IFFR 2010

Paz Fábrega

A young Costa Rican couple on holiday discover one evening a seven-year-old girl who has run away. The next morning she has disappeared.

A young Costa Rican couple on holiday discover one evening a seven-year-old girl who has run away, yet the next morning, when they want to take her back to her camping parents, she has disappeared again. This leads to a confrontation between two women of different ages and social status in a spot that is ostensibly paradise.

VPRO Tiger Awards Competition

Agua fría de mar

Pedro González-Rubio

Unusual film in an unusual location: the Mexican coral reef Banco Chinchorro, where grandfather, father and five-year-old son spend their days fishing for crabs and snappers. In a surging rhythm, Alamar shows that nature does not always form a stark contrast to cultivated humans.

Alamar

Inoue Tsuki

A catholic nun, played by the musician Rei Shibakusa, gets confused around the age of forty about her emotions and sexuality, as a result of her encounters with three very different men. Maker of the energetic The Woman Who Is Beating the Earth this time chose a more thoughtful style.

Autumn Adagio

Martijn Maria Smits

The young and talented director Smits operates both literally and metaphorically on the terrain of the Walloon brothers Jean-Luc and Pierre Dardenne with a very realistic-looking social portrait of a family on the seamy side of life in Seraing, where the Dardennes always worked.

C'est déjà l'été

Ben Russell

A reflection on the history of Surinamese migrants and slaves by one of the most prominent experimental film makers of our time, in thirteen takes each lasting ten minutes. He follows two brothers from the outskirts of Paramaribo via forest paths, goldmines and rivers to a Marron village.

Let Each One Go Where He May

Nikolay Renard

Yelena Renard

The story of a complex relationship between an overbearing mother and her obese, forty-year-old son who still lives at home. Yelena and Nikolay Renard, a new, promising voice in Russian cinema, made fiction out of a real life story, using a very realistic style in which shots are sometimes turned into still-lifes.

Mama

Tsubota Yoshifumi

A special, exuberantly designed biopic about a Japanese manga artist, his muse Miyoko who regularly posed nude and the Tokyo artists' district where they lived in the 1970s. The young, unsuccessful artist suffering manga delusions clings obsessively to his girlfriend and the bottle.

Miyoko

Anocha Suwichakornpong

A simple story about the hesitant overtures between a bitter invalid and his new nurse is the prelude to a hallucinogenic meditation about our place in the universe. As impressive and mysterious as life itself.

Mundane History

Charlotte Lim Lay Kuen

Intimate study of the mutual dependence between a slovenly hairdresser and her insecure teenage daughter. Not melodrama, but a brave experiment that expresses complex feelings primarily in pictures.

My Daughter

Michael Noer

Tobias Lindholm

Feature debut by Lindholm and Noer about Rune, in his 20s, who tries to survive in a heavily guarded Danish prison. Mercilessly oppressive picture of prison culture with its strict pecking order, violent codes of honour and secret contracts.

Sophie Deraspe

A young Canadian woman wants to know what people really need in the last moments of their lives. In a restrained way, without any false sentimentality, the film evokes grand questions about the things that are important in life and the strange intimacy between caregivers and the dying.

Les signes vitaux

Levan Koguashvili

Sober Georgian drama about Checkie, a jobless and penniless junkie, is a reflection of a generation brought up in the soviet style who were around the age of twenty when the Soviet Union fell, and incapable of adapting to all of the socio-political and economical changes. They are now in their late thirties and early forties and are referred to as the lost generation.

Street Days

Yang Heng

Successful Chinese example of minimalist cinema combines beautiful, very sharp HD images without camera movements with a story about a tragic relationship between a tattooed gangster and a hesitant girl suffering the pains of unrequited love.

Sun Spots

Veiko Õunpuu

Veiko Õunpuu’ second film (after Autumn Ball) is a parable on the new, wolf-like capitalism in Eastern Europe with its compassionless capitalist rules and rulers. Shot in beautiful black and white, Õunpuu’s vision is provocative and dark, but also very diverting with his use of black comedy.

The Temptation of St. Tony

Sophie Letourneur

It's hectically busy on the sofa of the students Pam and Manon. They do what girls that age always prefer to do: talk, smoke, drink, chat, party. But of course there is also a more mature reality, in one of the freshest French debut films in recent years.

IFFR 2025
30 Jan – 9 Feb 2025