To love your enemy may be divine but few could hope to reach the level of compassion towards the troubled and unloved evidenced in these films. From slut shaming and blind eyes turned to sexual assault through to terrorist sympathisers and tortured children, each film challenges the audience to park preconceptions and come to understand the humanity at the core of these problematic individuals.
Festival Programme
Films — by Strand
Radical Empathy
I'm Your Man
Ich bin dein Mensch
An archaeologist reluctantly agrees to test-run a humanoid love robot programmed to fulfil her desires in this poignant comedy starring Downton Abbey’s Dan Stevens.
The Lost Daughter
Sensual, subversive and sun-drenched, “even mothers make mistakes” (Peter Debruge, Variety) in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s glittering directorial debut, the 2021 Venice Film Festival winner for Best Screenplay.
The Painted Bird
By equal turns horrifying and beautiful, The Painted Bird sees Czech filmmaker Václav Marhoul put a young boy through every manner of evil that 1940s Eastern Europe can conjure in this war-torn vision of hell.