France

The special bond between a little French girl and her African nanny is tested during a last summer.

This year’s Palme d’Or winner launches our Festival with a profound and galvanising reflection on truth, facts and fiction, pivoting around another extraordinary central performance from Sandra Hüller—familiar to audiences for her work in Toni Erdmann (NZIFF 2016) and In the Aisles, among other terrific films.

We’ve searched near and far, and high and low to collect this latest selection of short film delights, selected especially to charm and captivate our littlest film fans.

Recommended for ages 4+

Get ready for your annual wintery fix of animated inventiveness from all corners of our big wide world.

French documentarian Sébastien Lifshitz's poignant story about trans lives across time. Casa Susanna was a bungalow refuge for cross-dressing men in the 1960s, where they were free to be themselves.

A complex, languorous tale of violence and desire drawing on French auteur Claire Denis’ own childhood growing up in colonial French Africa.

In this engrossing study of US interventions since the cold war, a cast of senior White House figures across the decades revisit their decisions, set against a visceral catalogue of archival footage.

Visionary and confrontational, the mysteries of the body are dissected with surgical precision in an unforgettable, extremely close-up look at human bodies, those who care for them, and the system that rules them all.

Franz Rogowski (Great Freedom, Transit) is thrilling as a foreign legionnaire fighting demons on the battlefront and urges on the dance floor in Giacomo Abbruzzese’s striking debut feature.

A dangerous romance ensues between a successful lawyer and her teenage stepson as Catherine Breillat returns for the first time in a decade having lost none of her propensity to transgress.

A private detective and her android partner track down a notorious hacker in the dark underbelly of a Martian metropolis in this superb cyber-punk-noir animated feature, packed with humour and action.

Two rookie midwives are thrown into the deep end in a chaotic, underfunded and understaffed maternity ward in director Léa Fehner’s compassionate French drama of triumph over adversity.

Acclaimed French documentarian Nicolas Philibert (To Be and To Have NZIFF 2002) takes us aboard a floating day care centre for adults with mental health challenges in this quietly observed yet unflinching Golden Bear winner.

Documentary, film essay, biography and performance piece meld together in Paul B. Preciado’s avant-garde, ruffed reclamation of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. This award-winning exploration of trans lives re-imagines the past and asks who are in the present.

Art cinema maverick Albert Serra takes us on an unsettling tour of the French Polynesian tropics with his latest anti-epic, a tale of political paranoia set to a backdrop of disquieting picture postcard sunsets.

Three months after surviving a terror attack in a Paris bistro, translator Mia retraces her steps in an effort to disentangle her fragmented memories of that traumatic night in Alice Winocur’s incisive portrait of survival.

A gay couple’s marriage spirals into chaos when one of them begins an affair with a younger woman in Ira Sach’s seductive and bitterly amusing Paris-set drama. Starring Franz Rogowski, Ben Whishaw and Adèle Exarchopoulos.

Drawing on a tragic true event, this multi-awarded and mesmerising, stately courtroom drama upends notions of race, cultural heritage, class and female agency, and the mythologies and social prejudices underpinning received ideas.

This Sundance award winner brings new meaning to the healing powers of sisterhood, following a group of Estonian women who gather in a traditional log-cabin sauna to share naked truths.