Oscar-winning war chronicler Mstyslav Chernov embeds with a Ukrainian unit in their last-ditch effort to reclaim a village, in a nerve-shredding reckoning with the Russian invasion’s relentless toll.
Festival Programme
Films — by Venue
Rialto Cinemas Dunedin

Bring Them Down
Set amongst the rugged countryside of Western Ireland, Christopher Abbot (Poor Things) and Barry Keoghan (Saltburn) deliver standout performances in a thriller that is as shocking as the landscape is serene.

Deaf
Sorda
A woman navigates the experience of motherhood as a deaf person in a hearing world in Eva Libertad’s crowd-pleasing, feel-good drama which collected the Panaroma Audience Award at Berlin this year.

DJ Ahmet
Ahmet stumbles upon a forest rave at the edge of his local village, where he finds the escape he’s been desperately seeking in Georgi M. Unkovski’s loveable debut, the first ever Macedonian film to be awarded at Sundance.

Happyend
Coolly compelling and disturbingly plausible, Neo Sora's debut feature is a dystopian teen drama where surveillance, friendship, and political truth collide in near-future Tokyo.

Hard Boiled
Lat sau san taam
John Woo's influential cops vs. gangsters gun-fu classic comes back to the big screen with a pristine 4K remaster making it a perfect time to revisit or discover one of the greatest action films of all time.

Homebound
Class, religion, and gender intersect in Neeraj Ghaywan’s personal approach to life in Northern India. A life-long friendship is put to the test when a shared dream leads two best friends in different directions.
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Hysteria
A film shoot sparks fear and anger when a holy book is desecrated in the name of art in this intense German thriller, fanning the flames of contemporary conflict into a taut and tangly blaze.

Kokuho
The all-consuming dedication of the Japanese Kabuki artist gets its due in an ornate, decades-spanning spectacular of passion and pain that charts the journey of two young trainees.

Late Shift
Heldin
Plunging through the corridors of a surgical ward, this frantic Swiss drama charts the pulse-racing worklife of an overstretched, underappreciated nursing professional.
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Love
Kjærlighet
What is love? Through the stories of a straight woman and a gay man, Haugerud defies conventions with humor and compassion, in an eloquent and moving masterwork on human relations in the 21st century.

The Love That Remains
Ástin sem eftir er
An intimate, rapturously-lensed exploration of a family struggling with a parental separation, Hlynur Pálmason’s mosaic of snapshots, dreams and memories finds gentle profundity in the slow march of time.

Mirrors No. 3
Miroirs No. 3
In the wake of a traumatic incident, a young woman forms a surrogate mother-daughter relationship with her rescuer. As emotional walls come down, doubts arise: is there more to the care offered than simple kindness?

Misericordia
Miséricorde
French auteur Alain Guiraudie continues his Hitchcockian streak with this slippery, eccentric story of a provincial French family in mourning and the chaos that arrives with the prodigal return of a disquieting family friend.

Mistress Dispeller
This thought-provoking documentary follows a “mistress dispeller” – a professional specialist in ending infidelity – and intimately interrogates marriage, loneliness and labour in contemporary China.

The New Year That Never Came
Anul nou care n-a fost
Masterfully directed with pitch-perfect tension, this award-winning Romanian film orchestrates a captivating portrait of the last days of Ceausescu’s regime, as seen through the eyes of six interconnected characters.

Ngā Whanaunga: Aotearoa New Zealand's Best 2025 Highlights
A highlight selection of the best short films from Ngā Whanaunga: Aotearoa New Zealand's Best 2025, including all award winners, will screen in the regions.
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Notes from a Fish
An aspiring novelist finds inspiration gurgling down the drain when his unconventional muse, a tropical fish, goes missing in this darkly absurd romp through the mean-ish streets of Auckland’s inner suburbs.

Plainclothes
In 90s New York, a young police officer must entrap and arrest gay men whose only “crime” is their sexuality, but when he falls for one of his targets the rookie risks losing his career and family in pursuit of love.

Sex
Returning from last year’s Festival to screen alongside the rest of his Sex Dreams Love trilogy, Dag Johan Haugerud’s comic drama takes a candid and refreshing look at modern gender roles.

Sound of Falling
In die Sonne schauen
German cinema celebrated the arrival of a bold new auteur in Cannes, as Mascha Schilinski unveiled her ghostly epic of women in one house visited by catastrophe and its echoes over generations.

Stranger Eyes
Mò shì lù
In a world where everyone has a camera in their pocket, the government has cameras on street corners and businesses have cameras in their lobbies, when can you be sure that you're not being recorded and who can you trust?

The Teacher Who Promised the Sea
El maestro que prometió el mar
A progressive teacher brings new methods to a village in Burgos on the eve of the Spanish Civil War, whilst in present day Catalonia a woman searches for answers as to the whereabouts of her great-grandfather’s remains.

TOITŪ Visual Sovereignty
Unprecedented insight into the curation of the Toi Tū Toi Ora: Contemporary Māori Art exhibition reveals the struggle for Māori artistic sovereignty within the structures of Aotearoa New Zealand’s cultural institutions.

Twinless
A grieving brother finds an unlikely connection at a support group for siblings who have lost a twin, but his burgeoning bromance threatens to turn into something darker in this uncomfortably sharp-witted comedy.

Two Prosecutors
Dva prokurora
Fresh from Cannes acclaim comes a gripping, mordantly absurd and meticulous study of the inverted logic of state terror from master chronicler of tyranny Sergei Loznitsa.

Urchin
This gritty and empathetic portrait of addiction and the self-destruction that comes along with it is filled with pitch black humour. Frank Dillane puts on a masterclass as he takes his character to rock bottom.

War Stories Our Mothers Never Told Us
Seven women reflect on the emotional cataclysm of World War II in Dame Gaylene Preston’s landmark contribution to the collective memory of Aotearoa, which has lost none of its raw power on its 30th anniversary.

The Weed Eaters
Cannibalism, murder and betrayal are on the table in this riotous NZ horror comedy. Four holidaying friends come across a strain of weed that gives them the most extreme case of the munchies ever recorded.

Went Up the Hill
An unsettling, sinister slow-burn thriller, Samuel Van Grinsven unites rising star Dacre Montgomery with Phantom Thread’s Vicky Krieps and New Zealand’s own Sarah Peirse for a supernatural chiller like no other.

Werckmeister Harmonies
Werckmeister harmóniák
Frequently singled out as one of the best films of the 21st century, Béla Tarr’s melancholy, mud-deep world of simmering mob chaos foretells of resurgent fascism in the heart of Europe.

What Marielle Knows
Was Marielle weiß
Panic around a new digital Big Brother era underpins a clever, absurdist send-up of bourgeois hypocrisy, as a married couple are put on the spot by their daughter’s all-pervasive telepathy.