A powerful, accessible blend of animation and archive that bears witness to the Armenian genocide through the eyes of survivor and Hollywood silent star Aurora Mardiganian.
Festival Reviews
Il Boemo
The life and loves of 18th century Czech opera composer Josef Myslivecek, and his dazzling Italian career and fall into obscurity, are lovingly and authentically reconstructed in Petr Vaclav’s sumptuous period production.
A Long Break
Years of guilt and shame are exorcised in Davit Pirtskhalava’s stagy drama tracking the aftershocks of bullying.
Blanquita
A complex thriller based on a true sexual abuse scandal involving Chilean politicians, priests, businessmen and homeless children, where nobody is wholly innocent or guilty.
Saint Omer
Alice Diop’s superb fiction debut is a marvel of control and depth, using the trial of a Senegalese woman guilty of killing her infant to honestly explore the complexities of motherhood while foregrounding it all within France’s racist currents.
Safe Place
Raw, authentic emotion and inventive lyricism combine in Juraj Lerotic’s sensitive, devastating reckoning with an acute mental health crisis in the family.
Beautiful Beings
Cruel and delicate, this Icelandic drama shows troubled kids as the product of the actions and inactions of adults.
You Won’t Be Alone
Noomi Rapace is among the moving female cast of Goran Stolevski’s Macedonian folk tale about blood-sucking, shape-shifting witches who offer body horror at its scariest, yet it’s also full of poetry, with a lot to say about women and life on Earth.
Joyland
Winner of the Jury Prize in Un Certain Regard, Sadiq’s delicate first feature explores the destructive force of patriarchy in a Pakistani family and the fallout from a long-unemployed man’s work at an erotic dance theatre.
The Blue Caftan
After her award-winning ‘Adam’, writer-director Maryam Touzani affirms her strong storytelling skills in a hugely touching love story set in an old Moroccan medina, where Lubna Azabal battles illness to be with her homosexual husband Saleh Bakri.
Under the Fig Trees
A gently appealing choral work from Tunisia with a strong understanding of rhythm and balance that marks a strong first feature for documentary-trained Erige Sehiri.
Decision to Leave
Korean cult director Park Chan-wook takes us on the rollicking ride of a deconstructed murder investigation, complicated by obsessive love and betrayal.
Return to Seoul
There’s a lot of raw energy in Davy Chou’s second feature, set in Korea, but the lead character is just too exhausting to watch.
Boy From Heaven
A solid though cautious, slow-burn loss-of innocence tale wrapped around the struggle between State versus Religion set (but not shot) in Cairo and designed for Western consumption.
Plan 75
The first feature from Japanese female director Chie Hayakawa seethes with violence under its soft-spoken exterior.
Corsage
Director Marie Kreutzer and star Vicky Krieps give a famous 19th century Austrian empress a subversive feminist remix in their joyously imaginative Cannes premiere ‘Corsage’.
EO
Polish auteur Jerzy Skolimowski’s mix of beauty and bombast makes a donkey of a promising premise of making audiences observe a chaotic, cruel world through a braying animal’s eyes.
The Quiet Girl
A emotionally fragile schoolgirl spends a revelatory summer with foster parents in director Colm Bairéad’s haunting, prize-winning, Irish-language debut feature.
Girl Picture
Three high school girls in Finland pursue love and orgasm in Alli Haapasalo’s frank and often warmly emotional tale aimed at teen audiences.
Utama (Our Home)
Sundance premieres a spellbinding portrait of life in the Bolivian Andes, where a drought threatens the livelihood of an elderly Quechua couple and their herd of llamas.
Klondike
Notwithstanding truly impressive visuals by D.P. Sviatoslav Bulakovskyi, “Klondike” underwhelms with its unilluminating look at the Donbas region conflict in Ukraine, seen through a reductionist gendered lens where women nurture and men achieve nothing but destruction.
The Exam
Cheating on a high school exam for a good cause gives top Iraqi Kurdish writer and director Shawkat Amin Korki (‘Memories on Stone’) a fertile moral field to examine the traps surrounding female empowerment.
Kerr
Turkish writer-director Tayfun Pirselimoglu’s prize-winning thriller Kerr is a surreal small-town murder mystery with echoes of Kafka and Lynch.
On the Job: The Missing 8
A Venice competition slot seems like a strange place for On the Job: The Missing 8, a punishingly long corruption thriller from Filipino genre master Erik Matti that’s soon to be seen as an HBO Asia Original six-episode mini-series. Following on – but not actually a...
The Employer and the Employee
A subtle character study successfully explores guilt, filial duty and labor relations between a young farmhand and his boss, set among the vast soybean plantations along the Uruguay Brazil border.
CINE VERDICT: El empleado y el patrón
Un sutil estudio de personajes que explora con éxito el sentimiento de culpa, el deber filial, y las relaciones laborales entre un joven peón y su patrón, ambientado en las vastas plantaciones de soja a lo largo de la frontera entre Uruguay y Brasil.
CINE VERDICT: Argentina, 1985
El drama de Santiago Mitre sobre el Juicio a las Juntas hace justicia a este importante hito de la historia argentina.
TFV Interviews Jerzy Skolimowski
The Polish filmmaker discusses his bond with the animal star(s) of ‘EO’.
Argentina, 1985
Santiago Mitre’s drama about the Trial of the Juntas does this important milestone in Argentina’s history justice.
CINE VERDICT: Alcarràs
El segundo largometraje de Carla Simón es una mirada novelesca pero poco sentimental sobre una familia rural catalana.
Alcarràs
Carla Simón’s second feature is a novelistic yet unsentimental look at a rural Catalan family.
Profile: Alice Diop
French director and documentarian Alice Diop makes a bright debut in fiction filmmaking with her complexly layered, multi-prize-winning ‘Saint Omer’, exploring the dark side of motherhood.
A Piece of Sky
A beautifully shot, rigidly ice-cold story of love, disease and crushed dreams that will play best with festival crowds and highly selective art houses.
Holy Spider
Ali Abbasi’s Iranian-set noir, based on a real serial killer of prostitutes, explores the social and religious culture that is often used as an excuse for violence against women.
Awards Corner
International Oscars 2023
- No awards yet.