Love, levity, tenderness, and staggering humanity shine through Sarah Friedland’s debut, starring an astonishing Kathleen Chalfant as an octogenarian transitioning to assisted living. Winner of three top prizes in the 2024 Venice Film Festival Orizzonti Competition.

Alex Russell’s irresistible psychological thriller about a loner (Théodore Pellerin, Genesis) who contrives his way into the entourage of an up-and-coming musician (Archie Madekwe, Saltburn) captures the whirlwind rush of stardom and the unsettling chill of obsession.

Piotr Trojan’s star-making turn anchors this visually and sonically riveting character piece that mines the conflicts between worker and boss, man and spirit.

The inimitable, indispensable Lee Kang-sheng stars in Constance Tsang’s exemplary debut feature that shines as immigrant tale, relationship drama, workplace comedy, and New York story. Winner of the Cannes Critics’ Week jury’s French Touch Prize.

Western India’s stunning, cascading landscapes background Rohan Parashuram Kanawade’s debut feature of familial bereavement and queer longing that earned Sundance’s World Cinema Grand Jury Prize.

A young cyclist’s flabbergasting efforts to reach home form the foundation of a stirring docufiction about the great lengths we go for freedom. Winner of IDFA’s Best First Feature.

This time-shuffling, doom-laden drama from ND/NF veteran Laurynas Bareiša is compelling from first moment to last—and never quite what it seems. Winner of Locarno’s Best Director and Best Performance awards.

Italian warrior-poet Gabriele D’Annunzio’s strange, bloody rule of a small Croatian city is examined in Igor Bezinović’s high-energy hybrid documentary that holds a mirror to contemporary fears of fascism. Winner of the top prize at this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam.

Unthinkable selfishness and incredible resilience collide with tremendous force in Atiye Zare Arandi’s documentary of an Iranian girl’s pursuit for family. Winner of the Next:Wave Award at CPH:DOX.

Cinematographer-turned-director Du Jie makes a seamless transition with this sumptuous, piercing relationship drama that charts fate, regret, and heartbreak across a stunning Japanese countryside.

Like a 21st-century Paper Moon bolstered by its distinctly Georgian sense of humor, Tato Kotetishvili’s Locarno Golden Leopard winner never misses the opportunity to exploit a moment’s comedic, dramatic, and emotional potential.

Callie Hernandez’s one-of-a-kind presence drives Courtney Stephens’s investigation into a family man’s uncertain past, journeying through a backwoods America of oddballs, cretins, and the occasional sweetheart. Winner of a Best Performance Prize in Locarno’s Concorso Cineasti del Presente.

Greece’s piercingly blue seas, verdant flora, and glowing sunsets background Kostis Charamountanis’s emotionally vibrant, formally audacious family drama that recalls festival favorites Aftersun or Murina.

The travails of students, parents, and teachers are put under the microscope in Bálint Szimler’s thrilling, novelistic view of school life. Winner of a Best Performance prize and Special Mention in Locarno’s Concorso Cineasti del Presente.

Maxime Jean-Baptiste’s feature debut and winner of Locarno’s Special Jury Prize blends ecstatic musical performances, vérité journeys through the streets of French Guiana, and dreamlike visions of the jungle. Winner of a Special Jury Prize and Special Mention from the First Feature jury in Locarno’s Concorso Cineasti del Presente.

Shedding light on Venezuela’s rich cultural history and troubled present alike, Lorena Alvarado’s feature debut recalls the intellectual obsessiveness of Roberto Bolaño.

An unplanned pregnancy causes major rifts and in Joel Alfonso Vargas’s feature debut, which looks to the side of New York—and the New Yorkers—rarely put on-screen to carve a story of quotidian tension.

Everyday Floridians engage in scams, tomfoolery, and romantic pursuits in Alexandra Simpson’s feature debut, which captures the state in all its beauty and strangeness as a hurricane rapidly approaches. Winner of a Special Mention from the jury at Venice Film Festival Critics’ Week.

When Joseph—a gay filmmaker and father to a young child whose work-life balance inspires little confidence—tries making his first comedy, intense strife and hilarious slapstick bleed so effortlessly it becomes impossible for him (or us) to tell where one stops and another starts.

One of China’s most exciting up-and-coming cinematic talents emerges in this dazzling series of long takes that investigate social, political, and economic identity in a bravura display that recalls Chantal Akerman or Béla Tarr.

Kateryna Gornostai’s documentary is a thorough display of life during wartime, placing us in the shoes of children, parents, and teachers soldiering on mere kilometers from the front lines of the war in Ukraine. Winner of the Eurimages New Lab Outreach Award at CPH:DOX.

Paula Tomás Marques’s feature debut is a dazzlingly intricate film about filmmaking, performance, trans history, and art as the means to make sense of ourselves.

Mo Harawe’s feature debut, the first Somali film to be an Official Selection at Cannes, recalls great works of Italian neorealism, rendering Somali life with stirring music, rich colors, fine textures, and bone-deep sentiment.

The pleasures, anxieties, and frenzy of teenage life are given center stage in a coming-of-age feature that crosses millennial nostalgia with intense violence.

Featuring Alisha Tejpal, Mireya Martinez, and Anoushka Mirchandani’s Landscapes of Longing; Enrique Pedráza-Botero’s You Can’t See It From Here, the U.S. premiere of Daniel Asadi Faezi and Mila Zhlutenko’s In Retrospect, and Maureen Fazendeiro’s The Inhabitants.

Featuring the U.S. premiere of Jessica Dunn Rovinelli’s Life Story, the North American premiere of Camille Vigny’s Crushed, the world premiere of Julia Sipowicz’s Maidenhair, the North American premiere of Kevin Walker and Irene Zahariadis’s Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, and the North American premiere of Daphné Hérétakis’s What We Ask of a Statue Is That It Doesn’t Move.