Films

Not sure where to look and cut, Jasna Safić’s portrait of an old man suffering from a mental illness makes up for its shortcomings by embracing a selfless humanity.

A fun, campy homage to contemporary folk and cosmic horror.

Through an experimental film essay, filmmaker Coline Confort aims to capture the “rupture and repair” of a relationship.

A strident critique of Germany’s relationship with some of today’s social and political realities at home and abroad, awarded the Alice Guy Prize at FIDMarseille.

The 1983 French television interview with actor Maria Schneider has lost little of its relevance in the intervening 40 years. In these reenactments of the interview, everything appears to be the same—but is it?

The latest film by prolific German film author Jan Soldat begs the question of why cinema is so good at portraying spectacular deaths instead of authentic ones.

Rita Barbossa presents a woman in need for real connection and underlines the right to embrace the pleasures of life without shame.

A father and daughter walk through a dark forest at night, listening to mysterious noises and looking up at the stars in Lizete Upīte’s delightfully minimalistic film.

Through symbolism and suggestive framing, Zoljargal Purevdash tells a story of contemporary Mongolia’s troubles.

Mulika is a perfect example of Africanfuturism, reconnecting local African heritage to the optimism inherent to Black contemporary sci-fi tales.

The Sower of Stars strongly evocates meditative practices, as Lois Patiño yearns for moments of rest, inner peace and undisguised self-reflection.

This Queer Palm winning short film holds an unattainable allure: unconventionally poetic yet accessible, personal but universal.

In a clever and playful moral, the extensive process of constructing a tree house charts the significance of time.

Douwe Dijkstra’s films are always simultaneously making-ofs, as he lifts the curtain on movie magic that employs green screen.

Carlos Gómez Salamanca tells an intensely personal drama, a complete life trajectory, reflecting on a turbulent societal condition.

Loneliness plays a crucial role in Evi Kalogiropoulou’s coming-of-touch story.

In her debut film, Maria Estela Paiso presents a walk down memory lane as a horror show. The end of the world is nigh and frogs are raining down from the sky.

Jean-Sébastien Chauvin’s city symphony generates affect before analytics, allowing it to continuously play with expectations and observations as it progresses.

With its contourless, bright, and lively 3D animation, Sierra captures the microaggression that is undeniably present in every example of parental expectations, and does so in a genteel way.

There is something in these characters that writer-director Risto-Pekka Blom feels compelled to denounce and it soon becomes evident who his real targets are.

Théo Jollets Meet Doug is a mesmeric overload that is quietly stunning.

While Handbook can be ruthless, Pavel Mozhar shows his finely-tuned sense for mutual respect even when the film is showing violently charged truths.

An exciting addition to the already rich and engaging filmography of Polish animation auteur Katarzyna Miechowicz.

Nicolai G.H Johansen’s horror-thriller investigates the roots of fear and anxiety—the one associated with a first love, a first touch, a first time of carelessly crossing a boundary towards the Other.

Diana Cam Van Nguyen’s festival hit is a personal story that becomes one of intergenerational and -cultural confrontation.

Gerard Ortín Castellví mixes his anthropological interests with his creative curiosities and turns his camera towards automated greenhouses in Agrilogistics.

Haig Aivazian's most daring leap into the world of film and a cogent attempt to tie together his interests through the form of found footage.

This devious domestic animated drama from the acclaimed Špela Čadež seems enthusiastically committed to realist cinema.

Nikita is a young teenager and a real techno music aficionado. Berlin is calling in this Eastern European love child of Gaspar Noé’s Climax and Xavier Dolan’s Mommy.

Niki Lindroth von Bahr's Something to Remember portrays the anguish experienced by a highly developed society and its pessimism towards an inevitable demise.

The past is inescapable for the protagonists in Marie Larrivé’s Noir-Soleil, in which the filmmaker wants us to pay close attention to “unmoments”—seemingly unimportant short occurrences where the characters stare into space or an animal moves between the bushes.

A character study of a middle aged woman, in many ways reminiscent of Yasujirō Ozu’s cinematic work.

Leonardo Martinelli’s Locarno Golden Leopard winner Neon Phantom is surprisingly as entertaining and watchable as it is urgent and harrowing.

Hotel Royal is a complete work of fiction that draws heavily from the conditions of its creation, namely the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the face of reality’s horror show and an Earth engulfed by flame, Wong Ping delivers pointed critiques, as laser focused as any satirist working in cinema.

Pom Bunsermvicha’s embrace of metafiction in Lemongrass Girl comes as no surprise as it follows a recent trend in Thai cinema.

Competing in the prestigious Cannes short film competition this year, Orthodontics is as an anachronistic tale of youth and friendship.

Focusing on a boy who finds dark spots covering his arms, Sarina Nihei’s narrative expands into a vast conspiracy.

In Doytcheva’s account of Bulgarian queer life, we are constantly reminded that identification does not have to be tied in to subjective manner of narrating.

With an unhurried pace and poetic imagery, Ana Edwards paints a portrait of an Aymara shepherd who lives on the high plateau at the Chile-Bolivia border.

Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival’s Grand Prix eloquently highlights the filmmaker’s grudge against patriarchal, male-dominated societies. Rightfully so.

Portuguese filmmaker Diogo Costa Amarante’s follow-up to his Golden Bear-winning 2016 short Small Town with a more straightforward celebration of the power of friendship.

By taking the disembodied point of view of automatic cameras, Naya — Der Wald hat tausend Augen covers an incredible amount of ground, and not only geographically.

Instead of offering anything as a straight factual counterpoint, the musical performances in One Hundred Steps themselves demand reconsideration.

Jacqueline Lentzou seems to offer some solutions to our existential angst, as the title of her latest short film humorously suggests.

Two young Black men are on a hike together. There are sparks of intense eroticism. But Tebogo Malebogo is not one to kiss and tell, nor are his characters.

In her kaleidoscopic experimental film, Yuyan Wang both eulogises and critiques a society which is drowning in an overload of information.

The Killing of Čáhcerávga is not one, but five films. Each a manifesto, these films—like chapters in a book—form a cross-section of questions and statements on indigeneity, otherness, and longing.

Randa Maroufi offers a look through the cracks of a social issue that usually remains underexposed. Her radical formalistic choices might simplify the problem for the greater good, yet never lose sight of the individual tragedies.

Lillah Halla’s third short film opens underwater, below sea level, a place that has become the victim of relentless pollution. Though never in the foreground, Halla makes the topic sufficiently tangible to allow Menarca to be grounded in ecocritique.

Two Falangists have come to disturb the domestic evening rituals of Paz and her family. Pedro Peralta’s talent celebrates the dignity of his fearless protagonist.

Ismaël Joffroy Chandoutis’ Maalbeek—part collage film, part experimental video art—challenges the documentary genre.

In Operation Jane Walk, the Austrian filmmaking duo Leonhard Müllner and Robin Klengel present us with a piece of history in spatial planning, while cleverly marking the virtual as an extension of the historical.

Cross-referencing politics and body politics, reproduction and pandemics, Isadora Neves Marques creates a juxtaposition between a warning dystopia and a dangerous reality.

Jorge Jácome presents time in an associative series of hypnotic rêveries—an ode to the past so bittersweet that we have to be repelled from it at one point.

A humorous and quietly sharp observational documentary set aboard a cruise ship.

In Symbiosis, Hungarian animator Nadja Andrasev tells the story of a deceived wife who starts a bizarre investigation of her husband’s infidelities.

A dark satire look at the (possible) end of the world through the prism of middle-class and middle-aged malaise.

Meryam Joobeur’s major festival hit, exploring the tensions within a Tunisian family, is cinematically and ethically flawless.

The female dance group JUCK performs in public spaces. By scratching between their legs, the dancers reveal patterns of male dominance. Unfortunately, this film depicts their feminist activism as solely female.