Constellations

This deeply personal documentary portrait captures several years in the life of the director’s ageing father, who, following the death of his wife, decided he would no longer hide his secret from his family or the outside world. As he expresses his perceived femininity, external symbols of womanliness – such as dresses, make-up and wigs – are no longer enough for him. He undergoes both a physical and social transition, which is succinctly expressed in the shot of Lilou riding a ladies’ bicycle, her hair and skirt flowing in the wind and her earrings shining. Such a radical step, however, has a profound impact on the lives of the other family members, forcing them to reflect on their relationships with one another and on how they see themselves in the world. “At the beginning, the purpose wasn’t to make a movie. I just wanted to film my father, because there was some difficulty in my family after my mother passed away.” — Tom FontenilleSource: International Documentary Association

Adelina, a young Georgian trans woman, spent eleven years locked away in her family home, where her parents hid her for fear of the hatred of a conservative society. It was only her escape to Vienna that brought her the freedom she longed for and the chance to devote herself to her love of dance. However, the ties to the past are hard to sever. As she gets used to her new life in exile on the outskirts of a foreign city, her mother back in Georgia faces harassment. Through compelling imagery and sound design, director Rati Tsiteladze brings to life the protagonist’s relationship with her family and her own body. In doing so, he delves beneath the surface of the trauma she has endured and shows just how difficult it can be to find a true home. “Ever since I was a child, I’ve wanted to be a dancer.”

The Geneva Conventions protect hospitals from military attacks. Yet according to Palestinian sources and the UN, more than 1,700 healthcare workers have been killed in Gaza over three years of war. Three American volunteer doctors venture here, to Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, operating under the threat of air strikes, during the ceasefire, and after it ends. Despite a persistent sense of futility amid the widespread devastation, they manage to save some patients. What they cannot heal, however, is public opinion or the political establishment back home in the US, where they must explain, over and over, through the media and in face-to-face meetings, what they have witnessed with their own eyes. “Institutions and companies are made up of people and those people change.” — Poh Si Teng, Screen DailySource

Sixteen-year-old Krzysztof Dymiński went missing in May 2023; the last traces of him lead to Gdańsk Bridge over the Vistula River, where he was captured on CCTV at half past five in the morning. It is there that one of the most closely followed cases in modern Polish history begins – a case that has sparked criticism of the police’s handling of the matter as well as a wave of solidarity across the country. However, this diving-themed procedural drama is above all a meditation on the story of Daniel, the father whose search has become his reason for living. Drones, underwater camera equipment and a boat have become an extension of his body, enabling him to reach deeper and further. He can thus search endlessly in the bottomless universe of coincidences and possibilities, in which anyone can get lost.“Daniel’s story moved me immensely, looking at him alone on that island, and the energy and the emotions he was putting into it, The Old Man and the Sea and Fitzcarraldo came to mind.” — Michał MarczakSource: International Documentary Association

A standard telephone scam turns into a therapy session the moment the artist, suffering from writer’s block, refuses to play the role of a passive victim. Instead of hanging up or mocking him, she offers the fake IT technician a glimpse into her own emotional emptiness and sense of burnout. Deliberate manipulation on both ends of the line gradually escalates into an intimate confession between two lonely strangers who are both victims of the same exploitative system. This short film essay on global inequality and the dark side of online vigilantism skilfully balances absurdity, sarcasm and tragedy.“Today, it is known that many so-called scam call centers are not just questionable workplaces. They are part of larger structures involving exploitation, forced labor, and human trafficking.”

This prison procedural completes the trilogy of films including Savage Flowers (2017) and In the Open (2017). This time, the director follows the jailers rather than the prisoners. Moving into student accommodation for six months, he films classes at France’s national prison service academy, seeking to enter the minds of hesitant students as they become instruments of power. This fascinating observational film presents prison as an ethical and philosophical problem. Through the collective protagonist of the student body, it reflects an entire institution that teaches both the rules for handling human material and ways to circumvent them. The problem with prison lies not in bad guards, but in the very nature of prison itself.   “Everybody who is in a position to have some power is able to abuse it.” — Montesquieu, quoted by one of the film’s protagonists

A Buddhist monk as an art installation or a walking sculpture. In the twelfth instalment of the walking films that he has been making since 2011, the Taiwanese director places his lifelong muse Lee Kang-sheng in San Sebastián, Spain, contrary to his eleventh film, which was shot in Jihlava. Step by step, movement by movement, inhalation after exhalation, the barefoot man with a shaven head and red robe cuts slowly through the tumult of a punk concert crowd or passes sgraffito façades. A mystical presence in the urban landscape, he connects the old and the new, the calm and the chaotic, the banal and the inward. Slowness is more than meditation: it is an act of rebellion, the art of coming to a halt in today’s world.“I had grown tired of making narrative films, and Lee’s slow walk gave me the idea of making something non-narrative, a form of pure visual expression. The way he walks is extraordinarily beautiful, and the idea of ‘slowness’ itself has great power.” — Tsai Ming- liang, Variety

We must leave behind what we love in order to find ourselves. So it is for Gabin Jourdel, who wants a different life than that of his parents – a butcher and farmer who have worked hard all their lives yet still struggle to make ends meet. This longitudinal portrait follows Gabin’s ten- year journey from an eight-year-old boy to a mature young man of eighteen, caught between loyalty to his family and freedom. The pastures of Artois in northern France form the backdrop to this coming-of-age story. Far from the chaos and pace of modern civilisation, the intoxicating beauty of the natural elements conceals the melancholy of a bleak timelessness, stagnation and disappearance. This intimate family chronicle explores both intergenerational conflict and the effects of globalisation on rural communities.“I begin to see Artois as a genuine film set, its inhabitants as living, novelistic characters. The Artois region is where I first envisioned becoming a filmmaker, and I pay particular attention to its working-class roots.” — Maxence Voiseux, The Hollywood Reporter

Palestinian director Kamal Aljafari returns to his parents’ home after a three-year absence and watches news reports on television from the heavily-shelled Gaza. He transforms news footage of destroyed houses, burnt-out cars and people searching for drinking water into a home video stripped of its original informative nature. He zooms in on gestures, faces and details in the background, and edits the sound so that not all Palestinian voices reach us. The constant emphasis on the mediated nature of one of the greatest humanitarian crises of recent decades highlights the fact that extensive media coverage of violence cannot prevent it from continuing.“The picture says what the story cannot.”

Every first Saturday of the month, members of the ultra-conservative religious movement, the Knights of the Immaculate Heart of the Virgin Mary, gather in Croatian town squares. The artist and activist Arijana Lekić-Fridrih is always there, too, until the police remove her, as women are barred from entering. This fascinating observation captures the clash of opposing forces in public space, as well as the coexistence of two female archetypes – the holy mother, who smiles quietly from a sacred image, and a goddess in a red dress, who uses her performance to fight against patriarchal violence against women. “All art is a political statement.” — Arijana Lekić-Fridrih Source

In collaboration with botanist Stefano Mancuso, Viktor Kossakovsky explores the lives of trees and the forces that threaten them. In close-up footage, the camera searches for traces of bark beetles before rising above the treetops, accompanied by classical music, and surveying forests devastated by a windstorm. Human interventions, however, are no less destructive. While Mancuso explains to children how trees perceive their surroundings and communicate with one another, the film follows a towering spruce from the mountains to St Peter’s Square, where it will serve as a Christmas decoration. The exploration of plant life’s diversity thus confronts the unquestioning ease with which humans subordinate it to their own needs.“While art may be powerless to halt the conflicts unfolding around us and cannot stop the bullets of today, I believe that telling stories rooted in empathy can plant the seeds for a more peaceful future.” — Viktor Kossakovsky, The Hollywood Reporter

One of Denmark’s most iconic social experiments began in 1971, when hundreds of young people moved into an abandoned military base in Copenhagen and established Christiania, a parallel society with its own set of rules. Now Karl Friis Forchhammer is moving there, seeking to understand the story of his parents, who lived there until he was born. He asks himself how one can be tolerant while at the same time preventing both external and internal destructive social phenomena. Collective idealism and the rhetoric of individual freedom attracted drug gangs and violence. A portrait of a parallel society offers a crash course in survival in a community where social consensus, rather than majority rule, prevails.“Residents decide on issues that affect the area, with the central principle being that a consensus has to be reached, rather than deciding matters by a majority vote.” — Leo BarracloughSource: Variety

Inspired by Pablo Neruda’s poetry collection The Book of Questions, Finnish visual artist Heidi Piiroinen turns her attention to the materiality of 16mm film itself. Using a chemical technique known as mordançage, she etches the film strip, lifting layers of emulsion to create veil-like, ever-changing textures. The fluid imagery gives tangible form to river currents, deltas and wetlands. Water emerges as a living organism with a memory of its own, its flow echoing the passage of blood through the circulatory system. Ceaseless movement becomes a metaphor for human existence.   “Why do the waves ask me the same questions I ask them?” 

Ingeborg Bachmann, one of the most prominent German-language poets and writers, began revealing her literary talent at the age of twelve. Her meteoric rise to popularity, linked to her time in Berlin and involvement in the literary circle Gruppe 47, landed her on the cover of Der Spiegel. Her life was shaped by prominent male figures, including Hans Werner Henze, for whom she wrote librettos, and Max Frisch, with whom she lived in Rome for several years. Actress Sandra Hüller, her admirer and guide, leads us through a meditation on this extraordinary woman and her troubled life. Drawing on fragments of poems and novels, she lays bare the tragic fate of an artist beset by hardship and doubt, and determined to die. “Early this morning I slumped into the rocking chair and found myself staring at the wall, where a crack had appeared; it must be an old crack that’s now widening a little because I’m constantly staring at it.” — Ingeborg Bachmann

In a world full of borders, the film presents art as a realm in which movement from place to place is almost unbelievably easy. This experimental found-footage documentary brings together excerpts from films of various origins, all of which explore the experience of exile. Characters of different genders, skin colours and cultural backgrounds take turns speaking, reflecting on feelings of uprootedness, the search for identity and their invisibility in the eyes of mainstream society. The universality of this existential condition is underscored by the fact that, although they speak different languages, they seem to share a single language of sorrow and hope.“Languages are living organisms, each of which carries within itself an entire universe.” — Lost for Words, a lecture-performance by Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson Source

An illustration from the 1685 treatise Oculus Artificialis Teledioptricus recalls a time when vision was understood as an active ray emanating from the eye. Visual artist Gregor Eldarb takes up this idea in an analogue experiment. Using a magnifying glass, sunlight, a magnet and an oily liquid with magnetic properties, he creates crystalline structures and amorphous landscapes within the camera’s lens. Combined with a digital display and Stefan Nemeth’s minimalist score, this exploration of the human gaze becomes a compelling spectacle in which historical notions of vision clash against today’s fascination with glowing screens.   “Like membranes, similitudes flutter through the air, and wherever they are carried, they are evident in the canyons.” — Johann Zahn, The Long Distance Artificial Eye, or Telescope

Deep in the Arctic permafrost lies humanity’s collective memory. A global memory bank is housed in an abandoned coal mine on Svalbard, three hundred metres below the surface. This intimate, hypnotic audiovisual essay reflects on humanity’s attempt to defy its own transience. Amid a monumental landscape of ice, chillingly desolate and melancholically endless, physical and digital records of human existence await discovery a thousand years from now. By then, we may no longer be here. The film forms part of a project that also includes a web app and presents the landscape as an archive or an intermedial map of texts, images, knowledge and ideas.“The Arctic contains archetypes that are a way of understanding the narrative of change on a planetary scale.”

On the outskirts of the Cambodian capital, a luxury residential complex is going up. Yet hardly anyone lives there. Instead of the paradise promised by estate agents, a ghost town is emerging. Cinematographer Ivan Marković’s feature-length narrative debut contrasts the workers, who build skyscrapers in the sweltering heat and sleep within the buildings’ concrete bowels, and a lonely woman in a vast, sterile flat. Through geometrically precise observational shots and minimalist dialogue, the film unfolds a reflection on modern property development projects, which fail to create a sense of home and human connection, but merely deepen isolation and the social divide.“Promised Spaces explores how architecture embodies social segregation, isolating people across class divides.” — Ivan Marković, The Hollywood Reporter Source: Cannes 2026 ACID Film Trailer 'Promised Spaces' (Exclusive)

In 2002, a group of cheerleaders fainted en masse at a secondary school in North Carolina. However, this fifteen-minute film does not attempt to reconstruct the mysterious incident. Using found footage from the internet, it instead dissects the myths and rituals of American high schools. The whispers of adolescent voices, oppressive ambient sounds and deliberately distorted images of girls’ bodies in prescribed poses reveal layers of latent, gender-based violence. This Lynchian collage of fragments from collective memory frames the high school girls’ breakdown primarily as a form of physical resistance against the relentless demands and expectations of the system.“High schools remain the birthplace of a gendered, formatted, hierarchical world. (…) What I was interested in was how this soft power, these ordinary images deeply engraved in our collective imagination, were reinvested and distorted.” — Lilith Grasmug, from an interview for FID Marseille.

Johanna works in a luxury watch factory in Geneva. Her wife has just left for an extended period to visit relatives in Mexico, summer is in full swing, and Johanna is unsure how to spend her time. One day she finds a flyer offering to scrap old cars for free, and she begins to wonder what she might do with the Volkswagen Beetle rusting away in her garage. This staged documentary about the life of a transgender woman takes us on a thrilling ride towards fulfilling personal desires in the face of trauma and fear – which might even mean entering a car race in a vehicle you’ve repaired yourself. “When Johanna talks about her life, you immediately imagine cinema.” — Céline Carridroit Source: Variety

Erik Shirai enters the insular world of Japanese sumo, following four wrestlers – from a teenage newcomer to a champion whose body bears the marks of years of extreme strain. While a bout may end in seconds, preparing for it takes a lifetime. Carefully composed images of ritual and training alternate with moments of exhaustion, doubt and pain. Childhood dreams are likewise set against the price that these men now pay to fulfil them. This portrait of a traditional sport rooted in discipline and self-control reveals an unrelenting tension between spiritual calling and physical sacrifice. “As I got deeper and deeper, making the film, I realized that there are so many misconceptions about sumo.” — Erik Shirai, The Hollywood ReporterSource: 'Sumo: Spirit Weighs Nothing' Doc Film Clip, Interview About Japan

NASA’s first space station was called Skylab, and three crews took turns aboard it over a total of 24 weeks in 1973 and 1974. The final crew made history, among other things, as the first astronauts ever to go on strike. Given the sensitive nature of the source material, the film takes the form of a documentary reconstruction, with actors performing on makeshift sets and a narrative structured by staged recreations of communications between Skylab and mission control. This only heightens the oppressive atmosphere of a workplace where people in a demanding profession are deliberately pushed beyond their limits.“For me, living is not just surviving. Living is having a life.” — Graeme ArnfieldSource: Business Doc Europe

Twenty-five years have passed since the war in Kosovo, yet Mitrovica’s Albanian majority and Serbian minority still do not speak to one another. The ruins of houses left unrepaired since the war, decadent poems about dying mothers and isolated young figures rooted in a landscape frozen by conflict speak of the past and of silence. Yet a blossoming cherry tree insistently grows through this hushed emptiness, its growth a subversive defiance of history’s course and human will, its scent intoxicating in the lyrical sunset. But history does not end in kitsch: the image breaks apart into a jumble of pixels until it loses all meaning. The void will only be filled by the future, which brings new meanings.“The main obstacle while filming was the lack of trust between the communities, which he [Marko Grba Singh] eventually used to his advantage because, he explained, ‘the film is about the lack of communication’.”— Xhorxhina Bami, Balkan Insight

Guillermina and Belinda Statz are nine-year-old cousins who cannot wait to grow up. Childhood imagination marks the beginning of a twenty-five-year collaboration with photographer and filmmaker Alessandra Sanguinetti, who follows their lives from 1999 into adulthood. This intimate longitudinal portrait, reminiscent of a family chronicle, forms part of a multimedia project encompassing the documentary, a series of photography books and exhibitions. It offers a mesmerising meditation on the lives of girls, women and mothers, telling an alternative history of rural Argentina, where patriarchal tradition holds sway. “It was really organic. I did not want to make a project about two women growing up. I just knew them and wanted to be with them.” — Alessandra Sanguinetti, Variety

In his third cinematic guide, Slavoj Žižek approaches utopias through their apparent opposite: images of oppression, revolt and the end of the world. Drawing on psychoanalysis, Marxism and mischievous humour, he dissects Apocalypse Now, Blade Runner and Melancholia, inhabiting recreated scenes from these films. Film clips alternate with footage of contemporary conflicts and political speeches, in which fiction finds unsettling echoes. This associative essay explores how easily resistance can become part of the very system it opposes. Žižek locates the possibility of genuine change in a willingness to relinquish comforting illusions – including those that offer us a vision of a better world. “I structured the film to put the apocalypse in the middle, in order to think beyond the notion of the end.” — Sophie Fiennes, Venezia News

At a faded resort with swimming pools, palm trees and halls adorned with crystal chandeliers, several hundred older men and women have gathered for a longevity conference to swallow handfuls of pills, work out and attend lectures on extending their lives. Joshua Oppenheimer captures their ageing bodies in silent, static compositions, interspersed with close-up images of organisms under a microscope. These tiny creatures struggle to survive, much like the ageing people beneath the harsh Californian sun. Meticulously composed yet unsettling, the film peers into a world where the fear of one’s own mortality dissolves into a collective illusion of immortality.   “The Revolution Against Death is my poem about these fears, about mortality, capitalism, desperate denial – and our universal longing for communion and love.” — Joshua Oppenheimer (Interaction)

Violence against women is a sensitive subject in itself, particularly in view of the psychological trauma suffered by the victims of these horrific acts. Nevertheless, three female filmmakers decide to make a radical artistic and civic gesture. Recordings of anonymous testimonies by rape survivors serve as the scripts for scenes in which the filmmakers reenact the assaults from the victims’ perspectives. With the perpetrators absent and the immersion growing increasingly intense, the staged experiences begin to bear a terrifying resemblance to the real ones. An experience that can neither be fully understood nor simulated speaks to us through the film’s participants in the language of visceral bodily reactions and genuine human emotions. “It was always with me. The desire to break the silence.” — Mariia Lapidus, Rephrase Mag Source

This short documentary by Laura Poitras and Rachel Lauren Mueller captures raids by the US immigration agency ICE in Minneapolis and the neighbourhood resistance networks that are springing up to protect vulnerable communities. Footage from dashcams and mobile phones is complemented by visualisations of detentions and deportations. The use of horror film conventions captures the experience of a city where an ordinary journey to work can be interrupted by a violent raid by masked agents. Concealing the identities of the protagonists highlights the risks involved in filming, as well as in civil disobedience itself. This testimony to state violence is thus also a portrait of solidarity that turns the gaze against those who abuse power. “The use of concealing the identities of the protagonists becomes also part of the kind of how the film communicates the risks involved.” — Laura Poitras, The Hollywood ReporterFoto: Tim Evans; Jack Califano.

Some families have lived on Mount Sinjajevina for generations, raising livestock and producing, as one of the film’s protagonists claims, “the best cheese”. Above all, however, they feel a deep connection to the landscape, which lies within a protected natural area. The Montenegrin government’s decision to establish a military training ground on the mountain therefore meets with fierce resistance from the local population. A charismatic and unconventional local farmer emerges as the leader of the protests, which gain support across the country. This poetic documentary, blending drama with everyday life, tells the story of this woman, whose life has been marked by hardship, and that of her stepdaughter. “I’m interested in telling a story through light, atmosphere, and sound.” — Bijlana Tutorov, Sundance Institute Source

A female figure in a white dress walks across a stretch of living earth that seems at times to float on the waves, resembling a forgotten wreck, a dead whale or a fallen monumental sculpture. Fierce winds rage through this shimmering, almost lunar landscape of elegant, rounded forms; at times rain pours down, at others sunlight beats upon it. The central question is: who is she, where is she going, and what is she carrying in that large white sack on her back? Director Viktor Kossakovsky’s black-and-white minimalism moves between an audiovisual poem, a record of a particular artistic performance and a kinetic meditation connecting humanity with the cycle of life and death in the oceans.“I’m not using many words in my movies, I’m trying to use cinema language. I’m trying to use pictures. A picture alone talks most of the time. Our eyes are unbelievable computers. We are able to look at someone and read that other person. This is why I don’t understand why cinema, specifically documentary cinema, doesn’t use this factor. We understand the world not through voiceovers and talking heads. It’s not through words. We understand the world around us through looking.” –– Viktor Kossakovsky, (The Hollywood Reporter)

We owe the speedy delivery of food and electronics to an army of exhausted people who face extreme heat and the risk of being sacked due to work-related injuries. In the United States, many of them have lost their patience. Out on the streets and during strike pickets outside Amazon and UPS warehouses, two-time Oscar winner Barbara Kopple captures the open conflict between New York’s couriers, drivers, warehouse workers and their corporate bosses. This raw account of the impact of algorithms on the labour market and workers’ lives clearly demonstrates why, in the era of the gig economy, trade union solidarity remains one of the few ways to effectively counter the pressure exerted by multinational corporations. “I found that these are people who are not going to lay down or allow people to walk all over them from UPS, from Amazon and from the deliveristas. They were strong, they were going to fight the best fight that they could, whether they won or they lost certain things.” — Barbara Kopple, The Hollywood Reporter Source: Barbara Kopple on Her New Labor Documentary, 'Union Town'

It is painful enough simply to have to leave one’s place of origin, as was the case of Ali Al Azhari in 1948 during the displacement of Palestinian villages following the establishment of the State of Israel. It can be even more harrowing when there is nowhere to return to, as settlement in question no longer exists. In this exploratory documentary, Ali, accompanied by the director and the cameraman, sets out after decades on a journey back to the site of the former village of Saffuriya, where, although no people live there any longer, life otherwise thrives in abundance. Ali can name the biological species of every plant, every tree and every bush. He touches them all and tastes them. They are his old acquaintances. “If some people see themselves as a fly on the wall, I see myself as a fly in the soup!” — Avi MograbiSource: Cineaste