Based on a graphic novel, this dazzling sapphic fable is a whimsical ode to the power of storytelling.
Festival Programme
Films — by Venue
Rialto Cinemas Newmarket
9 Temples to Heaven
9 วัด สู่สวรรค์
A gently funny exploration of family, faith and the tensions between Thailand’s spiritual and modernist dimensions.
All the Lovers in the Night
すべて真夜中の恋人たち
Set against Tokyo’s quiet winter glow, a reserved proofreader finds an unexpected bond with a physics teacher in a delicate drama exploring isolation, desire, and the risks of emotional connection.
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.
AnyMart
チルド
In the cold and conformist world of Japanese retail, convenience store clerk Sakai slowly awakens to the horrors of the system just as his orderly world of cheap consumerism begins to unravel with brutal consequences.
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 Best Summer
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
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.
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.
Butterfly Jam
The Beanpole director's third feature — and first in English — confirms his extraordinary formal and sensory capabilities.
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.
Do You Love Me
A striking panorama of national collective memory told entirely through archive material in this playful, immersive journey through Lebanon’s history and culture.
The Fence
Le cri des gardes
The cover-up of a worker’s death in West Africa and the arrival of the site manager’s young wife are lit matches to a tinderbox in this strange, sinewy thriller of alienation and exploitation.
First Light
A ruthless workplace cover-up by a powerful family throws a nun into existential crisis in this mysterious, meditative drama, beautifully lensed in island greenery and candlelight.
Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass
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.
Goodbye, Cruel World
Adieu monde cruel
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
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 gives his inimitably magpie-ish style of documentary-making the big screen treatment in this endlessly digressive investigation into a hilariously mundane topic.
Kim Novak's Vertigo
Now in her nineties, legendary actress Kim Novak sits down to discuss her storied career in Hollywood and her most famous role in Hitchcock’s Vertigo in Alexandre O. Philippe’s intimate and illuminating documentary.
La Perra
The arrival of a free-spirited stray dog transforms a lonely woman's life, exposing deeply held wounds and a longing for connection that is buried beneath the surface of her stoic exterior.
The Last One for the Road
Le città di pianura
A love letter to the villages and towns of the wine- and grappa-producing Veneto region around Venice, this comedy-drama has humour, a heart and a melancholic streak.
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.
Lost Land
Harà Watan
Using non-professional child actors, Japanese director Akio Fujimoto offers an unflinching portrayal of the Rohingya crisis and the struggles of refugees without a nation to call their own.
Low Expectations
When a musician's career implodes, she retreats home, takes a job at a high school and quietly pieces herself back together. A sweetly low-key Cannes gem about mental healing, second chances and the unexpected joy of starting over.
The Match
El Partido
The infamous World Cup quarterfinal between England and Argentina — won, defined, and immortalised by Diego Maradona… and by the hand of God.
Mouse
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.
Mysterious Skin
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.
Nagi Notes
ナギダイアリー
With his trademark sensitivity, Koji Fukada turns a delicate story of friendship into a moving meditation on resilience, freedom, and the courage to embrace change.
Narciso
Marcelo Martinessi crafts a sultry, political thriller where private longing intersects with authoritarian power.
Nino
A young man wanders the streets of Paris, reconnecting with the world following a startling medical diagnosis in Pauline Loquès moving and warm portrait, ably assisted by an exceptional Théodore Pallerin in the title role.
On the Road
En el camino
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.
Phantom Beirut
أشباح
Interweaving fiction and reality, Phantom Beirut's striking restoration refreshes a landmark of Lebanese cinema, bringing its vivid, haunting portrait of 1980s Lebanon to a new generation.
Portobello (Eps 1 - 3)
Marco Bellocchio's six-episode TV series is a majestic cinematic work investigating the fall from grace of Italy’s most beloved TV host.
Portobello (Eps 4 - 6)
Marco Bellocchio's six-episode TV series is a majestic cinematic work investigating the fall from grace of Italy’s most beloved TV host.
Prosecution
Staatsschutz
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.
Remake
Renowned American documentarian Ross McElwee confronts the limits of the movie camera as a tool of the heart as he revisits family footage after the death of his son, and reflects on their relationship to and through cinema.
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.
A Sad and Beautiful World
Nujum al'amal w al'alam
Romantic and sharp, this is a story of two souls bound by fate, a country on the brink of collapse, and a love story that refuses to give up on either.
The Samurai and the Prisoner
黒牢城
Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s exquisitely crafted samurai murder mystery finds a Lord and his captured prisoner work together to solve a series of shadowy murders inside the palace compound as civil war rages around them. An elegant and probing portrait of power, violence and honour, which world premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
The Seoul Guardians
Seol-ui-bam
South Korea’s brief but traumatic 2024 martial law declaration by disgraced former President Yoon Suk-yeol is the subject of this thrilling documentary, combining wild on-the-ground reportage with important historical context on Korea’s authoritarian-scarred past.
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.
Silent Friend
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
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
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
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.
We Are All Strangers
我们不是陌生人
The poetry in the everyday abounds in this novelistic drama set in modern Singapore, chronicling the daily lives of a father and son and their parallel romantic relationships.
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 World of Love
Segyeui Ju-in
When a confident high school student refuses to add her name to a petition against a sex offender, questions mount over why in this superb and psychologically complex drama exploring trauma responses to abuse in modern Korea.