Festival Programme

Films by Venue

Rialto Cinemas

100 Nights of Hero

Julia Jackman

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

The Best Summer

Tamra Davis

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.

Betty Blue [Director’s Cut]

37°2 le matin

Jean-Jacques Beineix

The stylish, sexy global sensation of the mid-1980s has had an hour of material added that has underlined the film’s artistic qualities without losing any of the elements that originally seduced a generation 40 years ago. 

Butterfly Jam

Kantemir Balagov

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

Calle Málaga

Maryam Touzani

An intimate and warm story of a life entwined with a deep-rooted sense of belonging, and the inconvenience of aging in a world that continues to move at pace.

Comédie-Française

De la Comédie-Française

Martin Darondeau, Bertrand Usclat

Drunk actors, cursed props, clashing egos and a Macbeth that refuses to come together… a gloriously chaotic love letter to theatre and everyone mad enough to make it.

Crocodile

Pietra Brettkelly, The Critics

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.

Flies

Moscas

Fernando Eimbcke

As a young boy searches for answers, he is aided by an unlikely individual in this modest and affectionate take on an intergenerational friendship, combining droll humour and neorealism.

Footrot Flats: The Dog's Tale

Murray Ball

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.

Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass

David Wain

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.

Ghost in the Cell

Joko Anwar

Indonesian genre maestro Joko Anwar returns with a wild mashup of martial arts, horror and comedy, set inside a corrupt prison system, where an evil entity is literally turning prisoners inside out.

The Good Boy

Heel

Jan Komasa

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.

Goodbye, Cruel World

Adieu monde cruel

Félix de Givry

A bullied 14-year-old sends farewell letters to his classmates and vanishes, but when a girl from his school spots him wandering the streets at night, the two begin to build a fragile, secret world of their own.

Hen

Kota

György Pálfi

Beyond the confines of a factory farm, a heroic hen finds a new lease on life in a crumbling restaurant's courtyard. Feathers are ruffled and jokes are cracked in this egg-cellent adventure.

The History of Concrete

John Wilson

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.

The Ice Tower

La Tour de glace

Lucile Hadžihalilović

Lucile Hadžihalilović’s spellbinding 1960s-set fairytale follows a teenage runaway who becomes infatuated with an alluring movie star filming a local adaptation of The Snow Queen.

Jim Queen

Marco Nguyen, Nicolas Athané

Bold, colourful and irreverent, Jim Queen is the elevated campy animation you don't want your mother to watch – but that all your gay friends will die to see.

Jimpa

Sophie Hyde

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.

La Gradiva

Marine Atlan

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.

Last Man Standing

Gerd Pohlmann

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.

Late Fame

Kent Jones

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.

The Match

El Partido

Juan Cabral, Santiago Franco

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

Mouse

Kelly O'Sullivan, Alex Thompson

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.

Mum, I’m Alien Pregnant

THUNDERLIPS

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!

Mysterious Skin

Gregg Araki

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.

No Good Men

Shahrbanoo Sadat

When Kabul's only female camerawoman is given a career opportunity by the last man she expected, she finds herself falling for someone in a city that is about to fall itself. A funny, warm and deeply political romance from one of the most exciting voices in world cinema.

On the Road

En el camino

David Pablos

Danger, desire and an unlikely bond forged on the long roads of Mexico – David Pablos's award-winning thriller is drenched in heat and darkness, with tenderness at its core.

Prosecution

Staatsschutz

Faraz Shariat

Faraz Shariat’s sleek, suspenseful crime drama about a racially targeted prosecutor won an Audience Award at the Berlin Film Festival, and takes the temperature of a Germany that has not shaken off its Nazi-era maladies.

Sheep in the Box

箱の中の羊

Kore-eda Hirokazu

Kore-eda's nuanced exploration of how grief manifests is distinctly Japanese yet universally resonant, in this empathetic consideration of how technology may serve as a vehicle for healing.

Silent Friend

Ildiko Enyedi

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.

Sundays

Los domingos

Alauda Ruiz de Azúa

Coming off a win for Best Film at the San Sebastián Film Festival, Sundays is a coming-of-age drama with the fragility of family and faith at its forefront.

The Tale of Silyan

Tamara Kotevska

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.

Time and Water

Sara Dosa

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.

The Wizard of the Kremlin

Olivier Assayas

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.

Yellow Letters

Gelbe Briefe

İlker Çatak

A celebrated Turkish theatre couple are suddenly targeted by the state and stripped of their livelihoods, leading to their marriage, their ideals and their sense of self being pushed to breaking point. Winner of the Golden Bear (the Berlin Film Festival's top prize), this is a riveting and urgently relevant political drama.