A demonic killer takes the form of your crush in Adrian Chiarella’s gay coming-of-age story meets visceral supernatural horror, set against the backdrop of a Christian community in backcountry Australia.

Two adult sisters compete for their mother’s withheld affection in Rosanne Pel’s sophomore feature, an absurd, lacerating portrait of a family that is definitely unhappy in its own way.

Three athletes—including one played by a real-life gold medalist in women’s judo—prepare for a fictional Olympiad in this elemental study of athletic discipline from first-time feature director Giulio Bertelli. Winner of the FIPRESCI Prize at Venice Critics’ Week.

A commune in the Basque Country is the setting for Irati Gorostidi Agirretxe’s intricate ensemble drama, as its residents split from the Spanish mainstream after Franco’s death to explore new approaches to life and labor. Special Jury Mention, San Sebastián Film Festival.

An absentee father returns to Tokyo—and his estranged children’s lives—to take on a major urban-renewal project in Yuiga Danzuka’s hushed and affecting family drama, which premiered at Cannes Directors’ Fortnight.

Inspired by the true story of a “fake” invention, Kevin Walker and Jack Auen’s Chronovisor follows a Columbia professor deep into a Borgesian labyrinth of textual clues pointing to a time-travel device rumored to have been suppressed by the Vatican.

Winner of the Prix Georges de Beauregard at FIDMarseille, Clemente Castor’s second feature is an entrancing modernist narrative that explores the subterranean spaces and subconscious minds of suburban Mexico City and its aimless youth.

A portrait of Lebanon assembled entirely from archival footage, Lana Daher’s Do You Love Me stitches together a poetic, expansive vision of a country fragmented by military, social, and economic turmoil, turning individual documents into collective memory.

Charli XCX stars as a 365 party girl who wonders whether the music is finally stopping, as a weekend in Warsaw with her boyfriend resurfaces the unresolved, tantalizing excitements of an old friendship.

Winner of the First Film Award at FIDMarseille, ND/NF shorts alum Isabel Pagliai’s hushed, rapturous Fantasy is a genre-defying psychological portrait built out of a young French woman’s inchoate thoughts.

A cozy and melancholy triptych shot across a year at a remote hut in the French Alps, Manon Coubia’s feature debut follows three women who serve as its caretakers, each having sought out a season of self-sufficiency. Winner of a Special Mention at the 2026 Berlinale.

Puppy love crumbles under the pressures of the creative gig economy in Sanju Surendran’s very modern romance, executive produced by Payal Kapadia, in which the bustling megalopolis of Delhi tramples all over the plans of an aspiring artist and film-festival worker.

A Belgian single mother turns to sex work to pay the bills in documentarian Alexe Poukine’s fresh and sensitive fiction debut, a Cannes Critics’ Week favorite that lifts the veil of shame and secrecy around both economic hardship and kinky sex.

John Early’s first feature, starring the director, in drag, as a bulimic food influencer, is bracingly comic and wrenchingly tender—a Sirkian melodrama from the age of short-form video.

Thanking Tarkovsky, Parajanov, and Pasolini in its opening credits, Vladlena Sandu’s autobiographical first feature, the opening night selection of 2025 Venice Days, enfolds the end of the USSR and the Chechen Wars of Independence into delicate and poetic reenactments.

A Tibetan American family makes preparations for the death of its patriarch in Tenzin Phuntsog’s fiction debut, a spare and moving meditation on exile and spirituality that draws inspiration from The Tibetan Book of the Dead.

Four lost souls roam the margins of Chinese society and the banks of the Yangtze in a grimy and glorious triumph that mixes documentary realism, ancient symbolism, and daring technique, heralding Xinyang Zhang as one of the most exciting new voices in Chinese cinema.

His belief wavering, a Mozambican pastor begins practicing witchcraft in this dreamlike fable from first-time feature director Ique Langa. As his flock grows, his conflicted soul becomes the location for a clash between postcolonial Christianity and folk spirituality.

A 9-year-old dance prodigy runs away from home in this deadpan fable from Lorenzo Ferro and Lucas A. Vignale, exploring Buenos Aires and the countryside with the boyish energy of the French New Wave and a droll, literary sense of bemusement.

One of the most acclaimed Spanish films since its 2025 Venice premiere, Jaume Claret Muxart’s feature debut sketches out the turbulent passions of queer adolescence beneath its hazily immersive evocation of a single summer vacation.

When Hein returns to his hometown, he’s put on trial to determine whether he really is the boy who left 14 years ago. Kai Stänicke’s daring debut is a timeless allegory that examines whether it’s true that you can’t go home again—and why. Winner of the Teddy Jury Award at the 2026 Berlinale.

In her feature debut, artist Viv Li jumps back and forth between Berlin’s ultra-permissive alternative culture and her family in Beijing in this puckish and self-aware autodoc, a portrait of becoming and belonging in a connected but confusing world.

Winner of the Golden Leopard at the 2025 Locarno Film Festival, minor miracle Two Seasons, Two Strangers follows a screenwriter rediscovering herself on a winter vacation—and forging a tentative new friendship that echoes the summer fling of her most recent film.

An elderly goatherd in South Africa reflects on her life in Jason Jacobs and Devon Delmar’s casually expansive drama, a collection of linked short stories about village life. Winner of the top prize at International Film Festival Rotterdam.

This program includes El Mahdi L Youbi’s Marseille, 14th July, James Paul Dallas’s Division, Conor Fay’s The Following Day, Renzo Cozza’s Time To Go, and Emma Hütt and Tina Muffler’s Unleaded 95.

This program includes Ananth Subramaniam’s Bleat!, Gaël Kamilindi’s Taxi Moto, Mars Verrone’s Buckskin, Clément Pinteaux’s Only Angels, and Falcão Nhaga’s Sabura.

Join IndieWire’s weekly Screen Talk podcast co-hosts Anne Thompson and Ryan Lattanzio (and special guest Jeremy O. Harris) live at Film at Lincoln Center for an in-person conversation during this year’s edition of New DIrectors/New Flms about the latest happenings in Hollywood—from the festival circuit to awards season and beyond.