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Based on a graphic novel, this dazzling sapphic fable is a whimsical ode to the power of storytelling.

Across two decades, a filmmaker and her teenage son share the camera to document his transition from female to male in this honest and compassionate family archive.

A groundbreaking documentary reexamines a decades-old film about the first contact made with the Korubo tribe in Brazil and the “white man’s gaze”.

Winning awards at Sundance and the Berlinale, this vibrant, vital portrait of lesbian experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer explores her radical life, work and legacy.

Raised in 1980s Russell by Merry, an artist whose life became local folklore, filmmaker Gwen Isaac returns to her Far North hometown to untangle fact from family legend and confront the inheritance she carries into her own motherhood.

Rediscovered and resurrected into a Sundance-premiering doc by Tamra Davis, this is a raw 90s capsule of life on tour with The Beastie Boys, Sonic Youth, Foo Fighters, Beck, Pavement, Rancid, The Amps and Bikini Kill.

Premiering at Sundance earlier this year, Paloma Schneideman’s coming-of-age debut launches our festival with a tender portrait of 14-year-old Sid, as she tentatively traverses insecurity, identity and desire during the summer of 2006.

A profoundly personal, revelatory portrait of a family in crisis told through the perspective of a young child as she struggles to understand her older brother’s increasingly unsettling behaviour.

A neon-soaked plunge into Sydney's seductive queer underworld, Body Blow is an unashamedly camp genre-bending odyssey, on the cusp of bursting off-screen and into the audience.

This impressive first feature documentary from photographer Pete Muller has much to say about fractured modern masculinity, without explicitly saying much at all.

Mining from hundreds of hours of footage, Buffet Infinity tracks a town's descent into chaos though local TV footage that slowly grows more unhinged in one of the most original films of the festival.

The Beanpole director's third feature — and first in English — confirms his extraordinary formal and sensory capabilities.

Bridging genres as it taps a real 70s scandal about a Benedictine monk’s memory-recording machine, this unique debut was a festival hit at Rotterdam, and is the year’s buzz title in eerie and stylish academia horror-noir.

A collaboration between Arts Laureate Pietra Brettkelly and Nigerian filmmaking collective The Critics, this Berlinale hit is a tribute to the power of imagination, storytelling and creative ingenuity.

After a seven year hiatus, Gus Van Sant is back behind the camera with this star-studded true-crime thriller, earning an 11-minute standing ovation after its premiere in Venice.

A striking panorama of national collective memory told entirely through archive material in this playful, immersive journey through Lebanon’s history and culture.

Grant Gee was awarded Best Director at the Berlinale for this intense, fragmentary and inventive portrait of Bill Evans, in an interval of the American jazz great’s career when he grappled with grief and opioid addiction.

Indie cinema’s long-time King of Cool Jim Jarmusch finds mystery and melancholy alike in this triptych of family short stories, each grappling with the weight of shared history.

A pristine masterpiece from Polish Academy Award winner Paweł Pawlikowski, reflecting on history and its shadows on the present, as well as on the undying bond of family ties.

The cover-up of a worker’s death in West Africa and the arrival of the site manager’s young wife are lit matches to a tinderbox in this strange, sinewy thriller of alienation and exploitation.

A divisive talking point at Cannes even before it took its top award, Cristian Mungiu’s story of a conservative immigrant family under institutional suspicion is a barbed interrogation of liberal Nordic attitudes.

40 years ago, New Zealand’s most loved cartoon strip was adapted into our first-ever animated feature and the result broke the box office and captured the hearts of a far more innocent nation.

Upon discovering his fiancée’s affair, Nick makes a deal with a trickster fox in this sly and quirky ‘she'll be right’ Aussie comedy about the lengths (and shortcuts) we'll go for love.

High priest of American buffoonery David Wain (Wet Hot American Summer) returns with his latest irresistibly silly slice of nonsense, a Wizard of Oz-aping Hollywood odyssey about a small-town girl with a very particular mission.

When a picture-perfect middle-class family turns out to be dangerously twisted behind closed doors, Jan Komasa's darkly funny psychological thriller asks who really needs ‘fixing’... and how far is too far.

ohn Wilson gives his inimitably magpie-ish style of documentary-making the big screen treatment in this endlessly digressive investigation into a hilariously mundane topic.

Provocative and horny as ever, New Queer Cinema icon Gregg Araki’s first film in over a decade is a riotous antidote to the Gen Z sex recession.

A surreal and heartfelt portrait of a young boy caught between his own burgeoning artistic identity and his father's rigid expectations of masculinity, told with visual flair and deep empathy. 

In this dark and absurd found footage mockumentary, Morris Fubbins ventures deep into the New Zealand bush in search of his missing father, who he believes was kidnapped by a mythical creature.

A filmmaker balances her outspoken father and a boundary-pushing teenager while working on her latest screenplay that only she believes in, in Sophie Hyde's heartfelt, queer family drama.

A feisty little dinosaur and a gentle purple creature navigate big feelings and discover friendship in a beautifully handcrafted, musical adventure for kids and their grown-ups.

A stunning directorial debut that was a big winner at Cannes – a coming of age story set at the foot of Mount Vesuvius that announces the arrival of a major new talent of French cinema.

Gerd Pohlmann offers a timely doc tribute to politician Jim Anderton as a long-haul fighter for Labour’s welfare-based values, against a wave of neoliberal deregulation that fundamentally changed New Zealand politics.

Willem Dafoe and Greta Lee bring heart and realness to this wistful, unromantic comedy about the fragility of creative ambition and a bygone, bohemian New York lost to a consumerist era of gentrification and influencers.

Rugby's first global superstar was also one of its most private — a shy, gentle giant caught between two worlds, whose story mirrors Aotearoa's own coming of age.

The infamous World Cup quarterfinal between England and Argentina — won, defined, and immortalised by Diego Maradona… and by the hand of God.

In the summer of 2002, a 17-year old must navigate the earnest pressures of teenage life – identity, family, and friendship – while burdened with the profound weight of grief.

Directing duo THUNDERLIPS add another comedy horror classic to the Kiwi film canon in this tale of an accelerated extraterrestrial pregnancy, packed with some outrageously off-kilter visual effects!

The 1988 hit single Sweet Lovers made Fonotī Pati Umaga a star, but a devastating fall in 2005 reshaped his life and purpose.

Newly restored, Gen-X icon Gregg Araki’s remarkable, aggressively over-censored coming of age classic grapples with the enduring spectre of child sexual abuse, presenting one of the auteur’s bleakest but most essential visions.

The lines between predator and prey begin to blur as a solitary polar bear journeys through a rapidly changing world.

Dunedin’s Robert Sarkies ventured into weightier territory after Scarfies, reckoning with a defining tragedy of gun violence that rocked Aotearoa’s sense of security in his chilling but sensitively measured sophomore feature.

Renowned American documentarian Ross McElwee confronts the limits of the movie camera as a tool of the heart as he revisits family footage after the death of his son, and reflects on their relationship to and through cinema.

Sci-fi strangeness meets working-class struggle in Cornish director Mark Jenkin’s haunting vision, meticulously crafted with analogue methods, of a fishing boat lost decades ago that claims a new crew from the present.

A medical student creates a sinister diet drug to fight her own eating disorders in this witty, gory body-horror shocker.

The plant world lights up alongside Tony Leung Chiu-Wai and Léa Seydoux in this playful, eccentric love letter to scientific experimentation and the beauty of noticing life in all things.

When everyone he loves moves on, one man stays, and finds unexpected solace in the most unlikely of companions. Tender, majestic and deeply humane, it's a film about what we risk losing when the world moves too fast.

As a maven of pop-culture detritus, American director Jane Schoenbrun’s campground of twisted delights is a heady, horny headtrip of the highest order.

As Iceland's ancient glaciers start to vanish, one family's extensive archive becomes a portrait of a disappearing landscape through the passage of a century.

Set against the backdrop of a Kiwi summer, Uncle is a tender and deeply human story about caregiving, connection and the people who show up when they're needed most.

An Auckland man endures a gauntlet of disastrous flatting situations in this silent horror- comedy film for the rental generation.

The poetry in the everyday abounds in this novelistic drama set in modern Singapore, chronicling the daily lives of a father and son and their parallel romantic relationships.

The competitive world of musical whistling takes centre stage in this humorous documentary that showcases the weird and wonderful lives that have devoted themselves to the art.

Actors Jude Law and Paul Dano star as Putin and his propagandist in an epic political thriller by Olivier Assayas, that shows how brutal repression in Russia is puppet-mastered behind a veil of manufactured illusion.

Three youths head into the punishing Australian desert to escape menacing outlaws on their trail in Warwick Thornton’s tough and uncompromising western-thriller.