IFFR&rsquo;s trademark competition celebrates the innovative and adventurous spirit of up-and-coming filmmakers from all over the world.Still: Friends and Strangers

IFFR 2021

Salim Mourad

Photography, sex, reproduction and the power of minerals merge into one in this aesthetic alleviation of fear of the finite.

Using a combination of painterly images, form experimentation, mythical motifs and philosophical commentary, Agate mousse forms an aesthetic antidote to fear of the finite. Film frame, camera movement and narrative threads become circular in a film essay that constantly references itself and its maker, like a snake swallowing its own tail.

Competitions

Tiger Competition

Agate mousse

Juja Dobrachkous

A young model returns to the Georgian countryside, where a confrontation with her past offers hope for the future.

Young model Ariadna’s return to the village in Georgia where she was born to attend her grandmother’s funeral is a painful but liberating experience, as she is finally able to shake off the trauma of her past. A sensitive, atmospheric drama with a touch of poetry, captured in magnificent black-and-white.

Bebia, à mon seul désir

Queena Li

Chinese road movie with Western elements in crisp black-and-white about a woman, a lobster and a great sorrow.

In the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, a young woman encounters a lobster that will change her life. She came here to forget the pain, but in this road movie she first has to return the magical lobster to the lighthouse on Ming Island, more than a thousand kilometres away.

Bipolar

ismaël

Youssef Chebbi

Stylised, dark thriller about a young Tunisian woman leading a double life: a contemporary Medusa for the #MeToo era.

Young, silent Nada operates as an avenging angel in nocturnal Tunis. A dark thriller offering a stylised view of contemporary Tunisia, where a disillusioned generation clings onto hope in the wake of the Arab Spring. Featuring an electronic soundtrack reminiscent of Italian giallo films.

Black Medusa

Pascal Tagnati

Cross-section of life in a Corsican village where tradition is revered, observing the locals throughout one summer.

Corsican theatre-maker Pascal Tagnati’s debut film, set in a Corsican village in summer. The locals flirt, swim, party, chat and fight. Using a static camera, Tagnati observes the residents of a village where – despite individual differences – the sense of community is greatly revered.

I Comete − A Corsican Summer

Ainhoa Rodríguez

Mysterious, suggestive, often humorous drama about the suppressed needs of women in a small town in a depopulated rural part of Spain.

In a quiet Spanish village, gossip runs rife among the women when one of them leaves her husband. Maybe they too want to escape the choking patriarchal ties imposed by this traditional community. In this documentary-style drama, spiced up with magic realism and a dash of surrealism, nothing is quite as it seems.

Destello bravío

Taiki Sakpisit

Monochrome impressions reveal the traumas that keep an influential Thai family imprisoned in emotional paralysis.

Thailand’s eventful past 50 years seep through into this doom-laden, associative portrait of a troubled family with army and political connections. Past and present meld into one long nightmare built on psychological trauma and violence.

The Edge of Daybreak

Tim Leyendekker

Plato, dildos, an injected tulip: reconstruction of a troubling case by idiosyncratic cinephile and talent from Rotterdam, Tim Leyendekker.

Plato, dildos and an injected tulip meet in this layered work by an idiosyncratic filmmaker from Rotterdam, based on the disturbing Groningen HIV case whereby men were purposely injected with contaminated blood at parties. True, beautiful, courageous cinema with a hint of philosophy.

Feast

James Vaughan

A succession of awkward interactions involving two rudderless millennial protagonists results in a wryly comical presentation of contemporary solipsism.

Wry humour and a spiky narrative style characterise this portrait of rudderless millennials in search of something to hold on to. Twenty-somethings Ray and Alice lack little in life, and maybe this is their biggest problem. Awkward interactions at the intersection of the mundane and the absurd illustrate their struggles with reality.

Friends and Strangers

Itonje Søimer Guttormsen

A penetrating mix of parody and desperation, about a Norwegian woman and a critical play that simply refuses to become reality.

A young Norwegian theatre-maker tries to get her socially critical play ‘The White Inflammation’ produced, but everything is against her. Along the way, the film’s burlesque undertone transforms into a desperate clinging onto life. It’s difficult to make contact with what we perceive as reality.

Gritt

Marta Popivoda

The landscape gains a voice when elderly Sonja talks about being in the anti-fascist resistance and escaping from Auschwitz.

A beautiful song and a field of poppies, testaments to bygone bloodshed, start this unorthodox journey through Sonja’s memories. The friendly elderly lady fought the German occupiers as a partisan in Serbia and was a resistance member at Auschwitz.

Landscapes of Resistance

Nino Martínez Sosa

Sensory story of the Dominican messianic figure Papá Liborio and the community he inspired.

A poor Dominican farmer disappears during a hurricane and returns as a prophet. His commune soon arouses the authorities’ suspicions. Liborio tells the story from multiple perspectives of a movement that combines spirituality with the struggle for self-determination.

Liborio

Norika Sefa

Delicate, observational coming-of-age story about Kosovan teenager Venera, struggling to go her own way in a strongly patriarchal situation.

There’s little to do in the Kosovan village where teenager Venera lives. And even when there is, her father is unlikely to allow her to do it. With patience and precision, this film with a documentary feel shows how difficult it is to make your own choices when everyone is always interfering.

Looking for Venera

Madiano Marcheti

The death of a trans woman links three lives in Brazil’s agrarian heartland. An ingenious debut, bursting with visual flair.

While the body of a murdered trans woman lies in a soya field, Madiano Marcheti follows the lives of three people whose only connection to one another is her. With this assured debut bursting with visual surprises, he pays gentle homage to all lives and bodies that deserve to coexist.

Madalena

Karen Cinorre

Feminist fable in which Ana ends up in a war between the sexes. Unruly adventure film in a gritty dream world.

Feminist fable in which girls get the opportunity for revenge in a war on men – or are they innocent, overgrown boys in oversized uniforms? Feature debut director’s idiosyncratic adventure epic nod to Alice in Wonderland and Lord of the Flies. Dreamy and brutal.

Mayday

Vinothraj P.S.

A poverty-stricken father and son wander a southern Indian landscape where anger and frustration burn hotter than the sun.

A 13 km trek through the suffocating heat of the day brings the violent drunk Ganapathy and his son’s relationship to a head. They wander across a desolate landscape that symbolises their poverty and attendant emotional deprivation.

IFFR 2025
30 Jan – 9 Feb 2025