Full of echoes of the real-life crimes, shady deals and human rights abuses that brought down Sheikh Hasina’s authoritarian government in the “July Revolution” of 2024, Master tells a familiar but well-crafted story about the rise of an idealistic politician who is inexorably drawn into a murky world of bribery, brutality and betrayal. The film’s key take-home message is that power corrupts: hard to refute, but a somewhat banal and well-worn conclusion in modern cinema. Post-Awards buzz from Rotterdam will help open doors internationally, but Sumit’s second feature is ultimately a pretty creaky, old-school morality play at heart. Indeed, with a different backdrop and late 19th century clothes, the story would work as a classic social drama by Ibsen or Strindberg.

As the son of a former government minister himself, Sumit clearly knows this volatile political terrain well. Master opens with the small-town election campaign of Jahir (Nasir Uddin Khan), a much-loved schoolteacher with outwardly progressive liberal values and a flair for inspirational rhetoric. He is running to become a Chairman, the local representative for a national political party, in a remote rural community surrounded by protected forest land. Against the odds, including some thuggish interference from his main rival, Jahir is swept into power as the people’s champion. But soon afterwards, inevitably, his problems begin to mount up when lofty campaign promises come into contact with cold reality.

Jahir soon finds himself up against numerous vested interests: well-connected businessmen, ethically shady police chiefs, and old friends expecting payback favours for campaign support. An even more tricky prospect is the local UNO (Azmeri Haque Badhon), a high-ranking civil servant responsible for the wider region. Glamorous and alluring enough to make Jahir’s wife Jharna (Zakia Bari Mamo) suspicious, she also has self-serving designs on an eco-tourist hotel and prestige bridge-building project. This grand scheme would require bulldozing the Millgate shanty town, whose impoverished residents have invested their hopes in Jahir.

Scrambling to find a pragmatic balance, Jahir begins striking Faustian deals in a bid to deliver at least some of his campaign promises to prioritise jobs, womens’ rights and better conditions for poorer voters. But eventually he is forced to concede that treachery, bribery and dirty deals are the price of power, tacitly agreeing to forced evictions to clear the Millgate slum. Violent street protests erupt. old friends becomes enemies, and Jahir clashes with his fiery former lieutenant Ayub (Sharif Siraj).

To its credit, Master boasts generally strong performances, polished production design, and some well-staged action sequences. Khan is a quietly magnetic presence on screen, his flickering eyes hinting at panicky soul-searching behind a facade of soft-spoken, unflustered charm. Then again, his character development from humble hero to fatally compromised anti-hero is too broadly sketched, with no room for the kind of psychological shading that might have given these ethical dilemmas more dramatic heft.

Similarly, the film’s dialogue (or the English subtitle translation at least) is jammed with on-the-nose sermons and glib homilies: “It’s ironic, Jahir, that a history teacher like you has learned so little from the past,” Jharna scolds. “The poor do not ave many ambitions, they are pretty harmless,” Ayub sighs. “However, those chasing wealth can cause a lot of harm.” Too much of this sullen sermonising makes for a pretty flat story overall, pitching Master firmly at the superior soap opera level, entertaining enough as earnest melodrama but not the fresh, biting insider critique of contemporary Bangladeshi politics that it might have been.

Director, producer: Rezwan Shahriar Sumit
Screenwriters: Rezwan Shahriar Sumit, Sabbir Hossain Shovon
Cast: Nasir Uddin Khan, Azmeri Haque Badhon, Zakia Bari Mamo, Fazlur Rahman Babu, Sharif Siraj, Tasnova Tamanna
Cinematography: Tuhin Tamijul
Editing: Kristan Sprague
Production design: Jonaki Bhattacharya
Music: Hao-Ting Shih
Production company, world sales: Mypixelstory (Bangladesh)
Venue: International Film Festival Rotterdam (Big Screen Competition)
In Bengali
126 minutes

Today’s unpredictable global political climate, and rising concerns over strongarm rule, were channeled and transformed into some of the festival’s most powerful cinema. Variations on a Theme by Jason Jacobs and Devon Delmar won the main Tiger Award for up-and-coming filmmakers. A slender but deeply lyrical rumination on the state’s neglect and scamming of a widowed goat herder in South Africa, who ponders her departure from the ruggedly beautiful Kamiesberg mountain region, it stars Hettie Farmer, the real grandmother of co-director Jacobs.

Scoring a rare high-profile festival prize for a Bangladeshi production, the Big Screen Competition winner was Master, a sober political drama about corruption and lies in a rural community. Partly inspired by the real-life crimes and human rights abuses that brought down Sheikh Hasina’s authoritarian government in 2024, writer-director Rezwan Shahriar Simut’s familiar but well-crafted character study chronicles the rise of an idealistic small-town politician inexorably drawn into murky world of bribery, brutality and betrayal.

This year’s Tiger Competition was a rich showcase for original films from the African continent. In sharp stylistic contrast to Variations on a Theme, French-Angolan director Hugo Salvaterra painted a lively city-sized canvas with My Semba, a stylish, quasi-musical drama about a trio of young misfits who use poetry, rap and song to try to transcend their marginalised lives in the Angolan capital Luanda. Mozambican director Ique Langa delivered one of the festival’s most hauntingly beautiful films in O Profeta, an elegantly minimal portrait of a rural pastor turning to witchcraft to restore his troubled faith, its cryptic narrative elevated by ravishing close-up monochrome visuals.

Georgian director Ana Urushadze’s long-awaited sophomore feature Supporting Role was another big Tiger winner, coming away with the FIPRESCI critics’ prize as well as a special jury award. A once-revered actor yearning for a comeback plunges into surrealism-tinged existential crisis after a casting audition with a young woman director and the death of a pet parrot in this wildly eccentric take on creative ambition and its barriers. Urushadze addressed the difficulties of making films in Georgia in her acceptance speech, political repression in the cinema sector, and the ongoing boycott of the Georgian National Film Center by hundreds of film professionals.

Another Tiger special jury award went to Swedish director Angelica Ruffier’s beautifully woven together and highly personal documentary meditation on memory and yearning, La belle année, in which a young crush on a teacher is revisited and reevaluated many years later.

The Tiger shorts competition felt especially strong this year. The winners, Mariia Lapidus’s The Second Skin, Petna Ndaliko Katondolo’s Ndjimu, and Dean Wei’s The Apple Doesn’t Fall… all stood out for the way they tackled important subject matter with singular artistry.

Rotterdam again proved an important hub for initiatives of financing and support. Australian actress Cate Blanchett, a UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador, joined five established filmmakers to present the very well-received and buzzy world premieres of the shorts they had been invited to make in the initial phase of the pilot scheme she backs, The Displacement Fund. Maryna Er Gorbach, Mo Harawe, Hasan Kattan, Mohammad Rasoulof and Shahrbanoo Sadat all delivered strong works with radically different approaches on the set theme of displacement. Among them, Er Gorbach’s Rotation plays out in a cropfield with a glowing mauve horizon, its picturesque calm skewed around by traumatic war memories that come up in a hypnotherapy session for a woman who served; Shahrbanoo Sadat’s Super Afghan Gym makes pointed comedy of women roasting gender double standards while working out; Hasan Kattan documents the indignities of an interminable hotel wait at the hands of UK immigration officials after fleeing Syria in his humanity-filled and heartbreaking Allies in Exile.

Bazaar (Murder in the Building) by Remi Bezancon, a Paris-set comedy-thriller about a crime writer and a film professor caught up in a mystery, which playfully riffs on Hitchcock’s Rear Window, was an apt closer for an edition that leaned into fresh twists on genre cinema. While Brazil’s Yellow Cake by Tiago Melo brought outrageous sci-fi to the Tiger Competition as it tackled insect-borne virus and toxic weapon fears, Chronovisor in the Bright Future competition merged techno-horror and a kind of academia-noir in its vision of consciousness deluged into dysfunction by humankind’s recorded memory, in just two of a numerous instances of arthouse that featured an energetic retooling of sci-fi and horror.

All in all, Rotterdam’s 55th edition was one in which the notoriously tricky balance between challenging experimentation and broad, narrative-driven appeal felt successfully and imaginatively navigated, with the festival remaining a key haven for embattled voices in an increasingly difficult production environment.

Tiger Competition award
Variations on a Theme
Directors Jason Jacobs, Devon Delmar

Special jury awards
La belle année
Dir. Angelica Ruffier

Supporting Role
Dir. Ana Urushadze

Big Screen award
Master
Dir. Rezwan Shahriar Sumit

Fipresci award
Supporting Role
Dir. Ana Urushadze

Netpac award
i grew an inch when my father died
Dir. P.R. Monencillo Patindol

Youth jury award
Ah Girl
Dir. Ang Geck Geck Priscilla

Kaludjercic acknowledged this as part of her long-term strategy for the festival, specifically the aim to diversify a genre catalogue that, while always present in Rotterdam, tended to originate mainly from the Asian continent, particularly the South-East territories. And while Asia retained a prime spot, including some vintage Japanese titles in the V-Cinema retrospective and a restored 3D version of the Korean classic The Devil and the Beauty in the Cinema Regained sidebar, the general experience was a very global one.

Whether it was haunted toilets in Brazil (Bowels of Hell), witchcraft in the Basque region (Gaua) or a father in South Korea trying to bring his teenage child back from the undead (My Daughter Is a Zombie), there was no shortage of thrills and scares in the context of the 55th edition of IFFR, including in the two competitions, Tiger (Yellow Cake) and Big Screen (Talking to a Stranger).

Granted, checking out the various offerings also led to the one proper dud I saw during my stay in Rotterdam, namely the videogame adaptation Return to Silent Hill. Still, the screening I attended, at the IMAX theater inside the Pathé Schouwburgplein, was fairly packed, suggesting many festivalgoers – presumably fans of the franchise – had been curious to see if director Christophe Gans would be able to recreate the unsettling mood he conjured up in the first Silent Hill movie two decades ago (spoiler alert: he wasn’t).

Such a widespread buffet, particularly with the films vying for prizes beyond the Audience Award, was a refreshing sight in the context of a festival that doesn’t cater specifically to genre fans. It is no secret that horror, not unlike comedy, is still viewed as “lesser” when it comes to putting together the lineup of Category A events that, by reputation at least, are borderline snobbish (this despite Cannes chief Thierry Frémaux’s famous quote about preferring “a good commercial film over a bad arthouse one”).

More often than not, horror films are relegated to a specifically mounted Midnight section, even when it comes to so-called “elevated” pieces of genre fare (a notion the 2022 Scream legacy gleefully poked fun at). In his 2017 book Official Selection, about the behind-the-scenes of the 2016 Cannes program, Frémaux admits he lost Julia Ducournau’s Raw to the Critics Week on account of offering her the Midnight slot as opposed to one in Competition (he has since made up for that by selecting Titane and Alpha in the main section, with the former winning the Palme d’Or).

Of course, sometimes it’s a matter of distributors getting cold feet: Venice has notoriously struggled with getting American horror fare in its lineup, and supposedly managed to land 2021’s Halloween Kills – whose 2018 predecessor went directly to Toronto – only by giving a Career Golden Lion to its star Jamie Lee Curtis. Berlin rarely screens them on account of having dates that are generally not ideal for horror releases in the US (in terms of quality), but the upcoming 76th edition promises at least some thrills in competition with Nightborn, the new film by Finnish director Hanna Bergholm, who made a splash on the festival circuit in 2022 with her creature feature/body horror hybrid Hatching.

Going back to Rotterdam, such an array of scary films is probably also an accurate reflection of how concerned directors are responding to what’s going on in the world. Such a thought brings back a screening I attended in 2025, for Alexandre O. Philippe’s riveting documentary Chain Reactions. While introducing it at the Swiss premiere in Fribourg, and looking back on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s birth as a somewhat rage-filled commentary on early 1970s America, Philippe came to the conclusion that we’re no more than five years away from a similarly masterful, era defining piece of US horror cinema, given the current political landscape. It’s an exciting prospect, but also a terrifying one. To be continued at next year’s IFFR? We shall see…

Each story is about a different artist, whose “portrait” (to use the description provided in the credits) is fictional even though the performers use their real names: Sara Fakhri, Hadi Deaibes, Adham Al Dimashki, Dana Dia, and Dhana Mykael. The segments are as follows: Sara is a lawyer who yearns to change careers and is preparing for an audition at a prestigious dancing school; Hadi turns his home into a sound studio so he can provide for his family, but becomes concerned with a strange noise; Adham, a painter, has to deal with unprecedented hostility from his neighbors; Dana uses her acting skills to conduct drama workshops for kids; and Dhana, also an actress, struggles with financial hardship.

The project came about from an idea by producer Georges Hachem, who came up with the general framework within which each story was developed. Per his statement in the press notes, the film “brought together Lebanese filmmakers and actors of the same generation, engaging the former in a process of writing and directing, induced and largely inspired by the latter.” As such, each segment is very much its own thing, although there is some behind-the-scenes overlap: in addition to producing the whole endeavor, Hachem edited the Hadi and Dana storylines, and Tania Kammoun worked on the sound for three out of five chapters.

Each pairing of filmmaker(s) and actor (Ghina Abboud for Sara, Naïm El Hajj for Hadi, Salim Mrad and Aline Ouais for Adham, Jihad Saade for Dana, and Marie-Rose Osta for Dhana) has a distinct flavor, rooted in the sensitivities of the individual directors and fields of the arts they explore, and this is perhaps most evident in the Dhana segment which is shot in black and white. Each microcosm has its own peculiar mood, and can therefore be enjoyed as a singular dramatic entity. Except, of course, in a theatrical context it’s the bigger picture that matters, and while that may be a daunting prospect for some viewers, the cumulative effect of the five chapters is a quietly powerful one, as the frustrations of each protagonist paint an intriguing picture of everyday life in a city that is perhaps becoming too stifling for the generation depicted on screen.

And yet, while the atmosphere in front of the camera veers towards the gloomy, what went on during the shooting appears to have been quite the opposite. The most striking detail of the film, in fact, is one that emerges in the closing credits, where each segment receives its own space and the supporting actors are invariably grouped under the phrase “With the Supportive Presence of”, a choice of words that indicates there was a great communal spirit and effort in making, amusingly enough, a series of portraits of alienation. One can only hope future projects by these filmmakers will similarly benefit from the supportive energy of the varied Lebanese artistic community.

Directors: Ghina Abboud, Naïm El Hajj, Salim Mrad, Aline Ouais, Jihad Saade, Marie-Rose Osta
Screenwriters: Ghina Abboud, Naïm El Hajj, Salim Mrad, Aline Ouais, Jihad Saade, Marc Salemeh, Marie-Rose Osta
Cast: Sara Fakhri, Hadi Deaibes, Adham Al Dimashki, Dana Dia, Dhana Mkhayel
Producer: Georges Hachem
Cinematography: Jean Hatem, Elsy Hajjar, Jihad Saade, Jocelyne Abi Gebrayel
Sound: Raed Younan, Hadi Deaibes, François Yazbeck, John Paul Jalwan, Victor Bresse
Production companies: Stray Bee
World sales: MAD Solutions
Venue: International Film Festival Rotterdam (Harbour)
In Arabic, English
157 minutes

One of the more formally adventurous world premieres at Rotterdam film festival this week, Hungry blends impressionistic montage, eerie soundtrack music and off-screen interview fragments into an eye-catching, often incongruously lovely whole. At times the film’s arty, coolly detached, semi-abstract style recalls the work of fellow Austrian documentary director Niklolaus Geyrhalter (Our Daily Bread, Melt) and the maverick British newsreel collagist Adam Curtis (Hypernormalisation). A combination of this strong aesthetic and newsworthy subject matter should ensure it finds an audience beyond the festival circuit.

Pitched as a post-apocalyptic sci-fi documentary, the conceit behind Hungry is that we are watching some future cinematic survey of a ravaged Earth, as seen through the detached viewpoint of an extra-terrestrial visitor, or possibly a sentient AI machine, who is gathering evidence to better understand how humankind came to die from a catastrophic combination of climate change and food shortages. The entire planet is a crime scene, and the unseen narrator is looking for clues, seeking to clarify how humans went so badly wrong. “Does the capacity o understand a threat equate to the ability to react to it?” he ponders in his cool Hal 9000-style voice-over. “Their value systems seem to have been fundamentally misaligned with biological reality… why?”

To help address these questions, the film’s slightly clunky fictional conceptual premise allows the all-seeing narrator access to archive audio files of interviews that Brandstaetter conducted with a brainy panel of professors, molecular biologists, nutritionists, botanists, biochemists and others, including experts on food politics and agricultural biodiversity. Playing behind the mesmerising visual montages, the unseen speakers begin mapping out the links between climate change, soil degradation and crop failure, which leads to destruction of ecosystems and ultimately damages the human food chain.

“We are really on the edge of extermination as a species,” one speaker warns. “This is a global experiment that we are doing without any controls,” says another. “People will literally starve to death.” One microbiologist even takes bleak comfort in predicting that other lifeforms will outlive us, thus proving that humans are “not that important in the overall scheme of things.”

As these disembodied discussions progress, they take on an increasingly political dimension. Brandstaetter and her guests forensically lay out how the cumulative effect of harmful agriculture techniques, ultra-processed foods, profiteering multinational corporations, powerful lobbying groups and weak government regulation has massively increased risk of a climate-driven food disaster.

Even so, the director resists full-blooded fatalism, asking each of her experts to suggest potential ways for humankind to avert the impending foodpocalypse. Their solutions include planting more resilient crops, breaking up huge agribusiness monopolies, enforcing existing legislation and more. Small gestures, admittedly, but they elevate Hungry from just being a relentless bleak doom sermon. As a means of couching potentially dry subject matter inside a compelling stylistic package, Brandstaetter’s unorthdox cine-essay approach is largely effective. Whether it adds any fresh or challenging insights to these familiar journalistic topics is debatable, but this is still a finely crafted, intelligent and haunting audio-visual artwork

Director, screenwriter, producer: Susanne Brandstaetter
Cast: Jack Gilbert, Heribert Hirt, Michelle Meagher, Marion Nestle, Jeff Ricketts, Zephyr Teachout, Lewis Ziska
Cinematography: Joerg Burger
Editing: Lisa Zoe Geretschläger, Stephan Bechinger
Music, sound design: Peter Kutin, Rojin Sharafi
Production company
Susanne Brandstaetter Film Production (Austria)
World sales: Impronta Films
Venue: International Film Festival Rotterdam (Harbour)
In English
95 minutes

Gaua is a ribald, unhinged tale of repression and sexual liberation that gets away with the more hackneyed genre elements of its world-building by mixing in some inspired strokes of surreal satire, and by a brazen commitment to its more outlandish touches that mostly work their strange and unsettling charm without high-tech effects. There are possessed deathbed theatrics, a levitating coven and hybrid man-beasts aplenty, but also a hunting-obsessed, self-flagellating priest with a taxidermy-filled parish who is led astray by a sly rabbit, in this earthy and Gothic-tinged flight to the dark side, which had its international premiere in the Harbour section of the Rotterdam International Film Festival. Its emancipation-themed crux of women taking ownership of the monsters invented to suppress them, and its immersion in regional lore and gloomy landscapes, stands to widen its audience appeal a little beyond its midnight-movie hook.

Kattalin (an intense, magnetic Yune Nogueiras) is trapped. Her new husband Pello (Xabi ‘Jabato’ López) is violent and controlling, and she turns to a poisonous mushroom to aid her escape from their small farmhouse in the middle of the night. The only place to run is deep into the surrounding woods, where she is pursued by a presence that resembles her husband, but seems to change forms, merging with trees and animals. Such frightening encounters are known to happen here after the sun goes down, so she is relieved when she happens upon three older women who are gathered at a laundry spot. They only pretend to wash clothes there; their real reason for meeting is to have time out from men, chewing over village secrets and sharing horror stories. What follows is their series of tales, separated into chapters, but bleeding together as Kattalin becomes a part of the fabric of each alarming episode.

The world of Gaua is one governed by black-and-white notions of good and evil, where those who do not curry favour with priests or denounce their neighbours as she-devils are tarred as blasphemers and shadow-dwellers. Sin, under the powerful watch of the Catholic Church and its informants, is largely a sexual business here. Women overwhelmingly draw the short straw amid all of the opportunistic moralising for personal advancement, with lesbian desires and clandestine trysts particularly risky grist for the village gossip mill. The hypocrisy and corruption of the most powerful men of the cloth, who whip up terror to divide their parishioners and consolidate their rule, are laid bare. But that’s not to say that occult forces are not real in this universe, or that magic lore and secret remedies are not a potent alternative counter-measure.

The tall, horn-like white linen head-dresses of the women (frowned on, historically, as too phallic by the Church) add Basque specificity to the blue-tinged gloom with its spectral trees, dimly lit by firelight and lanterns, that fills Gaua. These horn shapes are echoed in the form of a black, Baphomet-like creature, who plays a role in a feverish finale spectacle of orgiastic village excess. None of this is subtle, nor does it have to be. Gaua succeeds as a vivid, risque and entertaining celebration of a human impulse as old as time: storytelling in the dead of night.

Director, screenwriter: Paul Urkijo Alijo
Producers: Ander Sagardoy, Ander Barinaga-Rementeria, Xabier Berzosa
Cinematographer: Gorka Gomez Andreu
Editor: Elena Ruiz
Cast: Yune Nogueiras, Elena Irureta, Ane Gabarain, Inake Irastorza
Production design: Izaskun Urkijo
Music: Maite Arroitajauregi, Aránzazu Calleja
Production company: Irusoin (Spain)
Sales: Filmax International
Venue: Rotterdam (Harbour)
In Basque
91 minutes

The central character of this soon-to-be-brown-tinged story is Malu (Martha Nowill), an event planner who’s had a dysfunctional relationship with bathrooms ever since a tragic incident that scarred her (psychologically) for life. She uses a contraption that allows her to urinate while standing up, and pointedly refuses to sit on a toilet when it’s time for the other errand – which is probably why she suffers from chronic bowel blockage.

And in case you thought that wasn’t enough, Malu also has to deal with her latest assignment: a gender reveal party commissioned by a pregnant influencer who lives in her building. This creates even more tension between Malu and her non-binary teenage child, and things are about to get worse as some of the neighbors start complaining about malfunctioning bathroom equipment. At that point, it’s only a matter of time before what some might consider a throne actually turns into a deathtrap…

Beyond what is spiritually akin to the “splatstick” of early Peter Jackson (with whom Bowels of Hell shares an irreverent low budget aesthetic), the story is, first and foremost, about human connection, albeit through a satirical prism. This is expressed primarily via the mother-child plotline, which is effective and affecting thanks to the perfectly judged performances, although some of the pronoun jokes don’t really land (then again, that could simply be a matter of the Portuguese wordplay not translating as efficiently in the adaptation made for the English subtitles).

But most people will be drawn to this film by the promise of gruesome toilet-related incidents. And in the early stretches, the movie takes its time, almost as if it shared in its protagonist’s constipation issues. Then, when the third act rears its feces-covered head and shit gets real, the picture morphs into a veritable cascade of poo, piss, puke and pus. It’s a spectacle so gloriously, deliriously filthy, you’ll be glad it’s neither in 3D nor in Odorama. Even the Jackass crew – no strangers to stunts involving excrement – would think twice about entering that building.

At one point, it looks like the film might be paying tribute to The Shining and its iconic shot of the elevator, only this time the liquid gushing out is brown and not red. If intentional, it’s a fitting homage, given Stanley Kubrick’s habit of coming up with key scenes that took place in bathrooms, as well as the most extravagant statement of intent: the movie may be visually modest, but in terms of ambition it aims for the sky. Well, the ceiling. And the walls, and any other immobile target in sight. By the end of it all, co-directors Gustavo Vinagre and Gurcius Gewdner have not only delivered a thrillingly deft mix of clever commentary and gleefully juvenile humor, they’ve also made the best case for reclaiming and recontextualizing the adjective “craptastic”.

Directors, screenwriters: Gustavo Vinagre, Gurcius Gewdner
Cast: Martha Nowill, Otávio Muller, Chandelly Braz, Marco Pigossi, Regina Braga, Olívia Torres, Bruce LaBruce, Maria Gladys
Producers: Rodrigo Teixeira, Berta Marchiori, Tereza Alvarez
Cinematography: Daniel Venosa
Production design: Juliana Lobo
Music: Arthur Joly
Sound: Ruben Valdés, Henrique Chiurciu
Production company: RT Features
World sales: Blue Finch Films Releasing
Venue: International Film Festival Rotterdam (Harbour)
In Portuguese, English
111 minutes

While Scary Mother swept audiences along on the imaginative flights of a woman writing erotic vampire novels her husband does not approve of, Supporting Role, with an almost contrarian perversity, puts the point of view of Niaz (Dato Bakhtadze), an entitled male chauvinist and once-revered actor, front and centre. We’re immersed in the faded, eccentric charm of Tbilisi through the eyes of the ageing star as he returns to the industry after a long hiatus, and is thrown into existential crisis upon finding his relevance has waned. He attends a casting audition for the bit part of a distinctly unheroic old man he’s been invited to play by Aza (Elene Maisuradze), a young woman director, or “little girl” as he later disparages her, and bristles that she has no qualms in firing out outlandish suggestions for getting into the role.

In a patriarchal society that is transforming in ways he is not ready for, Niaz is the past not the future, and his indignation gives rise to a cantankerousness that sours his encounters. Niaz does not make for pleasant company — all the more so because Bakhtadze is intense and brilliantly convincing in the role — which may be offputting for some audiences. But Urushadze’s love for every one of her misfit characters shines through, and it is not without empathy that we join Niaz on his anguished mental journey toward a new deal with fate, as he revisits the relationship wreckage of his regrets, and the family he walked out on. There is no room here for sentimentality, so the concluding poetic glimmers of real connection are hard-won.

Niaz is given three days after the audition to decide whether he wants the role, but this plot framework fades into the background as a much more cryptic, mystical and dreamlike logic takes over, still grounded in the sardonic humour and wry absurdity of lost chances. At first, as Niaz laments that directors no longer love actors, it seems the audition will be nothing more to him than a sardonic dinner table anecdote. But there is something in the project he struggles to name, but can’t shake, that works on his subconscious, as he wanders Tbilisi’s streets, and in and out of its ornate, battered apartment buildings and nighttime shadows (moodily shot by DOP Rein Kotov), in a strange delirium between surly, embittered outbursts and obsessive reflection. His parrot, sensing its own death was near, has escaped and expired. In the pet cemetery, he encounters two mysterious Armenians, who sense he has just a few days left himself — a premonition of mortality that escalates his fevered border-state.

On his meanderings around Tbilisi, Niaz stops in on an old acquaintance (Nino Kasradze) who fell three floors. After botched reconstructive surgery she now wears a mask and never leaves her apartment, but allows a group she found online to host a workshop on lucid dreaming. She is just one of a myriad of larger-than-life exiles from normality populating this vision of a twilight Tbilisi where the lines between hallucination and reality, and life and death, seem paper-thin. It’s hazy what all this means in a film as allegorical and full of tangents as it is charmingly offbeat, but its plea that it is never too late for integrity, in the final hours when the ego recedes, is unmistakable.

Director, screenwriter: Ana Urushadze
Producers: Davit Tsintsadze, Ivo Felt, Bacho Meburishvili, Sophio Bendiashvili, Zeynep Özbatur Atakan, Andrey Epifanov, Eleonora Granata-Jenkinson, Dato Bakhtadze
Cinematographer: Rein Kotov
Editor: Levan Uchaneishvili
Cast: Dato Bakhtadze, Nata Murvanidze, Elene Maisuradze, Irakli Kvirikadze, Zurab Sturua, Eka Demetradze, Sandro Samkharadze, Nino Kasradze, Davit Dvalishvili, Lasha Mebuke, Murman Jinoria
Production Design: Simon Machabeli
Sound Design: Harmo Kallaste
Music: Sten Sheripov
Production companies: Zazafilms LLC (Georgia), Allfilm (Estonia), Enkeny Films (Georgia), Zeynofilm (Turkey), Cinetrain (Switzerland), Melograno Films (USA)
Sales: Allfilm
Venue: Rotterdam (Tiger Competition)
In Georgian, Armenian
139 minutes

Performing the titular action (which loses the somewhat creepy implication of the original title about there being more than one eerie presence at play) is Patricia (Gigi Saul Guerrero), a woman whose psyche is permanently fragile following the tragic death of her son Chris, who perished in a housefire a few years back. Struggling to make sense of what is real and what is in her head, which also affects her sleep, Patricia starts having conversations with what appears to be her little boy, somehow back from the dead, or at least partially so. But as her grip on reality starts to negatively affect her surroundings, the rest of the family begins to wonder if there might actually be something in the house, possibly with malevolent intentions…

While the film is relatively short at 104 minutes, it still commendably takes its time setting the mood and tone: despite the pyrotechnics in the opening sequence, Talking to a Stranger is more of a slow burner, as Bogliano allows the dread to build up before the more conventional – but still chilling – third act developments. While this may frustrate those expecting jump scares (which are in very short supply), it’s also the best way to create a connection between the viewers and the entire family, as the drama grows in power even outside of the supernatural context.

Of course, the otherworldly is still involved, although the director (who also serves as the editor) and his cinematographer Damián Aguilar have made sure to avoid visually signposting the difference between the real world and Patricia’s hallucinations – in fact, the color palette gives every scene a slightly heightened sheen, matching the protagonist’s worldview in between the trauma and the medication that’s supposed to help her sleep. Throughout the viewing, we are effectively made to walk in her shoes, feeling her pain when she realizes something is wrong but still wants to cling on to the idea of one day reuniting with her deceased child.

Sound is the other key component, or rather, its absence: Patricia’s husband – who has set up a surveillance system to monitor her nocturnal activities – specializes in tinkering with audio tracks and, in one of the more successful blends of the scientific and the demonic on screen, discovers the unseen entity does emit discernible noises, only they’re on a frequency that most human adults cannot perceive. It’s a subtly chilling undertaking by the team at LSD Studio, arguably the most apt name for a post-production contractor on a project that at times feels very trippy.

But most important of all is the human factor, specifically the lead performance, which Bogliano has entrusted to Mexican-Canadian actress and filmmaker Gigi Saul Guerrero, perhaps best known outside of Latin America for her work behind the camera (in 2021, she directed Bingo Hell, one of the installments of Prime Video’s Welcome to the Blumhouse series of horror films). In her hands (and eyes, and lungs) Patricia becomes a force of nature, an avatar of pure, raw pain even as she’s somewhat sedated for a large chunk of the running time. The sense of loss emanating from every inch of her deceptively lethargic movements and expressions is nothing short of a revelation, providing the movie with an emotional core that keeps things compelling regardless of the familiarity of the genre trappings.

Director, Screenwriter: Adrián García Bogliano
Cast: Gigi Saul Guerrero, Eugenio Rubio, Yago Andreu Sandoval, Tatiana Del Real, Vania García, Nora Huescas
Producers: Javier Colinas, Eckehardt Von Damm, Pablo Guisa Koestinger, Andrea Quiroz Hernández, Carlos Solís, Luis Solís
Cinematography: Damián Aguilar
Production design: Catalina Oliva
Music: Fernando Escalante, Ricardo López Coa
Sound: LSD Studio
Production companies: Corazón Films, Salto de Fe Films, Mórbido Films, Prismaticoos Films
World sales: Corazón Films
Venue: International Film Festival Rotterdam (Big Screen Competition)
In Spanish
104 minutes

Instead, inter-personal relationships, social expectations and the dynamics of the household are conveyed most prominently through the movement of the body. Directed by Dean Wei and incredibly choreographed by Shiyu Liu, The Apple Doesn’t Fall… explores a complex and serious issue through a kinetic, funny ballet that revels in its restrictions and combines contemporary dance with the visual language of Chinese hand scrolls. The film premiered at the 2026 International Film Festival Rotterdam and was deservedly recognised as one of the winners of the Tiger Shorts Competition.

The film takes place within the single level home of a father (Tao Cui), mother (Niannian Zhou) and their teenage daughter (Xie Ziling) as they revolve around it each other, following their own routines that brush against one another or even collide only occasionally. Conversation is disjointed, dialogue spoken aloud but not received or responded to. The way they interact reveals subtle aggressions or dislocations in the family structure – the correcting of one another’s actions, their apparent confinement to their specified zones of the home, the daughter’s evident feeling of being stifled in this airless fragmented milieu.

All of this is conveyed brilliantly by Shiyu Liu’s choreography that was developed in tandem with the performers who put their own mark on their characters. Aside from a single scene in which the characters sit for a family photo – a comic triumph in itself – the camera pans back and forth along the length of the apartment, with the spaces in the house arranged so as it create vertical and horizontal zones, laying the space out as it is is two-dimensional. It’s a work embedded in Chinese art – and which makes very specific points about Chinese society and culture – but which also translate wonderfully to universal questions of the reality behind the façade of the family and what it means to be going through the motions.

Director, editing, music: Dean Wei
Cast: Tao Cui, Niannian Zhou, Xie Ziling
Screenplay: Dean Wei, Shiyu Liu
Producer: Jia qi Liu
Choreography: Shiyu Liu
Cinematography: Zhaoheng Qu, Adrien Chung
Production design: Tian Xie, Ziming Wang
Sound: Yun Xie
Production companies: NOWNESS China, THE O EYE (China)
Venue: International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) (Tiger Short Competition)
In Chinese
19 minutes

The film begins with Lee Jung-hwan, a single father, returning home with groceries, only for his daughter Soo-ah to greet him in an unusual manner. Flashbacks explain that the two escaped from Seoul during the initial stages of a zombie outbreak caused by a virus called GAR, but Soo-ah got bitten en route. Unwilling to execute his own flesh and blood on the spot, Jung-hwan subdued her and took her to his mother’s house. There, having witnessed certain behaviors from Soo-ah, he came to the conclusion that, much like the tiger he was in charge of at the zoo in Seoul, she could be trained to act properly and not bite people unless explicitly instructed.

And so we catch up with them about a month later, with the training going reasonably well. Only two things are of concern to Jung-hwan, his mother and his childhood friend who’s also in on the secret: if they’re caught, the army will kill Soo-ah without hesitation, since harboring an “infectee” – the official term used in the subtitles – is a crime; and one of the people living nearby is Jung-hwan’s old crush Shin Yeon-hwa, who hates zombies with a passion and would like nothing more than to behead one…

To quote Saturday Night Live’s Stefon, this movie has everything: a tiger that has learned how to moonwalk; a cat (arguably the most expressive cast member in the whole film) who changes the TV channels by himself to watch feline-themed videos; a zombie outbreak sequence that answers the question “What if Shaun of the Dead had been a musical?”; an alcoholic grandma who’s also ridiculously skilled when it comes to martial arts and self-defense; and more.

Most importantly, though, it has a properly touching father-daughter at its bond, making this a rare zombie movie that, while not holding back on the blood when needed, also works as a genuine family film. Cho Jung-seok, playing Jung-hwan, carries most of the overt emotional weight and acquits himself admirably, but the real scene-stealing performance – by a human actor, anyway – comes from the young Choi Yu-ri, who spends the bulk of her screentime wearing different layers of undead makeup and still conveys the humanity possibly still hiding underneath the veiny, rabid exterior, not unlike Samson in the similarly themed 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple.

The tropes are all there, but handled with genuine inventiveness as Pil Gam-sung walks the fine line between dramatic sincerity and comic-booky action and creates a virtually seamless blend of the two tones that keeps subverting expectations even as logic and genre knowledge kind of dictate where it’s all headed. It’s an exhilarating rollercoaster ride, and by the end you might want to grab ahold of family and friends and suggest a group outing at the nearest amusement park. Provided, of course, none of the cosplayers in attendance are actually ghouls…

Director: Pil Gam-sung
Screenwriters: Pil Gam-sung, Kim Hyun
Cast: Cho Jung-seok, Lee Jung-eun, Cho Yeo-jeong, Yoon Kyung-ho, Choi Yu-ri
Producer: Michelle Kwon
Cinematography: Kim Tae-soo
Production design: Chae Kyoung-sun
Music: Kim Tae-sung
Sound: Kim Suk-won
Production company: STUDIO N
World sales: Contents Panda
Venue: International Film Festival Rotterdam (Limelight)
In Korean
114 minutes

It is a useful word to keep in mind when considering the Stockholm-based filmmaker’s feature debut which premiered as part of the Tiger Competition in Rotterdam this year. Autofiction is the blending of autobiography and fiction – typically in the world of literature – and La belle année does precisely this. It is an intimate film that constantly elides the boundaries of documentary in a way more specific than the term ‘hybrid’ might denote. Featuring Ruffier herself as the film’s protagonist, it is an evocative and multi-faceted portrait of self, shot while settling the affairs of her recently deceased but long-estranged father.

Ruffier’s father passed away in 2021 and La belle année follows the director as she gradually clears out his house – and her childhood home – in France along with the intermittent help of her brother, Tom. Along the way, as she sifts through piles and piles of accumulated things, the debris of an entire life, she is forced to confront some of the painful memories that come with a violent history. While struggling through this, she also comes across old diaries that remind her of an intense infatuation she felt as a teenager with a woman who taught her history for a single year in school; Mademoiselle Bresson. As then, Ruffier finds release in this foundational emotional connection, her crush re-emerging amidst the flotsam of her youth.

Ruffier is playing herself in the film, but this feels very far from a typical documentary. The film might be littered with dream sequences and archival images, but it is even in the everyday observation that it is distanced from our typical visual expectations of nonfiction. It sounds somewhat convoluted but La belle année has the feel of a fiction film that is using the tropes of documentary to foreground its authenticity. Simon Averin Markstrom’s cinematography presents us not with the sensation of a fly-on-the-wall portrait, but that of a scripted drama. Some of the scenes evidently are pre-planned but others are much more véritè, though the delicately managed tone and sympathetic edit mean we’re not spending our times wondering at the distinction.

In this way, Ruffier is absolutely right to describe the film as autofiction as the way the film elides the real and the constructed, helped in large part by editor Anna Eborn is deft. While it is easy to understand why Ruffier would cite the name of Annie Ernaux as an inspiration – the film has a similar quality to some of Ernaux’s writing – there is also headiness to Ruffier’s work, the way it leans into its nostalgia and the trappings of its flights of fancy that feels distinct from that form of writing.

The vernacular of old movies is part of that process. At one point in the film, Ruffier, while reliving the passionate affection she felt as a 16-year-old goes to a cinema to see a screening of Harry Kumel’s Daughters of Darkness and there are various cutaway interjections representing imagined, remembered, or dreamed interactions with Mlle. Bresson that use the same visual language and carry the same potent eroticism. She is equally enamoured with the style of Louise Brooks who was a favourite of her teacher and whose aura her memories and visions of Mlle. Bresson evidently channel. However, La belle année is not just a film a film of nostalgic reverie. Ruffier’s idea of this blended approach allows genuine scenes of interaction with family and friends to sit alongside her internal reflections.

The ‘beautiful year’ of the title perhaps most evidently refers to her year of learning history at sixteen, but the film itself follows a similar timescale and across this time Ruffier is able to not only process some of trauma of her youth, but find some solace in who she has become and, perhaps offered the chance to reconnect with Mlle. Bresson two decades later and thank her for the role she played. Like part-documentary, part-indie drama, part-archival essay, La belle année is at once an intoxicating, sad, thought-provoking and affirming; an admirable, considered self-portrait and an ode to the power of love.

Director, screenplay: Angelica Ruffier
Cast: Angelica Ruffier, Tom Ruffier, Henrik Ruffier, Sylvie Bresson
Producers: Marta Dauliute, Brynhildur Thorarinsdottir
Cinematography: Simon Averin Markstrom
Editing: Anna Eborn
Music: Leo Svenson Sander
Sound: Thomas Endresen
Production company: MDEMC (Sweden)
Venue: International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) (Tiger Competition)
In French, Swedish, English
95 minutes

The film consists primarily of the director and her two collaborators, Lera Vetkhova and Margo Shkalina, in a white box studio going through the process of attempting to accurately re-enact sexual assault stories. Some of the stories have been shared online before, some have been recalled to the filmmakers directly, in all cases the people assaulted have remained anonymous, with the filmmakers taking on the burden of re-telling and, in the process, reckoning with, their stories. It is a singular, brave, uncomfortable, and necessary film that was rightly awarded one of the three prizes in this year’s Tiger Shorts Competition at Rotterdam.

The film is composed of a few different elements, though the re-enactments have primacy. Alongside them are tableaux of women’s clothes hung in various locations, intended to represent – and sometimes being literal examples of – places in which rapes have occurred.  Alongside these are on screen messages, taken from a group WhatsApp group, in which many of the women whose stories are featured talk about the psychological impact both of the attacks and the process of sharing their stories and being heard. Through all of this, Lapidus, Vetkhova, and Shkalina reflect on what it means to tell these stories, to put themselves in the places of these women, and what it must have been like to experience these assaults.

The result is a film that blends performance art with landscape art, blends the re-enactment with the reflexive, blends the searing personal with the vitally political. It is at once a simple idea and yet one that brims with complex elements and considerations. However, all of that pales into insignificance against the weight of its empathetic intent. As the film progresses, some of the filmmakers reveal their own stories of abuse and a startling act of violence that they suffered collectively while making the film. The cumulative effect of these stories is overwhelming and painful. The impact that this act of bearing witness, this act of supreme compassion, can and has had for the women represented and countless multitudes beyond is awe-inspiring.

Director, screenplay, producer, editing: Mariia Lapidus
Cast: Lera Vetkhova, Margo Shkalina, Mariia Lapidus
Cinematography: Lera Vetkhova
Production design: Margo Shkalina
Sound: Maria Alejandra Rojas, Arturo Salazar
Production companies: Sonnet (USA)
Venue: International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) (Tiger Short Competition)
In Russian
62 minutes

So asserts Chloe Brenan’s short of the same name, a brief cinematic derive that explores the architecture of the Paris metro system via Eugene Haussmann and the Situationists. A celluloid essay film shot during a residency in Paris; Brenan’s piece takes a sideways look at the implicit strictures of urban planning in Paris and the subtle ways in which control is and can be resisted. How defiance can present itself even in the most innocuous acts of miniature rebellion.

The film opens with the establishment of the Paris metro in 1900 as a single line connecting the city to the suburbs. In its luminous Super8 footage, the film explores the interior architecture of Hector Guimard. The designs were standardised, the entrances painted to ape the verdigris of the city’s statues. The film then jumps back in time, to the mid-19^th century where Eugene Haussmann is sweeping away the vestiges of medieval Paris for the peace and order of new wide boulevards, before exploring the situationists’ challenge to such paternalistic order. At one point, the narration – courtesy of Cal Folger Day – describes “a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiences,” that seems to fit with the film’s own rhythms.

These are aided by Phil Christie’s sound design, most notable in the drumbeat that accompanies the reflections on the structures imposed by Haussmann. Paired with Folger Day’s laconic voiceover embodies the counter cultural spirit that Brenan’s film explores. Where desire lines show the paths trod by a populace disinclined to stick to the pre-defined path, Verdigris feels like a work born of a questioning, subversive intent to travel to its own beat.

Director, screenplay, cinematography, editing: Chloe Brenan
Cast: Cal Folger Day (narration)
Music, sound: Phil Christie
Production companies: Chloe Brenan (Ireland)
Venue: International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) (Short & Mid-length)
In English
12 minutes

Brazil’s history of secret nuclear collaboration between a militarised regime and neocolonial western powers, the environmental contamination and tsunami of health problems that have come from uranium mining, and the rise of bug-borne disease epidemics, combine in a plot that is as in step with the stuff of the global population’s daily nightmares as it is off the wall, as state-led scientists contend with the deserved mistrust of citizens, seers and saboteurs in the town of Picui.

Rubia (Rejane Faria) is a nuclear physicist who spends long hours away from the woman she loves working on Yellow Cake, a foreign project that the Brazilian government is collaborating on in secret to use the power of radiation from uranium to sterilise mosquitoes. There’s been a dengue fever death spike, and Rubia wants to believe her work will help. But that’s hard to do when liaising between a shadowy regime and Bill Raymond (Spencer Callahan), the pushy, khaki-clad leader dropped in to helm the experiments. He wastes no time making his disdain for safety protocols known, in his hunger for fast results. What’s more, the potential of enriched uranium for bombs radically increases the stakes. Among local skeptics is Dona Rita (a show-stealing Tania Maria, who shot to fame in Kleber Mendonca Filho’s Oscar-nommed The Secret Agent). This elderly descendant of the region’s first prospector is tough as nails, an avid smoker who says if cigarettes were harmful, they would have killed her long ago.

The arid land might look dead in Picui, but beyond the naked eye, nature is full of deadly power, in both the insects that carry disease, and the coveted but toxic minerals buried deep. Makeshift tents are set up in the arid landscape, in what to the “gringo” overseers seems like the middle of nowhere. But locals are on the lookout. The beaten-down workforce have had more than enough experience with the ravages of geopolitical exploitation and a mining industry that has never cared if they are poisoned in their own homes so long as a profit is turned, and the supposed wisdom of scientists who’ve brought nothing but pain is a subject of derision at the pub. Rubia must reexamine her loyalties when the project spins drastically off course, and the warning signs of an apocalyptic calamity accelerate to the more grotesque and visually lurid.

Insistent through the human drama is the buzzing of mosquito swarms, an ominous reminder of a fatal threat, and that nature’s cycles of renewal do not prioritise the human. A 1980 Catia de Franca song about the cycle of life, death and viruses closes out a satire-savvy soundtrack of Brazilian pop. Biohazard suits and labs lit in neon pinks and blues add an unfussy but effective otherworldly, sci-fi sheen to the north’s dry and dusty dirt expanses, cacti and cavernous mining shafts. DOPs Gustavo Pessoa and Ivo Lopes Araujo occasionally hone in toward insect-scale, or evoke other planes of fevered consciousness, in vivid experimental sequences that remind us that many cataclysmic shifts in nature are beyond our gaze, and that intuition, spirituality and dreams are a more ancient kind of knowledge not easily displaced by modern scientific ambition.

Director: Tiago Melo
Screenwriters: Amanda Guimaraes, Anna Carolina Francisco, Jeronimo Lemos, Gabriel Domingues, Tiago Melo
Producers: Carol Ferreira, Leonardo Sette, Luiz Barbosa, Tiago Melo
Cinematographers: Gustavo Pessoa, Ivo Lopes Araújo
Editor: Andre Sampaio
Cast: Rejane Faria, Valmir do Coco, Spencer Callahan, Tania Maria
Production design: Ananias de Caldas, Avelino los Reis
Sound Design: Miriam Biderman, Ricardo Reis
Music: O Grivo
Production companies: Uranio Filmes (Brazil), Lucinda Producoes (Brazil), Jaragua Producoes (Brazil)
Sales: Uranio Filmes
Venue: Rotterdam (Tiger Competition)
In Portuguese, English
97 minutes

Writer-director Ivo M. Ferreira frames this loosely fact-based story as a freewheeling, kinetic, high-stakes crime thriller. His approach has an appealing grungy retro aesthetic and an immersive docu-drama rawness, but it also feels overlong, rambling and too opaquely explained at times. Following its world premiere in Rotterdam this week, Projecto Global should enjoy healthy festival interest, but its distended runtime and baggy narrative will likely limit its appeal to art-house audiences.

Despite Portugal’s shift to democracy following the Carnation Revolution of 1975, which ended half a century of right-wing dictatorship, FP-25 formed five years later due to mounting frustration over stalled socialist reforms, spiralling unemployment, economic recession, and other factors which they deemed to be early warning signs of an imminent return to fascism. Opposed to capitalism and the “bourgeois” parliamentary party system, they funded themselves with armed bank robberies, mounting small-scale attacks on military and commercial targets. They also killed 14 people, mostly businessmen, prison officials and alleged informers in their own ranks.

Taking its title from FP-25’s grandly ambitious political manifesto, Projecto Global paints a close-up insider portrait of the group’s operations, as embodied by a small cadre of long-haired, chain-smoking bohemians based in Lisbon. The closest thing to a lead protagonist is Rosa (Jani Zhao), a glamorous young mother with roots in fringe theatre. Together with Quieroz (Isac Graça), Jaime (José Pimentão), Balela (Joao Catarre) and others, her daily routine is a constant whirl of heated political discussions, clandestine criminal actions, and high-risk cat-and-mouse games with law enforcement. To complicate matters, a key member of the growing police operation against FP-25 is Rosa’s ex-lover Marlow (José Pimentão), who puts them both in peril by trying to warn her of the impending crackdown.

Citing the non-judgmental, gritty, morally complex cinema of the 1970s as his stylistic inspiration, Ferreira is careful to neither romanticise nor demonise FP-25. Instead he dramatises debates within their ranks about tactics and goals, ideological tensions and ethical reservations. If there is any editorial message here, it is that armed underground radicals have no legitimacy in a well-functioning democracy. As the world-weary detective (Ivo Canelas) pursuing the group says, “they should run for office, like all the other bastards.”

Swept along by a crackly, percussive, jazzy score, Projecto Global features some superbly staged action set-pieces, including a nail-biting prison break and a bank robbery that climaxes in a chaotic, catastrophic gun battle. Ferreira is less sure-footed in the low-key domestic scenes, which foreground lengthy, naturalistic conversation over narrative clarity. Back stories, psychological motivations, and connections between characters are thinly explained, blunting some of the story’s power as a smart political thriller. There is still much to enjoy here, but a sharper script and tighter edit might have made this fascinating based-on-reality story more accessible to viewers unfamiliar with Portugal’s post-revolutionary landscape.

Born after the Carnation Revolution, Ferreira was just a child during FP-25’s brief heyday, but he does have loose family connections with the group. In his Rotterdam press notes, he recalls an aunt being arrested and jailed for her involvement. Despite their crimes, most members caught in the police crackdown ultimately got off lightly with short sentences, pardons and amnesties under a series of sympathetic left-leaning governments. The director argues that their story still resonates today, the revolutionary struggles of the past helping to inform the current political landscape, including peaceful protest movements. “Projecto Global speaks of a dream of equality from which one is forced to awaken,” he claims, “and of the difficulty of accepting defeat when ideas collide with reality.”

Director: Ivo M. Ferreira
Screenwriters: Ivo M. Ferreira, Hélder Beja
Cast: Jani Zhao, Rodrigo Tomás, José Pimentão, Isac Graça Gonçalo Waddington, Ivo Canelas, Joao Catarre
Cinematography: Vasco Viana
Editing: Sandro Aguilar
Music: Nik Bohnenberger, Eva Aguilar
Production design: Nuno Mello
Producers: Luís Urbano, Sandro Aguilar, Donato Rotunno
Production companies: O Som E A Fúria (Portugal), Tarantula (Luxemburg)
World sales: The Match Factory
Venue: International Film Festival Rotterdam (Big Screen Competition)
In Portuguese
141 minutes

The plot is rooted in real events, which took place in 1930. At that moment, far-right movements were on the rise in multiple areas of Europe (Mussolini gets namechecked), and Finland was not immune to this. It’s in this context that we first make the acquaintance of Eero Kuussaari, an army officer who longs for a promotion but is unlikely to receive one due to his reputation for sloppiness and incompetence (his track record in Germany earned him the derisive nickname Der Saboteur).

Nevertheless, he’s still somewhat in the good graces of the aforementioned Wallenius (Aku Sipola), who shares his nationalistic vision with a restricted circle of army friends. Next thing you know, the small group is at a hotel in Joensuu, where both Eero and Wallenius receive a coded telegram neither of them can make sense of. Eventually, it dawns on them that, while heavily inebriated, they set in motion a coup d’état by mandating the abduction of Kaarlo Juho Ståhlberg (Pertti Sveholm), the former President of Finland. Yes, it’s a political kidnapping drama by way of The Hangover.

The film follows two main plot strands: the kidnapping, and the farcical implications thereof when the eager but clueless young men entrusted with the task also end up taking Ståhlberg’s wife Ester (a delightfully no-nonsense performance by Riitta Havukainen); and the simultaneous realization that Eero and Kurt drunkenly started their self-described revolution way ahead of schedule (the “1931” in their plan’s name being the main giveaway). And yes, this is all inspired by true events, although the opening disclaimer is perhaps less necessary now than it would have been ten years ago, given the many news stories about public buffoonery that have circulated far and wide in recent times.

Vatanen is no stranger to playing a character with a drinking problem, having done so to understatedly humorous effect in Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves; and while the laughs are a bit broader this time, there’s also a stronger underpinning of tragedy to Eero’s entire arc, since booze is more of a coping mechanism in the face of failure. His pairing with Sipola provides good buddy movie energy across the film’s brisk 82-minute runtime, while never failing to stress how Wallenius is more on the villainous side of things (although in this case evil is not so much banal as it is perennially intoxicated).

In fact, much like Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin (with which The Kidnapping of a President shares a penchant for copious profanity when things go pear-shaped), the film never forgets the horror that lies underneath the laughs, and when the fascistic rhetoric inevitably takes the stage for its customary speech, captured with close-ups that barely contain Wallenius’ warmongering ego, the comedy becomes a cautionary tale. Yes, this coup attempt was a failure, but under even slightly different circumstances the outcome could have been unfavorable for democracy. And almost 100 years later, the power and weaponry at the incompetents’ disposal has increased to a frightening degree. And unlike Eero, at least one of them is famous for not consuming alcohol at all…

Director: Samuli Valkama
Screenwriter: Samuli Valkama, John Lundsten
Cast: Jussi Vatanen, Aku Sipola, Pertti Sveholm, Riita Havukainen, Elias Salonen
Producers: John Lundsten, Melli Maikkula, Rogier Kramer, Jakub Koš?ál, Vratislav Šlajer, Madis Tüür, Laura Bouwmeester
Cinematography: Tuomo Hutri
Production design: Henrich Boráros
Costume design: Eugen Tamberg
Music: Juho Nurmela
Sound: Vincent Sinceretti
Production companies: TACK Films, Bionaut Films, Labyrint Film, Munchhausen Productions
World sales: LevelK
Venue: International Film Festival Rotterdam (Limelight)
In Finnish
82 minutes

Maryna Er Gorbach has followed up her lauded 2022 feature film, Klondike, with this powerful depiction of a young woman trying to come to terms with both the context-switching and agonising trauma of the war in Ukraine. Simple construction allows Er Gorbach and her lead actress Nadiia Karpova to mine a deep vein of emotion in a short timeframe. The film received its world premiere in Rotterdam this week as part of the newly launched Displacement Film Fund.

Rotation begins with Nadya (Karpova) sat in an apparently picturesque field, amongst sheafs of tall dry grass, where an off-screen voice asks if she managed to sleep and when she replies in the negative, offers to help. Thus begins a session of therapeutic hypnosis and Nadya finds herself back in a Ukrainian forest, in military fatigues alongside her comrades. She snaps back into the field amidst the sound of distant thudding booms, at which point the image on screen shifts into something grainier, more saturated, with the sprockets of celluloid exposed on its edges. The camera now drifts around Nadya as she wrestles both physically and emotionally with her grief.

The film’s shift in its visual language comes around a quarter of the way through, and specifically what it represents is likely to land in different ways with every viewer. On one hand it makes the action feel unreal, on another it evokes the cultural aesthetic or memory. Sviatoslav Bulakovskyi’s camera arches up into the air and twists its perspective, looking down on Nadya or, in the most striking image of the piece, presenting her sat cross-legged, as if upside down, suspended in an unnatural position. The ostensible beauty of the setting only serving to heighten the persistence of  her pain. Karpova gives a harrowing, embodied performance, channelling such anguish. Rotation taps into a fundamental pain that is at once impossible to comprehend and viscerally tangible.

Director, screenplay, editing: Maryna Er Gorbach
Cast: Nadiia Karpova, Oleksandr Piskunov
Producer: Mehmet Behedair Er, Maryna Er Gorbach
Cinematography: Sviatoslav Bulakovskyi
Music, sound: Silas Bieri
Production design: Andrii Hrechyshkin
Production companies: Protim Video Production (Turkey)
Venue: International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) (Displacement Film Fund)
In Ukrainian
12 minutes

A well-cast Ruby Ruiz plays Yolanda, a warmhearted, unassuming but independently minded nun who believes in the spirit rather than the letter of religious teachings, and is in the habit of bending scriptural rules out of selfless intent if she believes it will soothe the hardships of others. She and her sisters inhabit one of the first convents that Spanish missionaries built four hundred years ago, a cavernous structure in which candles are the only reliable source of light, and softly illuminate their evenings. They are accustomed to co-existing in a tranquil, mutually supportive community, but bats flitting around the tower at night have been creating disquiet among them, with the nuns reading their unusual activity as an omen that the environment is out of balance.

As an end-of-life carer for the elderly mother of imperious, self-styled philanthropist Mrs De La Cruz (Maricel Soriano), Yolanda is accustomed to being in close proximity to mortality. But when she is called to deliver last rites to a young and terrified construction worker in a hospital bed, she is shaken to the core — not because of the untimely death, but because of the strange and suspicious circumstances around it. This is a film as grounded in earthly concerns of money and status, and the lengths some will go to maintain it, as much as in the inexplicable mysteries of faith, and the forest ghosts and portents that are frequently discussed. Yolanda is faced with an act of cruelty and hypocritical opportunism of a sort totally foreign to her, on a criminal scale that relies on many layers of society, from the police to the Church, to enable it and hush it up. So she is pushed to reevaluate her perspective on the way that religion functions around her, and her own relationship to her faith, in turn influencing her novice charge in an unexpected manner.

In other hands, First Light might have been a pure suspense thriller, but Robinson brings an introspective touch attuned to the quieter work of spiritual questing, and attentive to the kindnesses of modest gestures. At times, gentler, calm-paced interludes risk sinking the momentum of a plot that turns on the masterful centrepiece of a nightmarish hospital scene and a truly shocking crime, and a more definitive tonal direction might have made for a more cohesive, riveting experience to build. But handsome, moody framing and a palate of muted greens and grey-blues immerses us in a world full enough of quiet wonder to support existential musings (Robinson’s background is in photography, and teaming up with DOP Amy Dellar has proved fruitful).

This is a thought-provoking take on class power and piety, and a colonial-imported Catholicism that has not equipped its devotees to tackle an institutional rot that holds some human lives cheap. It is ultimately a film not about resisting or changing a broken society, but finding peace of mind, and one’s authentic self, within it. While the more action-inclined may find too much resignation to the status quo here, audiences will appreciate its willingness to shine a light on workplace exploitation and the dehumanising horrors wrought by entitled, unchecked privilege in the ongoing shadow of colonial repression, and its open vision of spirituality on the believer’s own terms, free of the behest of a fallible Church, with a holistic view of “God in all things.”

Director, Screenwriter: James J. Robinson
Producers: Gabrielle Pearson, Jane Pe Aguirre, Christelle Dychangco, Jane Pe Aguirre
Cinematographer: Amy Dellar
Editor: Geri Docherty
Cast: Ruby Ruiz, Kare Adea, Maricel Soriano, Emmanuel Santos, Soliman Cruz, Rez Cortez, Kidlat Tahimik
Sound Design: Stuart Harmon
Music: Ana ‘Roxanne’ Recto
Production companies: Majella (Australia), GoodThing Productions (Australia), Clou Media Productions (Philippines)
Sales: Independent Entertainment
Venue: Rotterdam (Harbour)
In Tagalog
118 minutes