Raindance 2026: Serena / Stairs

Screenlife films, such as Unfriended and its sequel, take the digital clutter of modern life—message bubbles, tab‑hopping, notification pings—and turn it into a stage where intimacy and anxiety unfold in real time.  By confining the action to screens we stare at every day, the form exposes how people curate themselves, how relationships fracture or deepen through pixels, and how the smallest digital gesture can feel seismic.  What seems at first like a technical constraint becomes a narrative engine: the drama lives in what characters choose to reveal, what they hide in other windows, and how their devices quietly betray them.

At their best, screenlife stories capture something uncannily true about contemporary existence, where our online selves are both our masks and our mirrors.  Serena, which screens today and on Thursday at the Raindance Film Festival, is the latest effort in a movement that was admirably pioneered by Timur Bekmambetov but perfected by Rob Savage with his terrific films Host and Dashcam.  Serena sees broke musician Chris (Steven Strait) enlist as a beta tester for an AI chatbot played by Andi Matichak, hitherto best known for her role as Laurie Strode's granddaughter in David Gordon Green's Halloween trilogy.

For this gig, Chris—who is about to become a father—has negotiated an inflated fee of $3000, which might just help him stave off eviction.  What seems like a simple task—ask the bot 100 pre-planned questions—soon goes off-piste as the AI, who has adopted the name Serena, helps Chris generate serious money by predicting football results.  But things take a much darker turn when Serena assumes complete control of Chris' computer and confronts him with some terrible revelations.  The acting, writing, and directing are all strong here, and the taut, suspenseful Serena can sit proudly alongside the best entries in the subgenre.

The Raindance shorts programme Radical Agendas also screens today, and among the eight titles on offer here is Riley Donigan's impressive Stairs.  This sly allegorical tale centres on Ally (Betsey Brown), a New York bride-to-be who has a minor trip on a flight of stairs and subsequently develops a fetish for such tumbles.  With each fall, Ally's injuries worsen, but her search for gratification locks her into a cycle of trying to outdo the previous mishap.  Events reach critical mass at a pre-wedding photo shoot in Central Park, and Stairs' portrayal of hopeless addiction gives way to full-blown body horror as it dares us to keep watching.

Darren Arnold

Images: Cinequest / Festival Scope

Raindance 2026: A Free Daughter of Free Kyrgyzstan

It has been 35 years since Kyrgyzstan declared its independence from the USSR, but while women's rights in the landlocked central Asian nation may have improved in an official sense, there is considerable disparity between the law and everyday life.  The country has legal statutes against discrimination and domestic violence, yet many Kyrgyz women still face abuse, unequal treatment, and barriers to justice.  Activists and local organisations continue to push for stronger enforcement, greater awareness, and better protection for women and girls, especially those in vulnerable communities outside of the capital, Bishkek.

This struggle is at the heart of Leigh Iacobucci's documentary A Free Daughter of Free Kyrgyzstan.  Having already screened at several other festivals—including Den Haag's Movies that Matter— the film is among the selections for this year's Raindance Film Festival, where it screens on Saturday and Monday.  Iacobucci's film focuses on Kyrgyz singer-songwriter Zere Asylbek, better known by the mononym Zere, as she fights for gender equality.  It's a candid portrait that follows Zere in a variety of situations: recording new music, at home with her family, and partaking in protests quashed by the authorities.

Zere is charismatic and personable, and it's easy to see why so many Kyrgyz women have become fans of both her and her music.  It's hard not to be impressed by the singer's activism, and she remains steadfast in the face of every adversity—which ranges from online trolling to death threats.  With a runtime of just over an hour, the deft A Free Daughter of Free Kyrgyzstan is both an intimate portrayal of a fearless artist and an absorbing snapshot of post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan; its depiction of life after communism recalls another impressive title showing at Raindance 2026: the Czechia-set Summer School, 2001.

Darren Arnold

Images: Festival Scope

Raindance 2026: Life for Beginners

Polish vampire legends occupy a wonderfully eerie corner of Slavic folklore, where the boundary between the living and the dead is porous and often unsettling.  In rural tales, the upiór or wąpierz is not the suave, louche aristocrat of Western fiction but a restless villager who returns from the grave, driven by hunger, unfinished business, or sheer spite.  These beings are said to rise swollen and ruddy, their bodies filled with the blood they've stolen, and wander the night until discovered and ritually subdued.  Each story feels raw and rooted in the soil—half cautionary tale, half communal attempt to explain the unexplainable.

What makes Polish vampire lore so distinctive is its blend of the supernatural with the everyday: a neighbour who died suddenly, a relative buried improperly, a stranger who behaved oddly at the market.  This combining of the fantastic with the quotidian is very much in evidence in Paweł Podolski's feature debut Life for Beginners (Polish: Życie dla początkujących), which screens on Friday and Monday at the Raindance Film Festival.  Podolski sets his film in a retirement home, where vampire Monia (Magdalena Maścianica) works the night shift, during which she's able to procure blood from the elderly residents.

This arrangement—which happens to take place under the cover of darkness, neatly avoiding the perils of daylight—works well for Monia, who gets enough sustenance from the blood she carefully obtains.  But this status quo is disrupted when her secret is discovered by Czarek (Michał Sikorski), a gauche young man who frequents the old folks' home to visit his bolshy grandmother (Małgorzata Rożniatowska).  There's another problem for Monia in the form of her fellow sanguivore Mirek (Bartłomiej Kotschedoff), who's grown tired of this eternal life business; as his creator, she's the only one who can end his relentless suffering.

As one might reasonably expect from such a setup, there is an incipient romance between Monia and Czarek, who not only have to wrestle with the vampire-human dynamic but must also contend with the antics of Mirek, who is far more reckless than Monia when it comes to slaking his thirst.  It's all very watchable, and although Podolski deals in familiar horror tropes, he brings a light comic touch to the proceedings that serves the actors well.  Maścianica—who bears a passing resemblance to Jessie Buckley—is the standout performer in a brisk 75 minutes that stands as a sturdy example of low-to-no-budget filmmaking.

Darren Arnold

Images: Aurora Films