A spread of films and talent presented at IFF Rotterdam's CineMart and backed by the Hubert Bals Fund are once again a fixture of the Cannes lineup in 2025. Catalan filmmaker Carla Simón brings her family trilogy to a close with Romería, a moving story of love, yearning and family anguish, this time through an adolescent lens as orphan Marina travels to meet her grandparents in Spain. Erige Sehiri's second feature Promised Sky focuses on a pastor whose home becomes a refuge for Naney, a young mother seeking a better future, and Jolie, a strong-willed student, before an orphan girl arrives and tests their solidarity.
Italian-American filmmaker duo Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis continue their investigation into the legends and myths of Italian folklore with the surrealist Italy-set Western Testa o croce? (Heads or Tails?). The name derives from a bet between Buffalo Bill’s American cowboys (who visited Italy with their Wild West Show in 1890) and Italian cowboys over which team was better at taming wild horses. The film follows two young lovers on the run, played by rising French star Nadia Tereszkiewicz (Red Island) and Italy’s Alessandro Borghi (The Eight Mountains), with John C. Reilly co-starring as Buffalo Bill.
Renowned Japanese filmmaker Koji Fukada has made a number of highly acclaimed features across the last fifteen years dealing with “domestic disequilibrium”, including Harmonium (2016)—which won the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at Cannes—A Girl Missing (2019), The Real Thing (2020) and Love Life (2022). Inspired by real cases in Japan, his latest, Love on Trial, follows Mai, a rising J-Pop idol whose big break is threatened when she falls in love, violating the “no love” clause in her contract. The project was presented at CineMart in 2022, where it picked up the IFFR Young Selectors Award.
March is mourning his wife Nat—who has recently passed away due to dust pollution—when he discovers her spirit has returned by possessing the vacuum cleaner. So begins the premise of Thai filmmaker Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s unique, playful, genre-mixing debut A Useful Ghost (pictured top). Boonbunchachoke’s short Red Aninsri; Or, Tiptoeing on the Still Trembling Berlin Wall won the Junior Jury award at Locarno in 2020. A Useful Ghost was supported by the HBF+Europe: Minority Co-production Support scheme in 2023, where it received €60,000 of production financing.
Source: IFFR
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