BFI Flare: Pillion (Harry Lighton, 2025)

The entirety of BFI Flare’s Best of Year strand will be screened on Sunday, which marks the close of this year’s edition of the festival.  The strand’s title is fairly self-explanatory, and this selection of highlights from the last 12 months includes Harry Lighton’s feature debut Pillion, which arrives at Flare having already enjoyed outings at both the BFI London Film Festival and IFF Rotterdam.  As with every film in this strand—which also includes Dreamers, Baby, and Little Trouble Girls—tickets for Pillion have sold out, but it is always worth checking with the festival box office for any late returns that may become available.

Lighton’s film focuses on meek parking attendant Colin (Harry Melling), a naïve, gentle young man who lives with his parents (Lesley Sharp, Douglas Hodge).  During a pre-Christmas visit to a pub—where Colin and his dad perform as part of a barbershop quartet—Colin meets taciturn biker Ray (Alexander Skarsgård), an encounter that leads to a brief alleyway tryst.  Colin is subsequently ghosted by Ray, but eventually the latter gets in touch and invites Colin over; upon arriving, Colin is somewhat surprised to learn that he’ll be the one making the evening meal, but he is happy to be spending time with Ray, so duly obliges.

Colin’s surprise turns to bewilderment as he is made to stand while he eats the pasta dish he's cooked, while Ray and his dog share the sofa.  From this point on, Colin carries out virtually all of the household chores at Ray’s flat, where he sleeps on the floor next to Ray’s bed.  Ray introduces Colin to the biker subculture, and through this Colin witnesses other couples who also operate around a dominant–submissive dynamic.  Ray remains infuriatingly opaque to both the viewer and Colin, and a tense Sunday lunch at Colin’s parents’ house descends into a furious row as his terminally ill mum objects to Ray’s questionable treatment of her son.

Based on Adam Mars-Jones’ novel Box Hill, Pillion is a well-crafted work that never once feels like a first feature, and it veers away from predictability in a way that belies Lighton’s relative inexperience.  Skarsgård is as magnetic a presence as ever, and Sharp and Hodge lend unsurprisingly solid support, but the real revelation comes in the form of the brave performance by Harry Melling, who came to prominence as the insufferably spoiled Dudley Dursley in the Harry Potter franchise.  Many will find Pillion a difficult watch, but if you make it through to the other side, you can join the debate surrounding this fascinating film.

Darren Arnold

Images: A24

BFI Flare: Mysterious Skin (Gregg Araki, 2004)

More than 20 years on from its screening at International Film Festival Rotterdam, Gregg Araki’s Mysterious Skin returns to the big screen as part of this year’s BFI Flare, where it will be shown on Wednesday in a 4K restoration.  For this incarnation of the film, Araki has used new technology to make several tweaks to the original version, meaning its makeover extends well beyond what one might expect from a standard restoration.  Mysterious Skin is in fact a Dutch–US co-production, with Amsterdam-based Fortissimo Films one of three companies responsible for this haunting adaptation of Scott Heim’s eponymous 1995 novel.

Set in Heim’s home town of Hutchinson, Kansas, Mysterious Skin centres on Neil (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Brian (Brady Corbet), two young men leading separate—and quite different—lives.  Yet Neil and Brian are connected in a most unfortunate way: as eight-year-olds, both were abused by their baseball coach (Bill Sage).  While Neil remembers these events in detail, Brian has no memory of the abuse.  Instead, he is convinced that a five-hour gap following a rained-off game can be explained by UFO abduction, and on this basis he seeks out Avalyn (Mary Lynn Rajskub), a woman who also claims to have encountered aliens.

Upon meeting Avalyn, Brian finds many of the answers he’d hoped for, her theories neatly dovetailing with his suspicions.  But when Brian—who regularly experiences nightmares about being abducted—has a dream in which Neil’s face appears, he becomes determined to track down his old teammate.  Neil, meanwhile, has left Kansas for New York—a move inspired by his best friend Wendy (the late Michelle Trachtenberg).  At college, Brian gets to know another of Neil’s close friends, Eric (Jeff Licon), who takes him to visit Neil—who has returned to Hutchinson for Christmas—in the hope that Brian will finally learn the truth.

Although it may well be Araki’s best film, Mysterious Skin is also his least typical work.  Prior to this, he made a series of films—most notably his so-called Teen Apocalypse Trilogy—largely defined by their transgressive, nihilistic nature.  While those movies were all strictly adults-only fare, Mysterious Skin could be said to be his first film for grownups.  It’s a heartbreaking, wonderfully empathetic work, one whose impact has not diminished in the two decades-plus since its original release.  It was, and remains, a tough watch, with Gordon-Levitt and Corbet excelling as two very different—yet equally damaged—victims of abuse.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI

BFI Flare: Queen of Coal (Agustina Macri, 2025)

Coal mining in Argentina is small and highly concentrated in the Río Turbio basin of southern Patagonia, where a state‑owned company operates the country’s only significant coal mine and associated infrastructure.  The coal extracted there feeds a dedicated power plant project and supplies a minor share of industrial demand, leaving coal with less than 1% of Argentina’s electricity mix.  Although national coal reserves are on the order of hundreds of millions of tonnes, actual production is quite modest; this limited role has placed Río Turbio at the centre of debates about shifting local jobs and development away from coal.

The Patagonian mining industry it at the centre of Agustina Macri's Queen of Coal, which screens on Tuesday as part of this year's BFI Flare.  Macri's film tells the true story of Carla "Carlita" Rodríguez, who made history by becoming the first woman miner in Río Turbio.  Carlita is played by Lux Pascal, the younger sister of The Mandalorian star Pedro Pascal.  Lux actually acted alongside her big brother in Netflix series Narcos, and it is the streaming giant who have overseen the international release of Queen of Coal.  The film is based on the eponymous article by Erika Halvorsen, who co-wrote the brisk screenplay with Mara Pescio.

Queen of Coal follows Carlita as she applies for a job at the mine, which she is eligible for because her ID still lists her as male (women are barred from mining work).  Carlita quickly learns the ropes and soon excels at her job, proving herself to be an indispensable member of the team.  Aside from a few jibes and snide remarks, she is generally accepted by her colleagues.  However, problems arise when the passing of the Gender Identity Law results in her being officially classified as a woman—forcing her reassignment to a mundane clerical role in the mining company's office, where the women are far less tolerant than the miners.

This situation leaves Carlita miserable and unwell, prompting her to take medical leave before deciding to fight for reinstatement in the mine.  Outside of work, she begins a tentative romance with a visiting engineer, played by Spanish actor Paco León, but her relationship with her parents can be described as strained at best.  While the trajectory of the film will surprise no one, Agustina Macri elevates the material beyond a rote biopic, aided by a terrific performance from Lux Pascal.  The wintry, isolated mining locale recalls Mon oncle Antoine, and Macri uses the striking Patagonian landscape to powerful effect.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI

BFI Flare: Love Letters (Alice Douard, 2025)

In 2021, France passed a major bioethics reform that opened IVF and other medically assisted reproduction to all adult women, including single women and those in same‑sex relationships.  The law also allowed elective egg freezing without a medical reason for women between the ages of 29 and 37.  Fertility treatments continued to be reimbursed by the public health insurance system, and from late 2021 lesbians and single women could start IVF in France instead of travelling to countries like neighbouring Belgium.  The reform also recognised a specific filiation procedure for two mothers in female couples.

These changes to the law are at the heart of Alice Douard’s feature debut, Love Letters (French: Des preuves d’amour), even though it is set in 2014, several years before the landmark ruling came into effect.  The film follows Céline (Ella Rumpf) and Nadia (Monia Chokri), a married couple on the brink of parenthood.  Nadia is six months pregnant (via a donor in Denmark), and as such her role is quite clearly defined.  But it’s not as simple for Céline, who, upon the birth, must begin a long and arduous legal process for which there is little precedent, given that the law allowing same-sex couples to adopt is less than a year old.

In order to legally become the child's mother, Céline must fulfil several requirements, one of which is to provide 15 separate testimonies from a range of close friends and relatives.  These written statements will serve, as suggested by the film’s original title, as proof of love between Céline and the baby.  Céline needs one of these letters to be written by her mother, Marguerite (Noémie Lvovsky), a famous concert pianist with whom she has long had an uneasy relationship.  Meanwhile, as they consider suitable candidates for the statements, the highly-stressed couple are also busy making the necessary arrangements for the birth.

Love Letters—which screens at BFI Flare on Saturday and Sunday—is a wonderfully assured debut feature, and Douard taps into Céline's immense frustrations as she, unlike Nadia, must jump through hoops to prove she’s qualified to be a mother.  Swiss actress Rumpf, previously best known for her starring role in Julia Ducournau’s Raw, gives a deeply nuanced performance, conveying how her character is gradually diminished in the eyes of others to the point of near invisibility.  But viewers who, like Céline, endure the knocks and crushing bureaucracy will ultimately be rewarded with a moment of transcendent beauty.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI / Tandem

BFI Flare: The Broken R (Ricardo Ruales Eguiguren, 2025)

Ricardo Ruales Eguiguren's documentary The Broken R (Spanish: Rotacismo), which screens on Saturday as part of BFI Flare, was made with the backing of International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam's Bertha Fund (IBF).  The IBF should not be confused with IFF Rotterdam's Hubert Bals Fund (HBF), even though both schemes serve much the same purpose: to support emerging filmmakers in territories—such as parts of Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America—where local film infrastructure is lacking.  Receiving IBF funding precludes a project from benefitting from the HBF's support, and vice versa.

The Broken R is an intimate self-portrait of its Ecuadorian director, who, like his father, was born with Treacher Collins syndrome (TCS).  TCS is a rare genetic condition that affects the development of the bones and soft tissues of the face, often causing underdeveloped cheekbones, a small jaw and chin, downward‑slanting eyes, and abnormalities of the ears, sometimes with cleft palate and dental issues.  It commonly leads to conductive hearing loss, although intelligence is usually normal and life expectancy is typically not reduced.  Diagnosis is based on characteristic facial features, imaging, and sometimes genetic testing.

Treatment is tailored to the individual, which in Ricardo’s case has meant undergoing a number of gruelling surgeries, including complex dental procedures.  The film’s title refers to Ricardo’s longstanding difficulty in pronouncing the “r” sound (the blunter original title translates as “rhotacism”), which led him to avoid using words containing that letter and often resulted in others not catching his name correctly.  Speech therapy eventually resolved this issue for Ricardo, who notes that his father—also called Ricardo—is serenely accepting of life with TCS in a way that contrasts sharply with the filmmaker's outlook.

Which is not to say that TCS has got the better of Ricardo: he graduated from university in Ecuador before heading to Spain to undertake a master’s degree.  He's an honest, engaging narrator, and he is refreshingly open about his own perceived hang‑ups in the face of his parents’ pragmatism.  The Broken R highlights a generational divide, detailing the differing worldviews of Ricardo and his equally likeable father—a man who refuses to overthink life's problems.  Via a mix of film, digital, and VHS, Ricardo Ruales Eguiguren has created a deeply personal work, one whose impact is truly felt in the hours and days after viewing.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI / Festival Scope

BFI Flare: Mickey & Richard (R.A. White/A.P. Pickle, 2026)

Following last month's outing at International Film Festival Rotterdam—where it screened as one of the titles in Cinema Regained, an IFFR strand that offers new perspectives on film history—Ryan A. White and A.P. Pickle's documentary Mickey & Richard continues its journey on the festival circuit with two screenings at this year's BFI Flare, where it plays on Thursday and Friday as part of the festival's Bodies strand.  Mickey & Richard feels like a continuation of something that began with the same production company's esoteric 2021 film Raw! Uncut! Video!, an IFFR 2025 selection co-directed by White and Alex Clausen.

In Mickey & Richard, White and Pickle turn their attention to Richard Bernstein, who, under the stage name Mickey Squires, became a fixture of the 1980s adult film scene.  Now in his seventies and living a quiet life in the California sun, Bernstein comes across as a thoughtful, affable figure as he reflects on both his heyday in the industry and his wider life.  With seemingly unfettered access to the many films Bernstein starred in, the directors pepper their documentary with countless (and often explicit) clips of Mickey Squires in action, yet it’s always Bernstein’s sincere voiceover that commands the viewer’s attention.

This dissonance makes it hard to reconcile the sensitive older man with the unabashed icon seen in the excerpts.  It’s clear that Bernstein has always yearned for human connection—a trait that seemingly drew him to his chosen career—but has long recognised that physical intimacy doesn’t necessarily equate to emotional closeness.  It is no secret that the adult film industry has produced many casualties throughout its oft-murky history, and while Richard Bernstein—who generally looks back on his career with affection—has emerged with far fewer scars than most, there’s still a wistfulness to the way he reflects on his eventful past.

Given how erudite and engaging the Bernstein of today is, one criticism that might be levelled at White and Pickle’s illuminating film is that it focuses more on the professional than the personal—or rather, that it contains too much Mickey and not enough Richard.  Yet seeing how one informs the other is key to understanding both the film and its subject(s).  While the directors may at times rely a bit too heavily on the wealth of archival material at their disposal, this imbalance is offset by the sheer vitality of Richard’s personality, and the film’s heartfelt coda—centred on his recent major health issues—proves rather moving.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI

Kontinental '25 (Radu Jude, 2025)

The prolific and daring Romanian director Radu Jude's previous film, the coruscating documentary Eight Postcards from Utopia, was a sideways look at his country's rocky economic transition of the 90s, and his examination of post-Ceauşescu Romania continues with his new feature, the Rossellini-referencing Kontinental '25.  While this Luxembourgish co-production isn't quite on a par with Jude's last narrative effort, the outstanding Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, it is nonetheless another clever and absorbing tale from a filmmaker whose trademark irreverent wit seeps into virtually every frame.

Kontinental '25 follows Orsolya (Eszter Tompa), a Cluj-based bailiff of Hungarian extraction, who is tasked with evicting former Olympian Ion (Gabriel Spahiu) from the dank basement of an apartment building earmarked for redevelopment as a luxury hotel.  While Orsolya hopes this will be a routine affair, the eviction takes a tragic turn when the desperate Ion kills himself.  From this point on, Orsolya is consumed by guilt as as she tries to ascertain the extent of her responsibility for Ion's demise; she's also worried that a backlash may occur on account of her ethnicity (anti-foreigner sentiment is a recurring theme in Jude's work).

Like its predecessor, Kontinental '25 manages to be at once specifically Romanian and universal as it considers the impact of capitalism on national cultural identity—in Romania's case, this has meant navigating the complex economy that has developed in the 35-plus years since Ceauşescu's death.  But whereas Eight Postcards from Utopia was more concerned with the consumer habits of the Romanian population, Kontinental '25 sees Jude turn his gaze towards the property market, with the repurposing of the building in which Ion dies serving as a symbol of post-communist Romania's newfound taste for real estate.

It is no coincidence that the film is set in Cluj-Napoca, the Transylvanian city that changed hands from Romania to Hungary, then back to Romania, during WW2; in a sly inversion of the widespread Romanian nationalism on display here, Orsolya's Hungarian mother (Annamária Biluska) froths her way through an anti-Romanian tirade while championing Hungary's leader—much to her daughter's dismay.  Radu Jude remained in Transylvania for his other 2025 effort, Dracula, which has already screened at several film festivals; one wonders what this singular social chronicler will bring to Bram Stoker's much-loved story.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI

100 Nights of Hero (Julia Jackman, 2025)

Canadian filmmaker Julia Jackman's follow-up to her hugely likeable debut feature Bonus Track is a feminist fable based on Isabel Greenberg's near-namesake graphic novel.  The result is a visually striking, if somewhat underpowered, medieval romance.  It feels like a film that's striving desperately for cult status, yet it all seems a little too thin and brittle to endure—despite a great central performance from Maika Monroe and the stunt casting of Charli XCX in a supporting role.  As their titles suggest, both the film and its source material owe much to the tale of the vizier's daughter Scheherazade, that most expert of storytellers.

Here, the title character, played by Emma Corrin, serves as maid to Monroe's noblewoman Cherry.  It falls to Hero to spin the yarns that both hold the narrative together and stall the advances of the louche Manfred (Nicholas Galitzine), who has made a wager with his friend—and Cherry's husband—Jerome (Amir El-Masry) that he can seduce Cherry while Jerome is away for a hundred days, as per the title.  All this unfolds within an absurd patriarchal society that worships Birdman (Richard E. Grant), a god who forbids women from reading or writing, yet still allows them to tell stories—a right Hero weaponises as she fights the power.

Hero’s ongoing epic tale centres on three sisters, the most prominent of whom, Rosa, is played effectively by Charli XCX, whose presence proves as distracting as the nightly instalments are disruptive to the film’s overall flow (a late cameo from Felicity Jones, who also serves as a producer, is equally intrusive).  Rather than drawing us deeper into the narrative, the story-within-the-story tends to break the spell cast by the crepuscular fairytale world inhabited by Cherry and the others.  As the erudite Hero, Emma Corrin is so compelling that there is little need for the illustrative sequences accompanying her stories.

Given that 100 Nights of Hero is based on a work that is itself an adaptation of another, its second-hand nature should be one of its greatest strengths; yet the film is self-conscious when it should be self-reflexive, jarring when it should be seamless.  The ending feels as predictable as it does unearned, reinforcing the sense that this is little more than a fantasy pastiche lacking the guile of, say, Alain Resnais' Life Is a Bed of Roses.  Still, there are aspects to admire in this uneven 90 minutes, with the appealing performances and meticulous mise-en-scène going some way to compensating for the film's structural shortcomings.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI

The Stranger (François Ozon, 2025)

The Stranger is the prolific François Ozon's 24th feature film—an impressive figure, given that his first full-length movie, the queasy Sitcom, was released just 27 years ago.  Ozon's next feature but one after Sitcom, the slightly less transgressive Water Drops on Burning Rocks, was an adaptation of a play by Bavarian bad boy Rainer Werner Fassbinder—a director who churned out films at a rate that makes Ozon look like Stanley Kubrick.  For his latest feature, Ozon again goes down the road of the literary adaptation, with The Stranger seeing the versatile filmmaker tackle an undisputed classic in the form of Albert Camus' eponymous 1942 novella, which was the first of its revered author's works to be published.

While Ozon has had some success adapting books by writers as varied as Joyce Carol Oates (Double Lover), Ruth Rendell (The New Girlfriend), Aidan Chambers (Summer of 85), and Elizabeth Taylor (Angel), there is the sense here that Ozon has set himself a stiffer challenge as he grapples with the murky existential abyss at the centre of Camus' most famous work.  Happily, Ozon's film of The Stranger is both a resounding success and one of its director's finest achievements.  The Stranger is one of several Ozon features to have been shot by the Belgian cinematographer Manu Dacosse, whose other recent work includes Fabrice du Welz's Maldoror and Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani's Reflection in a Dead Diamond.

After Maldoror's rather muted colour palette and Reflection in a Dead Diamond's kaleidoscopic visuals, The Stranger sees Dacosse shooting in crisp black and white—and it seems almost inconceivable that this tale, set in sun-drenched French Algeria, could be presented any other way.  For the main character, Meursault (Benjamin Voisin), is a man drained of all colour, and his indifference to life (and death) leads him to kill an unnamed Arab man.  While his girlfriend Marie (Rebecca Marder) hopes for no worse than a light custodial sentence, Meursault's reaction could be viewed as the ultimate Gallic shrug.  At his trial, he makes little effort to explain the mitigating circumstances that led to his actions.

Late in the film, Swann Arlaud appears as a priest who visits Meursault in his cell.  The prisoner’s nihilistic response to the clergyman’s pleas is all too predictable—but still fascinating.  Yet there’s something slightly off about the scene; it leaves the film feeling a little unbalanced, as though it exists largely to accommodate Arlaud—one of the finest actors of his generation.  One wonders whether a lesser-known performer might have served the film better, with the sequence shortened.  Still, this is of little consequence when the performances are this good.  The Stranger remains a riveting film and a rigorous adaptation—one that sees Ozon cut cleanly to the dark heart of Camus’ knotty, evasive text.

Darren Arnold

Images: Carole Bethuel

The Second Act (Quentin Dupieux, 2024)

The prolific filmmaker Quentin Dupieux, whose movies include Rubber, Smoking Causes Coughing, Daaaaaalí! and Deerskin, has developed a highly singular style; his work often blends black humour, absurdity and surrealism as it deals with thought-provoking themes.  Dupieux's films are known for their originality and often challenge conventional narrative storytelling, and his latest effort, the elaborately structured The Second Act, certainly upholds the director's reputation as a purveyor of quirky, offbeat fare.  Dupieux seemingly has no trouble attracting big-name actors, with his previous films featuring stars including Jean Dujardin, Anaïs Demoustier, Gilles Lellouche, and Adéles Haenel and Exarchopoulos.

True to form for Dupieux, The Second Act features a stellar cast, one led by Louis Garrel, Vincent Lindon and Léa Seydoux.  Garrel's David is first seen imploring his friend Willy (Raphaël Quenard, best known as the title character in Dupieux's Yannick) to make a play for the clingy Florence (Seydoux), who happens to be besotted with David.  David and Willy are heading to the restaurant of the title, where they plan to meet with Florence and her father Guillaume (Lindon); as they walk, David mentions that they're being filmed, and it seems that the pair are actors in a movie.  Upon arrival at The Second Act, David, Willy, Guillaume and Florence sit at a table where a jittery extra (Manuel Guillot) attempts to pour wine.

As the overwhelmed extra—whose name is Stéphane—persists with his lamentable efforts, the film's stars do their best to get him to relax, with little success, and the episode ends badly—very badly.  But just as we think we've got a grip on proceedings, Dupieux pulls the rug from under us again, and it's revealed that these scenes with Stéphane are also part of the film-within-a-film, which, in a world first, is being directed entirely by AI.  The Second Act is a film for which the label meta-textual is woefully insufficient; it ends much like it begins, with two men walking along a road, but by this stage we are even less sure of who or what we've been watching (in this sense, it recalls Leos Carax's confounding Holy Motors).

The self-reflexive The Second Act includes several statements concerning the ephemeral nature of cinema—although Florence vehemently argues in favour of what she sees as the essential service provided by actors—and the film itself deftly illustrates such claims.  While both Deerskin and Rubber also used the Droste effect conceit, The Second Act is much more pointed in this regard.  Dupieux's slippery film is as inconsequential as it is entertaining, a shaggy dog story in which the director and his game cast have a great deal of fun as they highlight the artifice of filmmaking; this wickedly clever divertissement stands as one of the most effective examples of mise en abyme cinema in recent years.

Darren Arnold

Images: Diaphana

IFF Rotterdam 2026: Four Films in Festival Competition

Yellow Cake (Tiger Competition) follows a group of scientists trying to eradicate the deadly Aedes aegypti mosquito—the vector of dengue fever—through a secret experiment codenamed Yellow Cake. Using uranium extracted from the region, the project aims to sterilise the mosquitoes and contain the spread of the disease. The nuclear physicist Rúbia Ribeiro (Rejane Faria) acts as the link between the Brazilian military command and the project’s controversial leader, Bill Raymond (Spencer Callahan), whose urgency to see results leads him to disregard safety protocols. When the experiment fails, it is up to Rúbia to join forces with local prospectors to reverse the imminent catastrophe.

Butterfly (Big Screen Competition) centres on half-sisters Diana and Lily, who grew up as the only resident children at a all-inclusive resort on Gran Canaria, where their uninhibited mother, Vera, worked as a Star Tour hostess. Twenty-five years later, they have both created distance from the island and from each other: Diana works at a kindergarten in a small town in Norway, while Lily is a retired model and nightlife figure in Hamburg’s art scene. Now they are forced to return to the island to deal with their mother’s sudden death in the Canarian mountains. The reunion sets them on a headlong journey into their past and towards the hidden heart of the tourist island.

Luxembourgish co-production Projecto Global (Big Screen Competition) takes us to 1980s Lisbon, where the Carnation Revolution and the euphoria of freedom belong to the past. The country faces turbulent times: factories close, workers raise barricades, and politics dominates every street corner. Amid cigarette smoke, music, prostitutes, and sailors, people share shattered dreams and uncertain hopes. As social tensions deepen, the far-left armed group FP25 emerges. Its members follow a path of no return, living underground lives built on bank robberies, attacks, friendship, family, and love—all under the perpetual threat of prison or death. As they abandon everything and everyone except each other, they begin to lose their own identities, while an officer fighting against them faces a dilemma of his own.

White Lies (Bright Future Competition) tells the story of its director, Alba Zari, who uses her art to explore a past that does not belong to her. Born into the controversial Children of God sect, she has no memories of her childhood. Driven by a desire for truth, Alba embarks on a painful confrontation with her mother and grandmother to understand the reasons that led them to join the cult and the painful consequences of those choices. A touching and intimate portrait of a search for identity, White Lies is a journey that delves deep into family wounds. The film had its world premiere in Italy at the Festival dei Popoli, where it won four awards.

Source/images: Alibi Communications

International Film Festival Rotterdam (29/1/26–8/2/26)

IFFR 2026 will open with the world premiere of Providence and the Guitar by João Nicolau.  Inspired by a short novel by Robert Louis Stevenson, the film follows Leon and Elvira, two performers trying to keep their stage careers afloat.  Providence and the Guitar also marks the acting debut of Salvador Sobral, one of Portugal's most beloved musicians and the winner of Eurovision 2017.  The festival will close with the world premiere of Rémi Bezançon's crime comedy Bazaar (Murder in the Building), starring Laetitia Casta, Gilles Lellouche and Guillaume Gallienne.  The film follows an enthusiastic Hitchcock scholar who becomes convinced that the neighbour across the courtyard has murdered his wife.

At the heart of IFFR, the Tiger Competition showcases emerging voices from across the globe, with 12 world premieres from filmmakers who reshape the familiar from within, adjusting perspectives to reveal what often goes unnoticed.  The 12 titles in the Big Screen Competition—which is dedicated to supporting the distribution of nominated films in the Netherlands—examine how lives are shaped by inherited stories, with many of the films revisiting the past to understand its pull on the present.  The winning filmmaker(s) will be awarded €15,000 in prize money; additionally, IFFR offers €15,000 to the Dutch distributor that acquires the winning film's distribution rights, incentivising local distribution.

The Displacement Film Fund was established to champion and fund the work of displaced filmmakers, or filmmakers with a proven track record in creating authentic storytelling on the experiences of displaced people.  An initiative spearheaded by actor, producer and UNHCR Global Goodwill Ambassador, Cate Blanchett, the pilot scheme was announced at the 2025 edition of the festival and the Hubert Bals Fund is the Management Partner.  Five short film production grants of €100,000 each were bestowed to Maryna Er Gorbach (Ukraine), Mo Harawe (Somalia-Austria), Hasan Kattan (Syria), Mohammad Rasoulof (Iran) and Shahrbanoo Sadat (Afghanistan), who will premiere their completed works at IFFR 2026.

Vanja Kaludjercic, Festival Director at IFFR, said: "The 2026 edition of IFFR unites new voices and returning artists whose works explore belonging, reinvention, humour, fear, beauty and the persistent human effort to understand our place in a changing world.  We're also delighted the festival will open with João Nicolau's Providence and the Guitar—a generous and witty film which places the present alongside echoes of the past—while Rémi Bezançon's Bazaar (Murder in the Building) will close the festival with style, intelligence and a sense of fun.  Across the programme, we hope every audience member will find a film that speaks to them—or challenges them—in a meaningful way.”

Source: IFFR

Images: THE PR FACTORY / Carole Bethuel

Happy New Year!

All the best for 2026!