Bold Visions Abound at the 2026 Oldenburg Film Festival

The Oldenburg Film Festival is back – and as bold as ever.

Famed for its commitment to independent cinema and its vital support of those making interesting, dynamic and energising work on the industry’s fringes, the festival in Lower Saxony kicks off once again this Wednesday, 16 September. Over the coming five days, audiences will be treated to a wide variety of work with almost fifty films of different lengths being screened around the city. As always, these will range from crowd-pleasing genre spectacle, to intimate dramas. Viewers can attend gala screenings of world premieres and a vibrant repertory programme curated with real enthusiasm. It looks set to be another invigorating few days, overseen by the familiar face of the festival’s founder and director, Torsten Neumann.

Always keen to spark conversation and create a though-provoking atmosphere, the festival will open on Wednesday evening in a somewhat different style to normal. The world premiere of Mi Steinbach’s Strange Neighbors, makes it the first documentary to open Oldenburg and as a wordless non-narrative portrait of an island and nature reserve on the Elbe river, it is the meditative end of the documentary canon. Described by the film maker as contrasting the majesty of untouched nature with the behemoth of global industry, it is bound to generate discussion.

Other films making their bow in Oldenburg include Matthew Osubor’s Providence-set shaggy dog crime caper about a flower delivery service that possibly does more than deliver flowers, Big Daddy’s Flowers; Kill Me Now, a thriller in which a screenwriter’s life begins to resemble her story, from Michael Polish; Srdjan Janicijevic’s You Won’t Believe What Happened Before, a Macedonian political thriller pulling few punches regarding the state of the world today; and Jared Hogan’s stark and powerful homage to Ford and Malick set in 1930s Utah, Jackrabbit. Elsewhere, Murderous is a new dark and acerbic psychological thriller from Neil LaBute, about a filmmaker accused of stealing an idea from a former classmate.

LaBute is himself the subject of one of the festival’s two repertory strands. Accompanying the debut of his latest film, audiences will be able to delight in revisiting or discovering various of his older work including his first film, 1997’s In the Company of Men, the popular comedy-thriller Nurse Betty, starring Renee Zellweger and Morgan Freeman, and his recent foray into horror, House of Darkness, in which Kate Bosworth invites Justin Long in for a post-date nightcap he’s almost certain to regret. Alongside the work of LaBute, Oldenburg will also be paying tribute to the renowned Zoe Bell, who Quentin Tarantino has termed “the greatest stuntwoman in the world” with screening of Double Dare (2004), Death Proof (2007) and Angel of Death (2009) amongst others.

And there is much more besides. Attendees will be able to catch buzzy festival titles like Alex Cox’s Dead Souls, Zamo Mkhwanazi’s Laundry, Marjorie Conrad’s The Joyless Economy, and Bertrand Mandico’s Roma Elastica. The festival will close on Sunday 20 September with a screening of William Scoular’s Northbound, in which Bruce Dern as an unruly grandpa on a road trip to Canada. It promises to be a bountiful week in Lower Saxony, with bold visions and unique voices aplenty, just the way Oldenburg Film Festival loves it to be.

Read more of our coverage of the 2026 Oldenburg Film Festival and watch this year’s festival trailer below or on YouTube.