Official Selection A-Z

An acclaimed Iranian filmmaker holds a casting call for the role of Scheherazade in a new film adaptation of One Thousand and One Nights – the most renowned Arabian collection in the Western world. The actresses auditioning for the role parade in front of the camera lens, along with his ex-wife, whose career went up in flames after the divorce. As time goes by, the filmmaker, a figure we never get to see, becomes increasingly coercive, gradually unveiling his true intentions. Filmed without a permit in Iran and with a non-professional cast, the feature debut of the Iranian-American filmmaker Mehrnoush Alia is an innovative mockumentary of experimental form, emerging in the aftermath of the #MeToo movement and the recent plagiarism accusations against some of the country’s most illustrious male directors. Serving as an excellent commentary on the inherently authoritarian relationship between a filmmaker and an actor, the recurring roles Iranian women are forced to play, and the oppression they endure even within artistic circles that are, theoretically, more progressive, the film delivers an emotional crescendo and a cathartic plot twist that will stay with you long after the end credits.

After a lesson about cosmic archaeologists and a water fight in the schoolyard, Elly steals Faye’s soul, and Faye gives Elly a rare birthday present. But then, when the night falls, under a sky full of stars, a song from the past will remind the girls that nothing really lasts forever.

François Ozon’s playful yet irresistibly elegant musical mystery film is a Technicolor feast of intrigue and femme fatale brilliance, based on the famous play by the French writer Robert Thomas. Trapped in a luxurious 1950s mansion due to a blizzard, eight women – portrayed by some of the greatest stars of French cinema – attempt to solve the murder of the only man in the household. Each of them has a motive. One of them is the killer. Isabelle Huppert, as the panic-stricken, melodramatic Aunt Augustine is quite a revelation. With dramatic intensity, caustic humor, and incredible comedic timing, Huppert delivers an eerily tender performance, topped with what is now considered a classic scene where she plays “Message Personnel” on the piano. With a close-up shot, Ozon focuses on her face, capturing her charged emotional state as she utters “I love you… maybe.” Rounding out the illustrious cast are Catherine Deneuve, Fanny Ardant, Emmanuelle Béart, and Danielle Darrieux. The film won the Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution at the Berlin International Film Festival and garnered multiple nominations at the European Film Awards, making 8 Women an irresistible cinematic experience – a point of reference with an unforgettable soundtrack by Krishna Levy.

Not too far from the Ararat Valley, the biblical land where Noah’s Ark was found after the flood to commence humankind anew, in the perilous, contested region of Artsakh (for Armenians), or Nagorno-Karabakh (for Azerbaijanis), a profound, metaphysical journey unfolds in the war-torn countryside. A young Armenian soldier travels alongside a teenage girl who has just lost her father, but isn’t yet aware of it – after all, on the eve of the funeral, her family sought to remove her from the village, so that she would never come to know that the man’s cold-blooded murder was committed by his fellow villagers, who had mistaken him for an enemy. Departing from linear storytelling and defying realism, the filmmaker takes the camera in hand and follows her heroes into a descent that resembles a fever dream, wading through volatile, blurred, ethereal images that soften the edges of reality. Embracing abstraction; and as if entranced by a transcendental rhythm, she weaves together vignettes drawn from the universal mythology of war, nation, religion, and family, in order to escape into a new realm of poetic vision.

Willow, a red-headed teenage girl from Ireland named after a tree, moves with her father to the house where she grew up until her mother’s passing, passed down to her by a distant relative, Alwina. Along with it, she also inherited her very own lush forest, a brand-new life in a brand-new school, as well as something truly unexpected: a letter revealing she is descended from a large family of powerful witches. Now, Willow must awaken her powers and, with the help of three fellow witches, save the enchanted forest from a tragic fate – greedy developers, who are threatening to seize the land and turn it into a shopping mall! A wonderful film for all ages, made with handcrafted effects and animation, which proves with every single frame what “magic of cinema” really means.

How do athletes construct and present themselves under the gaze of coaches, institutions, and imagined spectators? Agon tracks three women athletes, specialists in judo, fencing, and shooting, as they prepare for the fictional Ludoj 2024 Games. The director combines the immediacy of documentary observation with stylized, digitally enhanced sequences that he defines as “techno realism”. Thus, he creates an unsettling yet captivating portrait of competition, where physical discipline collides with doubt, sacrifice, and fragile identity.

As Argentina experiences an unprecedented economic crisis, in the early 2000s, young Manuel’s parents are unable to pay rent and move, along with him and his two younger brothers, into their grandmother Tati’s house. The house is in disrepair, full of relics from bygone eras and piled objects that should have been thrown away years ago, rotting more by the minute. There, Manuel, who seems to differ from the other children, will reconnect with his eccentric grandmother, herself now touched by the metaphysical, while his family disintegrates much like the food in the fridge. An allegory about inner instability, the dissolution of human equilibrium and dignity, and ultimately of a country, as seen through the eyes of a boy in search of his own identity. With cinematography as warm as the summer heat, this is a debut with an atmosphere so thick that it sears itself into memory and emotions.

The true story of the Papin sisters, two housekeepers who murdered their employers in provincial France during the 1930s. Jean Genet’s 1947 play The Maids, and Ruth Rendell’s 1977 novel A Judgement in Stone provided first-class material for Claude Chabrol to craft an odd yet riveting film that became a landmark of 1990s French cinema. At the same time, the film gave Isabelle Huppert the unique opportunity to flesh out yet another wholly idiosyncratic character, earning her both the César Award for Best Actress, and the corresponding award at the Venice Film Festival, which she shared with her exceptional co-star Sandrine Bonnaire. A top-notch cinematic depiction of the social disparities and inhibitions of French society, A Judgement in Stone builds to a shockingly escalating crescendo of violence and immorality, exposed through Chabrol’s deeply sarcastic gaze in one of the highlights of his decades-long career. The film was a primary source of inspiration, among others, for one of the triumphs of 21st-century Korean cinema, Bong Joon-ho's Parasite.

In the aftermath of a personal crisis, unable to manage the weight of expectations placed upon him, 29-years-old Pauli, a talented and successful flutist, returns to his family home in a small town in Finland. There, almost unwillingly, he connects with a group of young musicians, pariahs in the suffocating, provincial environment, who, fueled by wonderful madness, compose experimental music through improvisation. The debut of Finnish filmmaker Lauri-Matti Parppei, as well as according to The Guardian “one of the most interesting films in this year’s Cannes Film Festival,” A Light That Never Goes Out unfolds an exquisite, liberating parable on the necessity of rejecting the false self and embracing weakness, fragility, and our authentic nature. Balancing delicately between drama and bizarre roundabout humor, the film leads both its main character and the audience into the inextinguishable, comforting glow of a purifying fire, from which one is reborn different, young, and open to embracing life.

An epic-scale journey into the depths of the Palestinian plight, masterfully tracing and carefully dissecting a multifactorial and convoluted intergenerational trauma. Starting in medias res, in a setting of pulsating action and anguish that leaves a tormenting question unresolved, we are plunged (and swept) from the get-go into a story of undulating pain and a recurring sense of futility. Divided into four chapters – the surge of violence during the Nakba in 1948; the consolidation of a new status quo in the West Bank in 1978; the outbreak of the First Intifada in 1988; and the filmic present of 2022 – Cherien Dabis’s devastating All That’s Left of You makes us both witnesses and participants in a fathomless and irreparable loss. Yet Dabis resists the lure of convenient sentimentality, weaving instead a labyrinthine character study, shrouding a series of underground and catastrophic conflicts within the bounds of family. In a meticulously paced yet heart-wrenching finale that imparts a bitter aftertaste of unfinished repatriation and existential uprooting, life and hope emerge as the sole bulwark against inhumanity and dehumanization.

A Long Goodbye tells the story of Ida, a 72-year-old pianist living with dementia. In this animated, interactive VR experience, we walk in Ida’s shoes. We experience a day in her life, as her reality is fading. The apartment, where she spent a lifetime with her beloved husband Daniel, first feels empty and undefined. When we interact with objects and play the tape recordings of her husband, her playful world gradually comes to life, as if drawn in paint before our eyes. Like pieces of a puzzle, memories and conversations help Ida to rediscover herself. But we also discover Daniel’s struggles, as he hopes to stay connected and realises their remaining time together may be short. A Long Goodbye is a poetic experience about the impact of dementia, but above all it is about love and the long goodbye of two lovers who shared a life together.

The long-awaited new film by the Academy Award nominated French animation director Sylvain Chomet (The Triplets of Belleville, The Illusionist) is a wonderful biographical animated drama that delves into the life of legendary playwright and director Marcel Pagnol. In 1955, Pagnol is going through a crisis of self-confidence, while simultaneously his memory starts to betray him. Tasked with writing a weekly column about his childhood for Elle magazine, he is tormented by doubts in the wake of his most recent plays’ failure. In this moment of complete vulnerability, the young man he once was, emerges from the depths of his memory – Little Marcel Pagnol. Together, they relive the most significant chapters of their life: from his first steps as a teacher in Provence to his groundbreaking cinematic work with sound, from the construction of his own film studios to the conflicts of World War II. A film that depicts the timeless vitality of a man who was, above all, a bon vivant.

Noir intrigue and philosophical comedy intertwine unexpectedly in Hal Hartley’s tender film, which is part of the rebirth of the 1990s American indie cinema. In this breathtaking tour-de-force performance, Isabelle Huppert portrays an ex-nun turned writer of erotic literature (her namesake), who believes that the Virgin Mary has instructed her to intervene in the destiny of a troubled porn star. Her path crosses that of Thomas, a handsome amnesiac she encounters in the street, sweeping them both into a bizarre chain of ethical dilemmas, desire, and absurd violence. Amateur, which had its premiere at the Cannes Directors' Fortnight, showcases Hartley’s signature balancing act between irony and compassion, delivering one of Isabelle Huppert’s most moving performances in English. A hilarious yet simultaneously melancholically pensive approach to sin, salvation, and reinvention, drawing from Godard’s cinematic universe.

The directorial debut that put the exceedingly talented creative duo on the map is a mystical, unholy, yet at the same time sanctified triptych on the body and desire, circling through three defining phases of a woman’s life: childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Set against the backdrop of a villa perched on a cliff above the French Riviera, we get lost in a psychedelic kaleidoscope of colors and extreme close-ups, wandering through the gray zone between reality and fantasy, as the creaking staircase, the dripping faucet, and the buzzing insects flying over a corpse compose a soundtrack straight out of nightmares. An orgasmic trip that sweeps us along a series of minor (and major) “little” deaths, and simultaneously pays homage to giallo – the “yellow” horror films that haunted Italian cinema in the 1970s, whose quintessential representatives were Dario Argento and Mario Bava. The two, along with Sigmund Freud and Luis Buñuel, grin at us sardonically from the depths of our dreams.

The daring short film And the Dogs Were Quiet, directed by Sarah Maldoror , is based on the titular theater play by Aimé Césaire, one of the most prominent figures of Creole literature. Transforming the Musée de l’Homme in Paris into a deeply allegorical scenery, a dramatic dialogue dissects the trauma and the vulgarity of colonialism, as well as of the mechanisms that ensured its historical silencing and justification.

They are young, handsome, in love, and living together in a bustling neighborhood in Barcelona, while considering moving to a bigger house since their toilet is constantly leaking and it refuses to be fixed. When their sexy new neighbor appears on the balcony across the street, the delicate balance between them will shatter with a resounding crash. Queer cinema rarely delivers such a poised and honest depiction of homonormativity and the elements that define the modern urban queer identity, through the lens of a relationship between two men – literally your next-door neighbors – who are going through incredibly familiar and relatable experiences. Light-hearted without being overly sentimental, pressing and surprisingly hopeful, even when touching upon difficult issues such as parental trauma, suicide, monogamy in a manner we have yet to become accustomed to (especially in gay love stories), this small Catalan gem reminds us, in the best possible way, that life is filled with bittersweet moments.

The hedgehog is just about to go into hibernation when he notices that one of his spines is missing. It's stuck in Lena's dog's bottom, of all places. Getting it back won't be easy!

Oscar, a fifty-year-old poet living off his mother’s pension, an alcoholic, and bitter man, finds himself facing a personal and financial stalemate. Through acquaintances, he manages to land a job at a high school of a marginalized neighborhood, and meets a student innately talented in poetry. Oscar becomes her self-appointed mentor and tries to introduce her to his literary circle, but her reluctance and a series of unfortunate circumstances will turn his life upside down, providing him with the opportunity to acknowledge his mistakes for the very first time. Awarded the Jury Prize in the “Un Certain Regard” section at Cannes, shot on vivid 16mm film, directed with confidence, and edited with exceptional restraint, the second film of Colombian filmmaker Simón Mesa Soto is one of the finest of the year. Hilarious yet deeply poignant at the same time, A Poet is much more than the witty portrait of a whimsical artist, or a biting satire of the literary world: in Oscar’s face, the face of a character painfully familiar, one sees a tragic hero of our time, who commits, almost ceremoniously, one blunder after the other until the final catharsis. And all this, with an unstoppable, bitter laugh.

Is there any greater mystery than other people’s lives? A stupefying enigma crosses Lilian’s path - an American psychiatrist living in Paris who makes a living through tracing (and clinically diagnosing) the innermost aspects of the human psyche - when one of her patients is found dead. Evidence suggests it’s a suicide - but could a different methodology, one that questions the saying “one should not air one’s dirty laundry in public,” lead to a different conclusion? And could it be that the audio recording used by Lilian to document her sessions contain messages that call for a different kind of deciphering? By inviting the ever-exquisite Jodie Foster to deliver a performance in her second language (the charismatic actress attended a French school, and even voices her own films in French if the need arises) and surrounding her with a harmonious blend of the old and new vanguard of French cinema (Daniel Auteuil, Virginie Efira, Mathieu Amalric), Rebecca Zlotowski unlocks our subconscious, as if we were entranced under a hypnotist’s spell. Keep an eye out for the iconic documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, who is making his first appearance in front of the camera lens here, in a surprise role.

An Argentinian actress travels to the Azores to participate in Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. Upon her arrival on the island, she finds no one from the troupe; there is not even a theater. After encountering Ariel, the air spirit of The Tempest who longs to be freed from its master, Prospero, the actress discovers that the curtain has already risen, the entire island has become a stage, and its inhabitants have morphed into Shakespearean characters. In his fourth feature film, Spanish director Lois Patiño creates a magical universe, where the dreamlike landscapes of the Portuguese Azores play the role of the desert island on which The Tempest is set. The film is a play-within-a-play, a meta-narrative with elements from the theater of the absurd, which derives from the director’s desire to reflect on how and from where, the poetry, humanity and deepness of Shakespeare’s texts can still challenge us today.

Blending fiction with realism, and professional with non-professional actors, Spanish director Sandra Romero makes her cinematic debut with a story that brings family tensions to the surface, in a documentary style. The dissipated intimacy between two brothers begins to resurface when Antonio returns to his town in Andalusia for Easter holidays, to a collapsing family home, to help his twin brother Javier, who has a congenital disease. They will have to face conflicts from the past, feelings of loneliness, and reproaches that will culminate in a tension-filled confrontation. Antonio must confront the dilemma of whether to stay and try to fix things or go back to his own life. The main roles are portrayed by two brothers, professional actor Antonio Araque and amateur actor Javier Araque, who lays bare the illness afflicting him in front of the camera. The film premiered at the San Sebastián International Film Festival and won the Special Jury Prize and the Best Actor Award at the Almería Film Festival, as well as the Jury Award for Best Film at the LesGaiCineMad Festival.