Constellations

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.” 

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

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.” — quote from the movie

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

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?” 

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

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

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

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

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