and devoid of actual interaction. Their evocative choreography reveals small neuroses, fractures in the façade. With subtle humour and meticulous precision, this film-theatre hybrid captures a family trapped in their routines, going in circles until the curtain falls.</p>
<p>When Camille, a teenager with Down’s syndrome, auditions for a dance troupe, her sister Agathe discovers the quiet cruelty of prejudice – and the fierce love that fights back.</p>
<p>A group of business people gather in a performance hall to discuss important business. Buried under endlessly amusing, eccentric minutiae, Richard Hunter’s absurdist wonder is an anarchic meditation on rules of social engagement.</p>
<p>A director has to reimagine his film – a love story between two men – because he was not allowed to shoot it in his home country. In a different location, he finds a new leading actor and, together with him, a tender gesture of resistance.</p>
<p>A journey through Sun Ra's life and music, following his jazz foundations, innovative spirit, and ongoing artistic and social pursuits.</p>
<p>casts a spell. poetic fever dream exploring queer longing and the magic and mysteries of adolescence.</p>
<p>A swarm of bodies and lights clashes with the orderly grids of modernist architecture in Slet 1988, which takes its title from Yugoslavia’s final mass performance-celebration of socialism’s achievements. Through the body of 74-year-old dancer Sonja Vukićević and the late-1980s diaries of a teenage girl, Marta Popivoda’s incisive film contrasts the collective gatherings of the Socialist Federal Republic’s decline with the rise of nationalism and isolation in the present.</p>
<p>In the mid-1980s, during a summer day, Rui Carlos and his friends Maranau and Tomané enjoy their free time in the neighborhood, between football matches and playful games. Rui Carlos repairs his worn-out shoes and heads out to borrow a valuable football from their neighbor, Dona Olinda, who daily entrusts it to him. As the teams are chosen and the game begins, typical neighborhood interruptions ensue: a visit from Mascote the dog, a break for lunch, and spontaneous games. But when the ball gets punctured, Rui Carlos is left to face responsibility and the realities of growing up.</p>
<p>Mysterious boat returns to a village 30 years after vanishing. Two men join its crew hoping for better fortune. After one voyage, they find themselves transported back in time, mistaken for the original crew.</p>
<p>In the early 17 century, a soldier arrives at an isolated Protestant village in Germany claiming to be the heir to an abandoned farmstead. Even though he proves to be a good man, the villagers’ suspicions about his identity grow and they force a reckoning.</p>
<p>Palestinian historian Salman Abu Sitta worked with Forensic Architecture to create a reconstruction of his vanished birthplace, al-Ma’in. They discovered that the Israeli army has brought the old route from al-Ma’in back into use.</p>
<p>Decades before reality television reigned supreme, there was Albert Brooks’s debut feature, Real Life, a brilliantly deadpan, stylistically innovative satire about the perils and pitfalls of trying to capture the truth on film. The writer-director plays “Albert Brooks,” a narcissistic Hollywood filmmaker who plans to spend the year in Phoenix embedded with Warren and Jeanette Yeager (Charles Grodin and Frances Lee McCain) and their two children, deploying an arsenal of cutting-edge equipment (including the over-the-head Ettinauer 226XL camera) to capture an American family’s ordinary day-to-day. Chronicling the project’s disastrous fallout, as the meddlesome Albert can’t help getting too close to his subjects, this pioneering mockumentary is more relevant than ever amid today’s media landscape.</p>
<p>The saying “If walls could talk…” takes on a whole other dimension in Gonçalo Almeida’s astute, mood-driven study of a hotel housekeeper slowly succumbing to the building’s sinister rhythms, punctuated by an unnerving, precisely calibrated score.</p>
<p>Punishment Park is a pseudo-documentary purporting to be a film crews's news coverage of the team of soldiers escorting a group of hippies, draft dodgers, and anti-establishment types across the desert in a type of capture the flag game. The soldiers vow not to interfere with the rebels' progress and merely shepherd them along to their destination. At that point, having obtained their goal, they will be released. The film crew's coverage is meant to insure that the military's intentions are honorable. As the representatives of the 60's counter-culture get nearer to passing this arbitrary test, the soldiers become increasingly hostile, attempting to force the hippies out of their pacifist behavior. A lot of this film appears improvised and in several scenes real tempers seem to flare as some of the "acting" got overaggressive. This is a interesting exercise in situational ethics. The cinéma vérité style, hand-held camera, and ambiguous demands of the director - would the actors be able to maintain their roles given the hazing they were taking - pushed some to the brink. The cast's emotions are clearly on the surface. Unfortunately this film has gone completely underground and is next to impossible to find. It would offer a captivating document of the distrust that existed between soldiers willfully serving in the military and those persons who opposed the war peacefully.</p>
<p>Life has never been easy for itinerant artists, and Leon and Elvira know it too well. Caught between moody police officers, rival performers, and small and cheeky demons, with a little help from new friends found on their way, Leon and Elvira must find the strength to keep believing in their art. Leon and Elvira Bertelhini are a 19th-century couple of performers, deeply in love and devoted to bringing their art to stages across Portugal. They travel from village to village, delighting peasants with their acting and singing. But life has never been easy for itinerant artists. Caught between moody police officers, rival performers, and small and cheeky demons, Leon and Elvira must find the strength to keep believing in their art. Set over the course of a single day, yet punctuated by unexpected and compelling leaps forward of a century and a half, João Nicolau’s fourth feature film is freely inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson’s Providence and the Guitar. The result is a tender fable about creativity and integrity, both romantic and witty.</p>
<p>Ursula and Neda, an East German waitress with a broken heart and an Iranian YouTuber with a broken arm, both feel trapped and lonely in their precarious lives. One summer evening, Ursula falls for a mysterious musician from the city, while Neda becomes convinced she’s recognized an old friend from Tehran in an equally enigmatic street sweeper. The winding paths of chance draw the two women together on an unexpected ghost hunt in the mountains... A romantic adventure film about an unlikely friendship and the longing for another life.</p>
<p>Milanés, co-founder of the Nueva Trova movement with Silvio Rodríguez, was a major voice in Cuba's revolutionary cultural movement. This film, directed by his adopted son Fabien Pisani, combines interviews with musical luminaries such as Serrat, Chico Buarque, Harry Belafonte and Fito Páez, alongside intimate moments of Milanés in his final years, looking frail and reflecting on the fading Cuban Utopia. It’s a striking cinematic portrait of the artist. As memories of the past surface, so does the broad disillusionment of the singer and his peers, a generation of artists who were once devoted to the Revolution but who now question its legacy.</p>
<p>Céline Berger, brilliant editor and former production engineer in microelectronics, reworks material from the 1980s German Federal Employment Agency: cutting, drawing, turning, sliding, folding, shoveling, tightening, loosening. These 16mm films, once made to inform and inspire jobseekers all over West Germany, spill and seep into each other to form a mechanical symphony that dismantles the very notion of productive labour.</p>
<p>At 12 years old, Olivia's daily life is turned upside down overnight. She must get used to a more modest lifestyle and look after her brother Tim on her own. Fortunately, meeting their welcoming and lively neighbours transforms their world into a genuine adventure film! Together, they turn every challenge into a game and every day into an unforgettable moment.</p>
<p>At the end of the 19th century, the Vatican summoned four nuns to map a portion of the sky for the ambitious Map of the Heavens project: the nuns thus became ‘computers.; Narrated from the point of view of a nun’s soul in transit before reincarnation, Oh Be a Fine Girl Kiss Me intertwines history and fiction in a playful account about female perspective and self-determination.</p>
<p>When a hopeless romantic makes a wish that his long-time crush falls in love with him, a sinister enchantment ensues in writer-director Curry Barker’s freaky and frightening feature debut.</p>
<p>o is a gem of 16mm cinema that coalesces exquisitely textured images and a gripping soundscape with irony and beauty. It is also a very contemporary essay on one of the most relatable topics of the 21st century: anxiety. From a small drop of blood on the belly button, Francisca Alarcão takes us through a meditation on uncertainty, unrest and self-healing.</p>
<p>In a ruined virtual museum, a group of avatars – a security frog, a prowling velociraptor, a romantic penguin and some Kawaii TikTokers – offer a witty commentary on its works. Normal Planet marks the return of the filmmakers behind Knit's Island (VdR 2023), with a brilliant essay on the pantheonisation of art and the consumption of culture.</p>
<p>Through performances at the Newport Folk Festivals 1963 to 1966, Newport and the Great Folk Dream revels in a generation's discovery of its voice through their rediscovery of American musical traditions.</p>
<p>An ordinary workday on a building site. Forty-year-old crane operator Thomas receives a call from his wife: he has to pick her up from the hospital. Once there, he finds her sitting alone on a park bench, crying.</p>
<p>In her forties or near them, life isn't what she expected. She takes a trip down memory lane and finds the young man she once fancied. The sole directorial effort of costume designer and art director Ester Krumbachová.</p>
<p>Monsieur Hulot, Jacques Tati’s endearing clown, takes a holiday at a seaside resort, where his presence provokes one catastrophe after another. Tati’s masterpiece of gentle slapstick is a series of effortlessly well-choreographed sight gags involving dogs, boats, and firecrackers; it was the first entry in the Hulot series and the film that launched its maker to international stardom.</p>
<p>A twisted utopia unfolds, as singing cherubs melt to the sound of decay. Crafted by a sentient machine from the future, it unveils its own version of paradise.</p>
<p>Set in Umata, a futuristic African country, Memory of Princess Mumbi recounts a love triangle between a film director, an aspiring actress, and a prince.</p>
<p>Marcel, a 1-inch-tall shell, lives with his grandmother, Connie, the only residents of their town after their neighbors' sudden, mysterious disappearance. When discovered by a guest amongst the clutter of his Airbnb, the short film he posts online brings Marcel millions of passionate fans and a new hope of reuniting with his long-lost family.</p>
<p>Documentary filmmakers André and Rémy have found an ideal subject in Ben. He is witty, sophisticated, intelligent, well liked—and a serial killer. As André and Rémy document Ben’s routines, they become increasingly entwined in his vicious program, sacrificing their objectivity and their morality. Controversial winner of the International Critics’ Prize at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival, Man Bites Dog stunned audiences worldwide with its unflinching imagery and biting satire of media violence.</p>
<p>One day, out of nowhere, a giant Rock lays in the middle of the peaceful little village where Luce lives. The villagers can’t even open the door to their houses anymore! Luce is angry: go away Rock, you don’t belong here! And why are you here anyway?</p>
<p>Vivid floral specimens slosh exuberantly in a water tank, elegantly pirouette in superimposition, pulse and mutate in dizzying stroboscopic single-frame edits. Continuing Jodie Mack’s (The Grand Bizarre, NYFF56) long-term project of animating alternative materials, Lover, Lovers, Loving, Love is an ecstatic and visceral reflection on temporality, both human and botanical, an amorous affirmation of death and life.</p>
<p>The squirrel's nest is warmly padded out for the cold winter with all kinds of stolen goods. But a sudden flood forces all the forest animals to flee to Lena's farm. The squirrel would like to help them...</p>
<p>Shimmering with beauty and freighted with mystery, Gabriel Azorín’s feature debut—set in the vicinity of an ancient Roman bath in the Spanish countryside—is a cosmic hangout film that announces its director as a major new voice.</p>
<p>A surrealist film, a pseudo-documentary portrait of Las Hurdes, a remote region of Spain where civilisation has barely developed, showing how the local peasants try to survive without even the most basic utilities and skills.</p>
<p>A ghost trapped in stone meets the director's elderly grandmother, sparking an intimate conversation that weaves through haunting footage both real and staged.</p>
<p>A change in her husband’s scent sends Anne spiraling into a late-night existential crisis.</p>
<p>A tomato travels from a Brazilian plantation to a supermarket and to a consumer's kitchen. It spoils and is sent to the garbage dump, destined to be pig food.</p>
<p>Shayma’ was six years old when the Second Intifada broke out. More than twenty years later, she opens a box of old videotapes that starts her search for memories. In voice-over she addresses her mother, who says she is blessed with a poor memory. Shayma’, by contrast, still remembers exactly what she wore on her first day of school: her new school uniform with a lace collar and a white bow in her hair. She also remembers spying her birthday cake through a crack in the kitchen door of their house, which had been confiscated by Israeli soldiers.<br /> <br /> These glimpses into an intimate world are contrasted with stark images of the city, including scenes of tanks blocking the streets of Hebron, endless checkpoints, houses being destroyed, the wounded and the dead, and children playing among the rubble and trees.<br /> <br /> Personal memories and collective trauma intertwine to form a powerful portrait of a childhood lived under occupation, offering a perspective on the present and the future. The film is dedicated to Shayma’s mother, who taught her to cherish the scent of almond blossoms in spring, and to all the mothers of Palestine.</p>
<p>During a mysterious event, an insect makes its way in the head of our protagonist. The vibrations caused by the critter make the man lose his grip on reality. Trying to escape his fears, the boundaries between time, space, reality and dream slowly erode. Beautifully shot on 16mm, this experimental horror film serves as an allegory for the fear and constant threat of war we currently experience.</p>
<p>A lone bird researcher finds footage of a feral child on his hidden trail camera deep in an unexplored forest.</p>
<p>Fifty-something Rosa, lying in an MRI scanner, is prompted to summon a happy memory. She plunges into a meandering, subconscious road trip with her bubbly mother, where wild imagination becomes a tender, unruly form of therapy.</p>
<p>Since the Arab Revolution in Egypt in 2011, which deposed the long-standing regime of Hosni Mubarak, the country has experienced ongoing political unrest till the rise of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. In this hallucinatory journey that defies our idea of reality, MeowX2 takes us to the heart of a propaganda machine that shapes and propels an image of aggressive, conservative and ultimately toxic masculinity – one capable of permeating society down to its most personal spheres.</p>
<p>While the bear parents are away, their cubs stay at home with the sheep. The bear cubs play merrily with a ball of yarn, but soon get all tangled up, and everything is turned upside down! The film is based on the traditional Latvian lullaby “Hush Hush Little Bear”.</p>
<p>In 2021, 21-year-old Robert Aaron Long kills 8 Asian women in massage parlors in Atlanta, Georgia as a way to suppress his uncontrollable sexual desire. Dutch-Japanese filmmaker Kiriko Mechanicus writes letters to the young murderer to find out what his killings have to do with her sexual life. What do our racial fetishes tell us about our hidden human desires?</p>
<p>A budgie finds itself in a luxurious wellness hotel that promises stressed birds peace and relaxation. But between the lulling sound of the fountains and soothing massages, it longs only to return to the safety of its cage.</p>
<p>A woman embarks on a road trip to deliver her creamy homemade sports drink to a mysterious online buyer.</p>
<p>Blending virtual reality, family photos and studio conversations, Home is where the heart is delves into the protagonist’s past, laying bare the violence of incest and the enormous strength and effort required to survive it. The film shows how trauma shapes and defines our memories and haunts our present, but first and foremost, it remains an act of love, affirming the value and power of filmmaking as a space for healing and mutual understanding.</p>
<p>While humans try to prevent matter from decaying, microfungi remind us that everything must perish in order to continue to exist. This conceptually designed film tells a story of transformation with religion as its backdrop and fungi as its metaphor.</p>
<p>The filmmaker writes a letter to her cat, Henry. She is looking for a soft and tender place to inhabit – a quiet refuge of warmth to retreat into when the world becomes too loud. An ode to our captive pets and the intimate worlds we build together.</p>
<p>Hal and Harper and Dad chart the evolution of their family.</p>
<p>Grave robbing, torture, possessed nuns, and a satanic Sabbath: Benjamin Christensen’s legendary silent film uses a series of dramatic vignettes to explore the scientific hypothesis that the witches of the Middle Ages and early modern era suffered from the same ills as psychiatric patients diagnosed with hysteria in the film's own time. Far from a dry dissertation on the topic, the film itself is a witches’ brew of the scary, the gross, and the darkly humorous. Christensen’s mix-and-match approach to genre anticipates gothic horror, documentary re-creation, and the essay film, making for an experience unlike anything else in the history of cinema.</p>
<p>The untold origins of artificial intelligence lie not in machines but in power, revealing the fantasies behind the hype that got us here and where we go next.</p>
<p>Annapurna Sriram writes, directs, and stars in this campy, vividly pastel-colored romp about a woman who embarks upon a sex worker odyssey through Trashtown with her nonbinary friend to break a terrible curse that has befallen her. SXSW Special Jury Prize winner.</p>
<p>In 1928, industrialist Henry Ford built a company town in the Brazilian jungle and established a rubber plantation. Within a few years his industrial utopia collapsed, coming to an end in 1945. Fordlândia was largely abandoned and became known as a ghost town.<br /> <br /> Following on from her previous film Fordlandia Malaise, in this documentary Susana de Sousa Dias evokes the spirits that still haunt the place: of those who built the town and died in the process, from snakebites, infections, the blazing sun, and exhaustion; and of those who once lived there but are no longer remembered.<br /> <br /> Above all, the film lets us hear from the people who live there now. Since the early 21st century, Fordlândia’s population has been growing. Recent archaeological findings show that the history of this settlement goes back much further than Ford’s utopian illusion, which should not be allowed to dictate the land’s future. The images unfold dreamily, as if the camera itself were a floating spirit, releasing Fordlândia from the imprint of colonialism.</p>
<p>A little boy, bored with building a bed, seeks something more exciting. A mischievous fire creature lures him into a magical mushroom world, where anything is possible and adventure awaits – beyond his father’s reach.</p>
<p>Between light, metal and golden reflections, Filme Pin transforms a collection of badges celebrating international solidarity into an archive: on another scale, the spectres of exile and the struggle against the Portuguese fascist and colonial regime reappear.</p>
<p>A simulation center inside the maternity ward of Elmhurst Hospital provides the setting for Carolyn Lazard’s astutely observational video, which documents an all-Black obstetrics team of doctors, nurses, and midwives as they rehearse a complex childbirth scenario with a ventriloquized mannequin for a patient. Deriving its title from the shared agreement among participants in a training simulation, Fiction Contract lingers on the careful staging and surreal performance of care during an exercise designed to reduce racial disparities in maternal mortality.</p>
<p>In Mexico, Tere, a musician-composer, opens her home to a TV interview with a friend, as topics meander and new voices drift in. An absurdist comical chamber piece that skewers art-world hypocrisy, mocks pretension and celebrates a singular womanly bond.</p>
<p>Sports photographer Lisa vanishes without warning, leaving behind a letter asking not to be found. She was last seen photographing rural football fields in remote Georgian villages. Her father, Irakli, unable to accept her disappearance, sets out on a journey to find her. He teams up with Levani, Lisa’s enigmatic best friend, and together they travel across the countryside, retracing her steps through quiet villages, meeting kind strangers, and speaking with children playing football along the way.</p>
<p>Set in contemporary Transylvania, the film opens with a Dracula actor fleeing a restaurant show, triggering a chaotic chase by tourists and staff. Parallel stories—some AI-generated—offer diverse takes on the Dracula myth, blending pulp, avant-garde, comedy, action, and political satire in a playful, multi‑layered mosaic</p>
<p>Kirsten Johnson watches as her father Dick's body and memory fail in his 80s. Preparing for the end, she films a comedy in which she imagines the various possible deaths of her father, staging him in often absurd or improbable scenarios. A joyful film about family love, full of humour as a foil against the inevitable.</p>
<p>In the claustrophobic depths of the Mutoshi mine in Katanga (DRC), Ndjimu follows The Rememberers – a community labouring in unsafe and brutal conditions to extract coveted minerals from the ancestral soils to feed global tech empires, to their own detriment. Set to a soundtrack of metallic rock being crushed, Ndjimu is an invocation and a descent into the earth’s memory, beneath the noise of extraction and the myth of progress.</p>
<p>Through masterful editing and a seamless interplay of sound and image, Catarina Gonçalves crafts a timeless cinematic essay on artistic motion. She follows 17-year-old Nina Pinzarrone, Belgium’s second-ranked figure skater, as she embarks on the delicate yet relentless pursuit of perfection while preparing for her first World Championships. Gonçalves’ intimate black-and-white cinematography remains devotedly close to her subject, capturing exercises and repetitions that reveal both resilience and vulnerability. The result is an elegant portrait of a talent in the making, and of the unwavering dedication behind every great achievement.</p>
<p>In a subtly dystopian representation of reality, the neighbourhood of Fontainhas (Porto) becomes caught up in a murky plot of real estate speculation. Disappearances and other disturbing elements arouse the suspicions of one of the neighbours.</p>
<p>A short cross-stitched story about friendship and treason between a birdie, a baby goat and a fox inspired by a folk proverb “a friend in need is friend indeed”.</p>
<p>Following the death of the coach of a professional football club, events come to a head and the world seems to fall apart around the team. Latent sadness, orderly crisis, slow-motion fall.</p>
<p>Mario wakes up with no memory of his past life. His encounter with Lazare marks the beginning of a spatio-corporeal drift, from the eastern suburbs of Mexico City to the surrounding underground cavities, where bodies and landscapes crack in the same motion.</p>
<p>A woman swaps bodies with a chair, and everyone likes her better as a chair.</p>
<p>Tiny workers run a domesticated factory under the supervision of giant hands. This fantastically convenient at-home solution for disposable creation is absurdly inefficient and potentially an answer to the question of how we get rubber gloves. The timer is ticking.</p>
<p>Mars Verrone turns the camera on their grandfather Carroll B. Williams Jr., a Black pioneer in the natural sciences, whose reflections on facing institutional discrimination throughout an accomplished career offer a template for resilience and survival for future generations.</p>
<p>Bubbling, a cultural movement fusing dance, rhythm and electronic music born out of Rotterdam’s Afro-Caribbean community in the 1990s</p>
<p>Shot using 3D animation, Orian Barki and Meriem Bennani’s singular and affecting debut feature Bouchra combines documentary techniques with an inventive narrative structure, exploring the relationship between Bouchra, a queer Moroccan Coyote filmmaker, and her cardiologist mother (also a Coyote), who lives in Casablanca.</p>
<p>A family of six settles into their new home on Vancouver Island as internal dynamics are slowly revealed through the eyes of the youngest child.</p>
<p>When a streetlamp lights up on a country road in the jungle, a group of insects goes crazy – which proves to be handy for the hungry bats in a nearby cave.</p>
<p>In the gritty outskirts of Medellín, Barrio Triste captures a hallucinatory day and night in the lives of youth navigating the raw edges of survival, desire, and escape. Through hypnotic imagery and a pulsating score by Arca, Stillz crafts a poetic portrait of street life where violence and tenderness coexist. With a loose, dreamlike narrative, the film drifts between moments of silence, chaos, and intimacy, as its characters search for meaning amid a crumbling urban reality. Executive produced by Harmony Korine, Barrio Triste is an audiovisual descent into the textures of marginalization and resilience, blurring the line between fiction, documentary, and music video.</p>
<p>Three Doberman dogs are holding a group of teen inside the swimming pool of the villa they have snuck into. One of the boys is injured with severe bites. Despite his screams, no one comes to his aid: all the neighbors in the area are at the traditional paella with which they celebrate the beginning of summer in a nearby estate. Those attending this party suffer a strange spell that does not allow them to get into the pool because everyone who swims feels the pain of the teens. It is the eve of San Juan. A ripe day for magic.</p>
<p>Another Other revolves around the interrogations of two black figures – Lt. Smith, a character portrayed by Wesley Snipes, and Claudine Gay, Harvard University’s 30th president – by white state officials. Cutting through legal language, the film impactfully reveals what the speech of the interrogators and the interrogated actually conceals.</p>
<p>An Impossible Address is the culmination of over four years of research, unearthing a hidden history of anti-colonial solidarity between India and Africa against the Portuguese empire. The film is narrated through the life of the revolutionary Sita Valles, an Angolan-born doctor of Goan origin who joined Angola’s liberation movement and was subsequently disappeared. Director Suneil Sanzgiri employs his signature visual language, blending digital animation, 3D scanning and archival material to create a powerful personal essay on cross-continental resistance.</p>
<p>In the microcosm of a small village, paths and fates cross. A car is burning at the roadside, pigs are dying in their sties and a man is lying on a park bench. Is he dead? Who is to blame, who is responsible and when did the playful mood turn sour?</p>
<p>Congested traffic and endless construction in the city of Ulaanbaatar are the backdrop of a young couple’s tense exchanges as they navigate their strained relationship while apartment hunting in Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir’s distinctly poignant and sophisticated drama.</p>
<p>Dorothea Sing Zhang’s documentary instincts reach new heights in this intimate behind-the-scenes glimpse of her mother’s solitary routine as the star of Chinese opera, a life’s calling that alienates her from her closest.</p>
<p>The hedgehog is about to retire for hibernation when he finds one of his spines missing. Guess what? It’s stuck in the bum of Lena’s dog! Getting it back is not easy.</p>
<p>The streets of Rio de Janeiro overflow with samba — it is Carnival. Ilma writes to her son, whose whereabouts have long been unknown; in her letter, she sends news of her country, itself faded or perhaps never truly found, a victim of a history of colonization that continues to breed oppression. Every celebration carries its reverse side.</p>