Festival Programme

Films by Strand

Visions

Critcally acclaimed films and contemporary masterpieces are gathered here for the joy of cinephiles. These works showcase the distinct cinematic style of revered masters and emerging talents, including a hugely engrossing animated feature.

All We Imagine As Light

Payal Kapadia

Direct from Competition in Cannes where it scored the Grand Prix, this radiant Indian drama follows two nurses looking for love but finding sisterhood in the vibrant, heaving 20 million plus populace of Mumbai.

The Beast

La bête

Bertrand Bonello

Léa Seydoux and George MacKay’s fatal attraction endures across space and time in Bertrand Bonello’s audacious Lynchian reflection on love and obsession, mixing sci-fi, melodrama, and horror across three different time frames.

Dahomey

Mati Diop

In 2021, 26 plundered artefacts from the Kingdom of Dahomey are returned to the modern day nation of Benin. Mati Diop’s dreamlike documentary skilfully examines the debate surrounding the repatriation of stolen cultural treasures.

Evil Does Not Exist

Aku wa sonzai shinai

Ryûsuke Hamaguchi

Ryûsuke Hamaguchi follows up his Oscar-winning film Drive My Car with a modern eco-fable that provides a gorgeous meditation on humanity’s relation to nature and an unnerving commentary on the price of progress.

Flow

Gints Zilbalodis

Direct from wowing audiences at Cannes, this immersive animated wonder from Lativian director Gints Zilbalodis tells the surreal tale of an unlikely group of animals who must overcome their differences to survive a great flood.

Grand Tour

Miguel Gomes

A runaway groom with his bride-to-be in hot pursuit takes us on an epic tour through colonial-era Asia in Miguel Gomes’s playful Cannes prize-winner which mingles the artificiality of classic cinema with a documentary sense of place.

Green Border

Zielona granica

Agnieszka Holland

Brutal, enraging and heartrending, Polish writer-director Agnieszka Holland’s controversial take on the Polish-Belarusian border crisis serves as a startling call to arms in the face of a little-seen humanitarian crisis.

Menus-Plaisirs - Les Troisgros

Frederick Wiseman

A quietly diligent examination of a family-run three-star Michelin restaurant in France, revealing minute details of a sprawling ecosystem as it unobtrusively traverses kitchens, dining rooms, suppliers, markets, cheese caves, farms, vineyards, and apiaries.

Pepe

Nelson Carlos de Los Santos Arias

One of Pablo Escobar’s “cocaine hippos” ponders the meaning of existence from beyond the grave in this gleefully unclassifiable film that playfully weaves fact, fiction and form into a truly unique cinematic experience.

The Seed of the Sacred Fig

Mohammad Rasoulof

A conflicted family implodes as protests spread throughout Iran, Mohammad Rasoulof’s courageous and urgent film delivers a bold middle finger to the totalitarian regime of his homeland.

The Universal Theory

Die Theorie von Allem

Timm Kröger

Featuring numerous unexpected twists and plenty of Hitchcockian suspense, German director Timm Kröger’s heady sci-fi thriller takes us on a gripping cinematic voyage packed with astute film references and brain-melting metaphysics.