Oldenburg 2026: The Verdict

The personal and political met most emphatically in the form of Oldenburg‘s Best Film winner at Sunday’s award night: Variations on Violence.

Speaking on stage while accepting his award, director Zachary Nichols explained that during its life so far, he has described Variations on Violence as a film about trauma. Over his few days discussing and reflecting on the film at the festival, and the recent public blaming of the death of more than a hundred school children in Iran on A.I. targeting system, Nichols loudly declared from the stage that his is an anti-war film. It is, it heart, both things. First and foremost it is a terrifying depiction of the nature of trauma suffered by a US drone pilot, Johnny (Lars Drew) who struggles to cope with the moral weight of following orders.

His guilt weighs so heavily that his connection to reality becomes severed, glitching like the computer systems from which he delivers state-sanctioned destruction. His home life with his co-dependent sister, Mary (Noelia Antweiler) is constantly being stress-tested by his fracturing psyche and the film is punctuated with chilling computer-animated monochrome dreams of drones and workstations and death and oblivion. It’s an incredibly powerful piece that was deservedly honoured by the Oldenburg advisory committee, its two elements bringing together two threads that ran throughout the festival.

Several films dealt with overwhelming emotional and psychological turmoil and discovery providing a number of the festival’s most intense experiences. These films were all built around commanding central performances and none more so than the winner of the Seymour Cassell prize for a lead actor: Jackrabbit, starring Frank Mosley. Directed by Jared Hogan, the film is a glacially paced drama about T.A. Diamond (Mosley), a miner in 1930s Utah who hurts his hand in a cave-in and can no longer work to support his family, being laid off. Keeping the news from his wife and playing down the injury he sets off for work as normal, instead drifting through the landscape, bereft. Jackrabbit is a impressively singular vision, utterly entrancing while moving to its own, discordant rhythm. Mostly devoid of dialogue, it demands a uniquely physical performance from Mosley as T.A. wanders, in some kind of inexorable death spiral, accompanied by plaintive, haunting woodwind score.

Both the Mexican horror-drama from first-time director Mauricio Chernovetzky, Sacrificios, and the short film about a mortuary working attending the scene of a tragic accident, Living Grounds, dealt with fathers feeling the impact of loss in very different ways. Emile Lavoie’s Living Grounds is a blow-by-blow account of a man who believes a suicide victim might be his daughter, it’s gripping and portentous as a storm gathers on the horizon. The father in Sacrificios has a very different reaction to the confirmed death of his son, one that blends Christian and Aztec iconography as he travels to a strange, possibly magical island seeking to bring his son back. Chernovetsky’s film is brutal and difficult to watch but undeniably personal film that is deeply felt.

Paul Wright’s Mission is equally enveloping. It’s a film concerned with depicting a dangerous level of interiority even as it’s protagonist, Dylan (embodied as much as played by George MacKay) seeks exterior validation that life is worth continuing. The film has a basic narrative shape, but feels more formless than many of the other films at the festival, using a melange of voiceover, sketched scenes and montage, and home video footage to explore the ennui that the character is being overwhelmed by. Marjorie Conrad’s The Joyless Economy, which premiered back at Cannes, is another bold vision the explores the potentially perilous interaction between internal desire and their manifestation in the world. Framed by a second-person narration that places the audience in the protagonist’s position, it tells of a young woman whose predilection for sleazy films – everything from Bette Gordon’s Variety, to Jess Franco, Tinto Brass, and far more explicit videos – comes to define and affect her life and relationships.

Conrad’s film told using split screen with video covers, DVD boxes, and posters accompanied by grainy home video footage which create an intense confessional atmosphere. The Joyless Economy, quite rightly, picked up Oldenburg’s award for Originality, Daring and Audacity and its transgression was echoed somewhat in the film that won the award for Best Short Film, White Whiter Whitest Black. Made by Italian filmmaker Michele Leonardi, it is not initially clear that the film is about anything taboo, as it follows a young couple enjoying each other’s company on a hot summer day. They swim in a secluded pool, then drive around sharing a cigarette before messing about in an old abandoned factory where they hang out with skaters. It is in the film’s final moments, when a twist – which Leonardi characterises as a “betrayal” – changes the nature of everything that we’ve seen to shocking effect.

The relationships between men and women – particularly those with problematic of highly complicated facets – were on display throughout the festival in the work of Neil LaBute who was the subject of a retrospective as well as premiering his newest film, Murderous, during the week. Adopting a theatrical construction familiar in LaBute’s work and a scenario similar in set-up to recent films like Some Velvet Morning (2014) and House of Darkness (2023) – both of which screened during the festival – horror filmmaker Marian (Gia Crovatin) has a surprise, and note entirely welcome, visit from a distant ex, Norman (Thomas Sadoski). What follows is a typically LaBute examination of gender and relationship dynamics, power plays, and – in this instance – the lengths someone is willing to go to protect themselves and their accomplishments. Crovatin is very impressive in a demanding, at times borderline unhinged, role which earned her the Seymour Cassell award for best actress at the festival.

And if the socio-politics of gender dynamics wasn’t enough, the festival featured several films that addressed politics and morality head on. From the apartheid-era South Africa of Zamo Mkhwanazi wonderful and gut-wrenching historical drama Laundry, via the 1980s leftist terrorism of the FP-25 examined in Edgar Pera’s energetic and essayistic Asphalt Guerilla, all the way to Srdjan Janicijevic lacerating state-or-the-nation portrait of North Macedonia in the compulsive thriller set in moral quagmire, You Won’t Believe What Happened Before. These films all demand we confront important questions facing us today whether those are social, moral, or political. Many of the films at this year’s festival have asked questions of the audience; how will you respond to these circumstances?

What’s amazing about Oldenburg and was on show again this year, is just how independent filmmakers will respond: with endeavour, and creativity, and sheer willpower. Whether that is in the form of films being made on an almost non-existent budget and against all odds like Matthew Osubor’s funny and inventive Big Daddy’s Flowers (which won the First Film award), or in the form of films that seek to realign our perspective like the protagonist of Boris Mojsovski deeply moving romantic dramedy, Foreign Tongue, about the immigrant experience in Canada (which picked up the Spirit of Cinema award). Oldenburg gives all of these voices not just a platform but a hugely receptive audience and an experience unlike most other festivals. Many filmmakers echoed the same sentiment on stage at the closing ceremony – that Oldenburg is the best festival in the world. In its support of truly independent and interesting filmmaking, there can – once again – be little argument.

Read more of our coverage of Oldenburg Film Festival 2026.