LFF 2026: Let Them Be Seen (Nolitha R. Mkulisi, 2026)

The Xhosa‑speaking Eastern Cape of South Africa carries a distinctive rhythm shaped by its landscapes, languages, and long political memory.  Rolling hills give way to villages where isiXhosa is not just spoken but lived—woven into poetry, communal rituals, and everyday negotiations of identity.  It's a region marked by resilience: the birthplace of towering political figures, the site of fierce anti‑colonial resistance, and a place where traditions like cattle‑keeping still anchor community life.  Yet the province is also defined by movement, with many residents navigating the pull between rural homesteads and urban opportunity.

What emerges is a region that feels both rooted and restless, carrying forward a cultural confidence that continues to shape South Africa’s broader story.  Nolitha Refilwe Mkulisi's feature debut Let Them Be Seen, which played earlier this year at International Film Festival Rotterdam and screens at the BFI London Film Festival today and tomorrow, is a slippery experimental documentary set in Tapoleng, the Eastern Cape village where the director grew up.  As with fellow LFF 2026 title At Night, Let Them Be Seen finds itself in the Dare strand when it would be rather less surprising to see it housed in the Experimenta section.

Tapoleng is situated near the town of Sterkspruit and close to the Lesotho border, and, like many villages in the region, is characterised by its prevalence of churches—a result of Dutch Reformed Church missionaries greatly expanding their activities in the Eastern Cape from the mid-19th century onwards.  Mkulisi includes frequent shots of these edifices as she essays daily life in Tapoleng, whose residents now look beyond the church buildings that once provided sanctuary as apartheid raged on.  The film also casts its gaze on the village's large cattle population, some of whom return this interest with an inquisitive bovine stare.

Besides these recurring shots of cows and churches, Mkulisi employs a more obscure leitmotif in the form of SABC music show Jam Alley, which is celebrated by a group of brightly wigged women as they endeavour to re-enact moments from the programme.  Mkulisi uses a mind-boggling variety of formats as she captures the essence of this largely forgotten community, for whom the spaza shop serves as a social hub; the countless small interruptions endured by the store's owner as he explains Rastafarianism are almost a running gag in this singular hybrid documentary, which is at once fluid and discordant.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI

LFF 2026: Filipiñana (Rafael Manuel, 2026)

Colonial rule in the Philippines unfolded as a long, layered encounter that reshaped the archipelago's political and cultural landscape.  Spanish authority, beginning in the 16th century, brought Catholicism, new administrative structures, and a rigid social hierarchy that often clashed with deeply rooted local traditions.  Towns grew around churches and plazas, while tribute systems and forced labour pulled communities into the orbit of imperial demands.  Yet Filipinos continually negotiated, resisted, and adapted—preserving indigenous languages, asserting regional identities, and nurturing nationalist thought.

By the time American rule followed in 1898, the islands had already set the stage for modern struggles over sovereignty and cultural self‑definition.  Dutch co-production Filipiñana—which has the last of its four screenings at Film Fest Gent today before playing at the BFI London Film Festival on Saturday and Sunday—is a film in which the weight of Filipino history is almost palpable.  Rafael Manuel's feature debut is based on his eponymous short film from 2020; both films star Jorrybell Agoto as Isabel, a young woman working at an exclusive Manila country club, where she places golf balls on tees at the driving range.

In another sop to the egos of the course's wealthy patrons—none of whom are professional golfers—an all-female team of caddies are on hand.  While there is a drought in Metro Manila—and the country club workers are toiling away in sweltering temperatures—both the golf course and its clientele enjoy a seemingly endless supply of cool, refreshing water.  Isabel becomes intrigued by the club's reptilian president, Dr. Palanca (Teroy Guzman), who accidentally leaves behind a golf iron that Isabel is tasked with returning, triggering a tense walk through areas of the complex that are normally off-limits to golf course employees.

Manuel's film appears to be a formalist exercise, one whose immaculately-composed shots and sly digs at the class system are undermined by problematic pacing; the knowledge that the film's genesis lies in a 24-minute short is apt to fuel the opinion that the material has been laboriously stretched to feature length.  Dubious editing choices aside, there's much to admire about Filipiñana: Agoto makes for a suitably engaging lead, 100 Nights of Hero DoP Xenia Patricia's lensing is astonishing, and Manuel's adroitness in making the golf course a microcosm of Filipino society—both past and present—belies his relative inexperience.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI / Film Fest Gent

LFF 2026: At Night (Beatrice Gibson, 2026)

The late American poet Alice Notley's work feels like a continuous act of defiance against the limits poetry tries to place on itself.  Across decades, she carved out a voice that was at once intimate and insurgent, folding grief, feminism, myth, and everyday survival into sprawling, incantatory lines that refused neat containment.  Her poems often read like conversations overheard from another dimension—raw, restless, and fiercely protective of the inner lives women are told to quiet.  Notley's commitment to pushing past convention made her a lodestar for poets who see the page not as a boundary but as a site of ongoing rebellion, where language can be remade in the image of a life lived uncompromisingly.

Notley's work—particularly her epic poem The Descent of Alette—underpins Beatrice Gibson's feature debut At Night, which was presented at IFF Rotterdam's CineMart in 2024 and screens at the BFI London Film Festival on Sunday and Tuesday.  Gibson established herself as a filmmaker through several experimental shorts, including IFFR Tiger Award winner The Tiger's Mind, and it's mildly surprising to find that, for all its experimental form, At Night has been placed in the LFF's Dare strand.  That said, the film is a more accessible work than what is typically found in the festival's ever-fascinating Experimenta section.

True to its title, At Night is a nocturnal odyssey through a Paris in which the bulk of its residents appear to have turned in for the evening.  It's a wonderfully atmospheric backdrop against which a number of women voice their hopes and fears.  One such woman, filmmaker B—deftly played by Gibson herself—is visiting Paris to scout for locations for an upcoming project.  While in the French capital, B attempts to contact her old friend Didi (Diocouda Diaoune), who once worked for B as a childminder; Didi lives in Belleville—where B is looking at potential locations—but appears to have been ghosting B for quite some time.

Gibson's film, which is wonderfully photographed (in 16mm) by Mare's Nest director Ben Rivers, opens up to include the stories of other women, such as Sophie Robinson's poet, who, in one of At Night's most striking scenes, recites one of her works to a roomful of people.  It is safe to assume that Robinson—like Gibson and the other women featured in this slippery film—is playing a once-removed version of herself.  The poetry of Notley, who died during production, is heard via a voiceover she recorded especially for this project after she became too ill to fulfil her planned onscreen role.  As such, Notley is a ghostly, ethereal presence, one who always seems to hover around the edges of this beguilingly original piece of autofiction.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI

Formosa Beach (Julia de Simone, 2024)

More than 35 years ago, the late Huub Bals—creator and director of International Film Festival Rotterdam—began setting up what was then known as the Tarkovsky Fund, a body intended to support filmmakers in the developing world.  Following his death, the fund was renamed the Hubert Bals Fund, or HBF, and since its launch it has assisted in the production of countless critical hits, including Memoria, Monos and Japón.  Both IFFR and the HBF are involved in Julia de Simone's long-gestating feature debut Formosa Beach: an HBF grant was awarded to the project way back in 2014, with the finished film premiering at IFFR 2024.

Formosa Beach examines, inter alia, colonial history in Brazil, as seen through the eyes of Brazilian native de Simone, and the resulting film is a languid reflection on the vagaries of both time and memory.  The temporally fragmented narrative of Formosa Beach follows the journey of Muanza (Lucília Raimundo), a woman trafficked from the Kingdom of Kongo to Rio de Janeiro (while the Portuguese influence in Kongo was intricately linked with commerce, religion and politics, it was slavery that left an indelible mark).  In Brazil, Muanza meets fellow slave Kieza (Samira Carvalho), with whom she plots an escape.

The now-defunct Kingdom of Kongo encompassed parts of several present-day countries (Angola, DR Congo, Congo-Brazzaville, and Gabon); established in the late 14th century, the kingdom was a centralised state with a sophisticated governmental structure, and its wealth was mostly founded on nefarious trades (ivory, slaves).  Many Kongolese people like Muanza were forcibly taken to Brazil, where, despite the brutal conditions they had to endure, they contributed significantly to the country's culture; indeed, the influence of the Kongolese can be seen in several aspects of contemporary Brazilian life, including music and cuisine.

Julia de Simone's dedication to examining the legacies of slavery and colonialism—and their impact on current society—is obvious in a film in which the two strong, stoic protagonists are boxed in to both their environment and the film's Academy ratio.  Formosa Beach's back-and-forth narrative and critique of European imperialism combine in a way that recalls Bertrand Bonello's unsettling Zombi Child, an altogether more sophisticated picture.  De Simone's ambitious film is better in idea than execution: it works well enough as an aesthetically pleasing mood piece, yet its story feels both underpowered and undertold.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI

My Stolen Planet (Farahnaz Sharifi, 2024)

The Iranian revolution of 1979 led to the overthrow of the Shah's monarchy and the return from exile of Ruhollah Khomeini.  The insurrection marked a significant watershed for Iran, one which saw the start of both the Islamic Republic and Khomeini's decade-long stint as premier.  As the 1980s dawned, Iran's efforts to install a new political system based on Islamic principles caused fractious relations with other countries, particularly the US, with the Iran hostage crisis—a standoff that actually began before the official commencement of Khomeini's tenure—resulting in real diplomatic strain between the two nations.

The shadow of the revolution palpably hangs over essay film My Stolen Planet, which tracks the life of its Iranian maker, Farahnaz Sharifi, who was born in 1979.  The accident of Sharifi's birth year is largely what drives My Stolen Planet, as she recounts how her experience of pre-revolution Iran is limited to secondhand stories and distressed film reels (more on those later).  Through candid footage, we witness the duality of daily life in Tehran, where private freedom is juxtaposed with public oppression.  Part diary, part political commentary, My Stolen Planet is very much about memory, both individual and collective.

Sharifi's tale is one of curiosity and discovery as she navigates the intricacies of her identity in a society where questions are, in the main, neither welcomed nor valued.  She obsessively collects strangers' 8mm home movies—featuring birthday parties and so on—in the process assembling a collage of yesteryear that conveys an image of a quite different Iran.  Poignant excerpts from these films form the emotional core of My Stolen Planet, and the end credits include an appeal to help identify those featured; Sharifi laments how so many treasured recordings ended up discarded by owners fearful of the post-revolution government.

Yet it is these old films that allow the director to form a connection to the past, and she uses them to fill in the blanks of her own life, finding a commonality between herself and these ghosts.  My Stolen Planet may be steeped in a Resnaisian obsession with the Before Times, but it still has room for more recent events—such as Sharifi's mother's fight against Alzheimer's disease, and the civil unrest that followed the 2022 killing of Mahsa Amini, both of which, in very different ways, underline the great importance of remembering.  Amini's death inspired the title track of Waddinxveen band Within Temptation's Bleed Out, a song which, like Sharifi's film, is a quite unique meditation on identity, freedom and memory.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI

Raindance 2026: Modem / Gedoetjes

Tim James Brown's film Modem—which received its world premiere on Thursday at the Raindance Film Festival and will have an encore screening there on Wednesday—hangs its narrative on a digital detox holiday that sends a family to a remote house in the Swedish woods.  What could possibly go wrong?  Even if the bucolic setting didn't sound suitably apt for a horror film, consider the terrifying prospect of a trip away with a tech-free teen.  But Modem soon lets the digital world seep back into the family’s idyll when the hardware device of the title is discovered and plugged in; as you'd expect, it's a most nefarious piece of kit.

Once the modem connects to a nearby military comms tower, it triggers a chain of events in which the youngest child, Stig (Stig Lundström), vanishes from his cot while his dad, Michael (Josh Burdett), is supposed to be keeping an eye on him.  When Michael’s wife, Johanna (Amanda Renberg), and stepdaughter, Nora (Nika Tallroth), return from shopping, a frantic search begins, and Detective Bergman (Fredrik Gunnarson) soon arrives on the scene.  Bergman is familiar with the house—a well‑wrought prologue depicts a similar incident occurring 25 years earlier—but he decides to bring Michael in for questioning.

Michael's case isn't helped by the fact that he'd downed a few beers whilst on babysitting duty, and it's clear that both Nora and Johanna feel that Stig would still be here had Michael been more diligent.  Johanna thinks that a couple of passing backpackers (Tuva Alfredsson, Vanja Engström) may have abducted Stig, and the plot thickens when grisly footage of the hikers' apparent demise is found on Michael's laptop.  This is an admirable indie chiller, one whose brooding atmosphere owes much to the forest location, and Modem's reflections on the perils of new technology recall another Raindance 2026 title: the screenlife horror Serena.

Having recently screened in IFF Rotterdam's RTM strand, Dutch short Gedoetjes (English: Little Problems) returns to the big screen at Raindance, where it is showing tomorrow and on Tuesday alongside six other short films in the festival's Nova Express programme.  Chris de Krijger's impish film—which has a runtime of just 10 minutes—is made up of a series of vignettes, each depicting an everyday situation that soon develops into something far more absurd.  De Krijger always shoots the action from a distance, and this consistently funny, very human divertissement features some impressive wide-angled views of Rotterdam.

Darren Arnold

Images: Raindance / 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

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: 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

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

IFFR 2026: First Cinema Regained Titles Announced

International Film Festival Rotterdam has unveiled its first selections for Cinema Regained, IFFR’s realm for rethinking film history, which will once again present recent restorations and works that offer new perspectives on cinema’s past.  Celebrating their world premieres at IFFR 2026 as part of the Cinema Regained programme will be Hungarian avant-garde master Péter Lichter’s The Thing in the Coffin (2026)—an appropriated footage version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula—and Ryan A. White and A.P. Pickle’s doc Mickey & Richard (2026).

Among the restorations featured, audiences will discover Tracing to Expo '70 (1970)—a dazzling mix of musical, travelogue and mystery, which looks at the first World Exposition held in Asia—and Gerald Potterton’s Tiki Tiki (1971), a crazy meta-movie featuring animated monkeys making a live-action Soviet-style fantasy epic.  Additional restorations will come from Brazil, Mexico and the Czech Republic, while further attempts at making new sense of film history will be provided by directors from Germany, France and Italy.

Vanja Kaludjercic, Festival Director at IFFR, said: "Cinema Regained reflects the way IFFR approaches cinema: by returning to works and histories that deserve a more attentive place in the conversation.  Cinema Regained continues to open up new ways of reading the past, presenting restorations, archival discoveries and experiments that shift how we understand film history.  This programme offers audiences a perspective that is informed, curious and grounded in the belief that cinema’s past remains essential to how we read the present".

Source/images: IFFR

The North (Bart Schrijver, 2025)

The North, the new feature film from Dutch director-producer Bart Schrijver, has been shortlisted for the European Film Awards.  The film has received an incredible response in a very short space of time: this year alone, the film has enjoyed theatrical runs in Luxembourg, Belgium, and Schrijver’s native Netherlands—where the film has already been viewed by over 115,000 people, making it only the second Dutch film this year to achieve such viewing figures.  The film also hit the number one spot in the Dutch Arthouse Top 30 for seven weeks.  Alongside The North, the team created a documentary, True North.

A decade after being best friends and roommates, Chris (Bart Harder) and Lluis (Carles Pulido) set out on a 600-kilometre hike through the Scottish Highlands.  Following the West Highland Way and the Cape Wrath Trail, they spend 30 days together in nature, hoping to rekindle their once-powerful friendship.  But while Chris remains preoccupied with work and life back home, Lluis is determined to finish the trail to prove he can do it.  The solitude and silence of the Highlands forces them to confront harsh truths about themselves, their friendship, and what it truly means to stand still and listen.

Written and directed by Schrijver, who co-produced with Arnold Janssen and Tom Holscher, The North was made for a mere €75,000 with a cast and crew of only eight people.  The team at Tuesday Studio, the production company behind the film, originally planned to simply sell the film online on their own TVOD website; however, after a glowing four-star review from The Guardian, everything changed.  More glowing coverage followed, including a piece in De Standaard, and the ball kept rolling until it landed at the doorstep of the European Film Academy, who shortlisted the project in the Feature Film category.

Schrijver began his career while studying architecture.  Using his first short films as his film school, he directed five shorts in his first year as a fiction director.  Since making the leap from short films to feature-length projects proved challenging, he co-founded a new production company, Tuesday Studio, with Janssen and Holscher.  In 2022, he launched his first project with Tuesday Studio, Human Nature, a film based on his 700-kilometre hike in Arctic Norway.  Schrijver combines his love for nature with his passion for filmmaking; to date, he has created 12 films and has hiked more than 5000 kilometres.

Source/images: Polymath PR

The Deal (Jean-Stéphane Bron, 2025)

The Deal is a six-part TV series that tells the story of the 2015 US-Iran nuclear negotiations, which took place in the very neutral state that is Switzerland.  Focusing on Geneva-based chief of protocol Alexandra Weiss (Belgian actress Veerle Baetens), the show—the first two episodes of which screen today at the BFI London Film Festival—provides an engrossing insight into these sensitive diplomatic talks.  The entire series is directed by Jean-Stéphane Bron, and this material feels a particularly good fit for a filmmaker who became known for his political documentaries—including L'expérience Blocher—before branching into fiction.

Weiss is a sort of diplomatic factotum, and the early stretches of the show focus on her seemingly endless duties as she attempts to smooth the ground for the negotiations.  She's serious, measured, and does her utmost to remain unruffled—even when being talked down to by Fenella Woolgar's ghastly EU delegate.  It is difficult to imagine the rather inscrutable Alexandra having any kind of private life, but this all changes with the introduction of her ex, Iranian scientist-engineer Payam Sanjabi (Arash Marandi), who has been released from prison so that he can play a role in the discussions; suddenly, we see a different side to her.

Sanjabi's arrival demonstrates how the series deftly combines the personal with the political, an aspect of the show that is underlined by a fraught telephone call between the US Secretary of State (Juliet Stevenson) and her aging, ailing mother.  The ever-dependable Stevenson is good value in the part, and her scenes with her Iranian counterpart (Anthony Azizi)—who doesn't consider her his equal—crackle and fizz in a way that adds real dramatic heft to the proceedings.  There's also a notable role for André Marcon, an actor perhaps best known for his work with Jacques Rivette, including the epic two-part film Joan the Maid.

But The Deal is glued together by Veerle Baetens, who excels as the put-upon Alexandra.  She's an assured, magnetic presence, and one suspects that her recent experience behind the camera—her directorial debut, the Belgian-Dutch co-production Het smelt, won Best Flemish Film at last year's Magritte Awards—has helped her further refine her technique as a performer.  Baetens carries the series with this complex character, one who must always remain impartial as the often bullish participants—who appear more concerned with not losing face than reaching an agreement—constantly threaten to derail the negotiations.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI

John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office (2025)

Michael Almereyda and Courtney Stephens' documentary John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office, which was selected for this year's International Film Festival Rotterdam, continues its run on the fest circuit with screenings at the BFI London Film Festival, where it plays today and tomorrow as part of the Debate strand.  It's now been more than 30 years since David Lynch stepped in to save the production of Almereyda's black-and-white vampire flick Nadja—Lynch funded the entire film after the initial financing fell through—a witty, highly stylised work that brought its director into the arthouse spotlight.

Since then, Almereyda has continued making narrative features, several of which—including his most recent effort, the biopic Tesla—have starred Ethan Hawke, but he's also no stranger to documentary, having directed the likes of This So-Called Disaster, William Eggleston in the Real World and Escapes.  John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office, co-directed with Courtney Stephens (Invention, The American Sector), sees Almereyda once again embrace non-fiction as he and Stephens essay the strange tale of the dolphin-bothering neuroscientist of the title, whose work inspired a classic video game.

Lilly is best remembered for both his invention of the isolation tank and his attempts at establishing communication between humans and dolphins.  It is hard to say which of these projects was the more outlandish: the former has endured as a means for those seeking sensory deprivation, while the latter gained a lot of publicity yet yielded no notable legacy.  The received wisdom about dolphins is that they are highly intelligent mammals that possess advanced cognitive skills, but Lilly believed they were also capable of language acquisition, and conducted countless cruel experiments on these fine marine animals.

If floatation tanks and talking dolphins aren't sufficiently outré, also consider Lilly's LSD and ketamine-fuelled insistence that there was a cosmic entity—the Earth Coincidence Control Office, or ECCO, of the title—managing earth's inhabitants.  Lilly coasted through his life and career on the back of a seemingly bottomless trust fund, and died in 2001 at the age of 86.  What, if any, value can be placed on his crackpot theories is something Almereyda and Stephens appear to be on the fence about, yet this doesn't prevent John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office from being a hugely entertaining and engrossing 90 minutes.

Darren Arnold

Images: Festival Scope

Almayer's Folly (Chantal Akerman, 2011)

Almayer's Folly, directed by the late Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman and first released in 2011, is a highly atmospheric and contemplative film that examines, inter alia, the impact of colonialism.  Adapted from Joseph Conrad's eponymous debut novel, the film was Akerman's final narrative feature before her untimely death in 2015; during her lengthy career, Akerman made just one other literary adaptation, 2000's austere The Captive, which was loosely based on Marcel Proust's La Prisonnière.  Akerman took a similarly liberal approach when it came to translating Conrad to the screen, although Francis Ford Coppola's much-discussed Apocalypse Now remains an even more outré stab at the author's work.

Just as Coppola transposed Conrad's Heart of Darkness from the 19th-century Belgian Congo to 20th-century Vietnam, Akerman updates the author's 1895 novel to the 1950s.  Although shot in Cambodia, Akerman's film is set in Malaysia, where it follows the story of Dutch trader Almayer (Stanislas Merhar) and his mixed-race daughter Nina (Aurora Marion).  Almayer, trapped in a loveless marriage to local woman Zahira (Sakhna Oum), is clinging to fading hopes of finding gold deposits in the land that surrounds his riverside home (this building, as explained in the book, is the "folly" of the title).  Moreover, Zahira's adoptive father Lingard (Marc Barbé) is busy burning through the wealth earmarked for Almayer.

With all else failing, Almayer focuses on securing his daughter's future.  After some vague talk of a trip involving visits to Paris and London, Nina is packed off to a colonial boarding school, where it is hoped she will become more in tune with her European heritage; her absence only compounds Almayer's misery.  Merhar, who also starred in the aforementioned The Captive, delivers a well-judged performance as Almayer, capturing the title character's slide into madness as he struggles with both his flailing business and the painful separation from his cherished daughter; Belgian actress Marion brings a beguiling intensity to her role, perfectly embodying the dichotomy of a girl caught between two hugely contrasting worlds.

Almayer's Folly requires patience, and it takes some time for its brilliance to emerge; this demanding film is both elliptical and highly reflective of its director's formally rigorous methods.  Yet it is not inapt to suggest that Almayer's Folly would form a fine double bill with Apocalypse Now—whose redux version features Akerman favourite Aurore Clément—with Akerman's ice providing a counterpoint to Coppola's fire.  Conrad, whose works often hinge on what is left unsaid, proves an ideal fit for Chantal Akerman, with the economy of his storytelling neatly dovetailing with her languid, minimalist approach.  This late masterpiece from Akerman is an exemplary meditation on the death rattle of colonialism.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI