Nine new films, presented to a film-loving audience jury. The winner receives a Dutch cinema release and TV broadcast by VPRO.

IFFR 2020

Marco Berger

Compact drama about a 15-year old boy who receives a video of him having sex with another boy.

15-year old homosexual Ezéquiel’s sexual awakening rapidly lands him in a moral dilemma. Compact, conspicuously subdued drama by Argentinian director Marco Berger, who won the Berlin festival's Teddy Award for <strong>Ausente</strong> in 2011.

Voices

Big Screen Competition

El cazador

Ágnes Kocsis

Can love save Éva from a world that is making her sick, or will she have to stay in her sterile apartment forever?

Éva lives cut off from the outside world in her sterile blue apartment. She's allergic to just about everything. Are her allergies caused by a polluting multinational corporation, or is she so sensitive and vulnerable she's making herself ill? A science fiction love story that explores the ambiguity of the modern world.

Eden

Sophie Letourneur

A famous pianist is unexpectedly pregnant, thanks to her over-controlling husband. This raw comedy bends genders in unexpected, weird ways.

Thanks to her over-controlling husband, a famous and career-minded pianist unexpectedly becomes pregnant. The event changes the dynamics of their relationship. What starts out as an unnerving film on toxic masculinity morphs into a raw, wacky comedy about womanhood, fusional couples and classical music.

Énorme

Braden King

An empathetic portrait of economic decline and spiritual redemption in a rural American mining town where the drug trade has become part of the social fabric.

An empathetic portrait of economic decline and spiritual redemption in a rural American mining town where the drug trade has  become part of the social fabric. Drugs dealer and carer for the elderly Cole Freeman is caught in a dilemma: his job contributes to a sense of solidarity, while his sideline devastates the lives of young people.

The Evening Hour

Thomas Clay

Genre mix of western, invasion thriller and survival drama shows the political and sexual liberation of a deeply devout woman in 1657 England.

England, 1657. Fanny Lye has always been taught to subject herself to the discipline of God and her husband's hands. Until two strangers suddenly turn up at their remote farm. This genre mash-up of western, invasion thriller and survival drama portrays the political and sexual liberation of a deeply religious woman, filmed on 35mm.

Fanny Lye Deliver'd

João Nuno Pinto

Mozambique, 1917. Teenage soldier Zacarias travels alone through this Portuguese colony, dizzy with malaria. A film like a feverish dream.

During World War I, heavy fighting also took place in East Africa, far from the European front. In 1917 a solitary Portuguese soldier (17) travels hundreds of kilometres on foot through Mozambique, looking for his platoon. He almost succumbs to malaria and other deprivations. Intoxicating war film without war about a soldier without an army.

Mosquito

Malou Reymann

When the father of two Danish girls becomes a trans woman, the younger daughter in particular struggles with this radical transition.

Delicate Danish drama in which the father of two girls plants a bomb under their harmonious family life: he will spend the rest of his life as a woman. What will such a complex change do to their relationships? We experience the story through the eyes of the sensitive younger daughter, who fears losing her close bond with her father.

A Perfectly Normal Family

Chang Tso-chi

Melancholy Taiwanese family drama about the meaning and function of memories and the indestructibility of family ties.

How human is someone with no memories? Can you manipulate thoughts of the past? Taiwanese director Chang Tso-chi investigates this in a melancholy, beautifully performed family epic centring on a man with worsening dementia and his daughter, whom he seems to have forgotten after her years in prison.

Synapses

Felipe Bragança

Melancholy, tragicomic fable about a bankrupt Brazilian filmmaker links a personal history to the shadows of Portuguese colonialism.

Obsessed with questions about his past, a bankrupt, white Brazilian filmmaker undertakes an epic journey from Brazil to Mozambique and Portugal. This melancholy, tragicomic fable mixes animation, live action, voice-overs, genres and continents to explore Brazil's colonial past.

IFFR 2025
30 Jan – 9 Feb 2025