Joint Cannes Best Actress winners Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto shine in Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s most unexpected journey: a life-affirming ode to friendship at the edge of mortality.
Festival Programme
Films — by Venue
Regent Theatre
Alpha
Titane director Julia Ducournau’s third feature tackles the late 20th-century AIDS crisis in France through her distinctively vivid and brutal lens, a fiery film as visceral as it is profound.
Arco
A hand-drawn wonder brimming with imagination and warmth, Arco is the kind of film that reminds you of the joy of discovery.
The Beloved
El ser querido
A ferocious Javier Bardem performance headlines Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s tense and unsettling family filmmaking drama, about the fraught relationship between a controversial filmmaker and his estranged actress daughter.
Big Girls Don't Cry
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.
Bitter Christmas
Amarga Navidad
An intricate nesting doll structure provides Spain’s most iconic auteur a lens with which to reflect on his own creative foibles, in frequently scathing terms, in this lacerating self-portrait.
The Black Ball
La Bola Negra
A queer epic spanning 85 years of Spanish history, inspired by an unfinished work by poet Federico García Lorca and brought to the screen with breathtaking ambition — The Black Ball left Cannes audiences on their feet for 16 minutes, and it's easy to understand why.
Calle Málaga
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
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.
Coward
A tender love story set against the most desolate backdrop imaginable, Coward is an inspirational tale about choosing one's own fate, against all odds.
Dead Man's Wire
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.
Everybody Digs Bill Evans
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.
Father Mother Sister Brother
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.
Fatherland
Vaterland
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.
Fjord
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.
The Fox
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.
The History of Concrete
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.
I Want Your Sex
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.
Jimpa
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.
Kiri and Lou go Raaa!
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.
Late Fame
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.
Little Amélie or the Character of Rain
Amélie et la Métaphysique des tubes
Amélie loves exploring everything her world has to offer, guided by her friend, Nishio-san, but everything changes when, on her third birthday, an event changes the course of her life forever.
Lomu
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.
Minotaur
Минотавр
A classic French psychosexual thriller about infidelity is expertly reimagined within a modern Russia of citizens feeding an inhuman war machine, in director-in-exile Andrei Zvyagintsev’s taut, chilling Cannes winner.
Nuisance Bear
The lines between predator and prey begin to blur as a solitary polar bear journeys through a rapidly changing world.
Out of the Blue
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.
Rose
A heartrending, austere portrait of a physically and spiritually scarred woman returning to her postwar hometown in the 1600s, posing as a male soldier.
Rose of Nevada
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.
Saccharine
A medical student creates a sinister diet drug to fight her own eating disorders in this witty, gory body-horror shocker.
Sheep in the Box
箱の中の羊
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.
Sundays
Los domingos
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.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma
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.
Time and Water
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 Voice of Hind Rajab
Ṣawt Hind Rajab رجب هند صوت
With the last words of a five-year-old girl, Kaouther Ben Hania's devastating documentary puts a single, unbearable human story at the heart of an ongoing catastrophe.
Whispers in the Woods
Le chant des forêts
Blending stunning wildlife footage with generational storytelling, Whispers in the Woods invites the audience to be immersed in an untouched world shrouded in mist, where nature reigns supreme.
Whistle
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.
The Wizard of the Kremlin
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
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.