“Double, double, toil and trouble,” indeed! Shakespeare’s punchiest tragedy gets a makeover in a way that only the prodigious Filipino multi-hyphenate Khavn De La Cruz could deliver. Unfolding in the Municipality of Marcos, Ilocos Norte and Khavn’s own Burroughsian Interzone of Mondomanila – also the title of the director’s crazed horror-comedy-crime drama, which premiered at IFFR 2012 – this mash-up of styles, genres, moods and atmospheres features a cast of over 100 performers and defies any easy description, even with so familiar a text. But as Khavn says of his source material, "Usually, word is king. Here, text is just one of the many cogs. It’s a column, a roof shingle, an ornament."

The Aromanians (Rrãmãnji) are an ethnic group found mainly in today’s Albania, Greece, Bulgaria and Romania. For filmmaker Alexandra Gulea, this question of heritage is connected to the name she shares with her grandmother, who was born into a traditional Aromanian life, and is fluent only in an Aromanian language. The older Alexandra's father suffered a violent death in an uprising for his people's rights, which forced the family out of Greece and into a politically treacherous Balkan landscape deep in the throes of nationalist upheavals, until finally, they found a home in Romania.

Rebecca Hirneise’s film centers around the uncles and aunts of her Protestant family engaging in a conversation about their faith for the first time. This reveals an unexpectedly intense and personal world of Christianity. A dialogue unfolds, revealing a broad spectrum of absolute devotion to the Bible, charismatic ecstasy, and a deep-seated fear of God.

In this electrifying journey filmmaker Vincent Boy Kars will try to understand in fiction how he became the person he is now, and who he wants to be in the future. The film challenges the very fabric of identity, eagerly pondering the possibilities of personal transformation. Can one truly break free from the weight of their own story?

A three-week vacation in the middle of a heatwave. Failed Emptiness is an existential thriller that describes the familiar experience of emptiness when responsibilities end.

The curators invited a group of artists to be inspired by the work of the well-known, Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman. They specifically presented them News from Home, the 1976 feature film with two equal main characters: the island of Manhattan, New York where the director resides and her mother in Brussels who, through a stream of letters, demands increasingly urgent news.

A cosmic odyssey of consciousness in a post-human Beirut. It follows two souls trapped in an underground purgatory, blurring the lines between reality and nightmare.

Set on a small farm in the Czech countryside, a Few mornings, an Evening offers a close and patient study of the interactions and dynamics between humans and the animals employed in human agriculture. As the film captures small moments of wonder and the subtle changes occurring over days, we witness humans, dogs, sheep, chickens, goats and several other animals engage in their daily affairs. With the introduction of a male goat to the farm, a mating ritual briefly ensues, but in the end, everything seems cyclical once again.

At 91 years of age, Alexander Kluge is solidly regarded as a trailblazing figure in New German Cinema and the avant-garde. He remains active and curious about media, so it’s no wonder that he recently began experimenting with artificial intelligence. He has been exploring a particular programme developed in Munich for medical research, which he systematically strains in order to find his images at the farthest ends of the system's creative faculties. With these, Kluge plays in the same essayistic fashion beloved from his television work – historical footage and a plenitude of texts, comics, charts and cabaret. In short: facts and fictions freely intermingle.

A Swiss filmmaker of Palestinian origin travels to the West Bank to make sense of the break-up with a childhood friend who became a Jewish settler. While trying to understand why their friendship has not held up in the face of the political situation, he reveals his own tragic family history in Palestine.

Avant-Drag! paints portraits of ten drag artists of varying gender expressions and sexualities who take to the streets of Athens to query, problematise and (yes, please!) undermine social strictures. Employing wildly imagined personas – like riot housewives and Albanian turbo-folk girls – who perform acts as revolutionary as praising abortion and as charming as drawing childish pictures, these artists call for social justice by taking aim at conservatism, patriarchy, patriotism, racism and sexism.

sr draws a panorama of human activity spanning centuries and continents. In 16 fragmentary episodes the film reports of political and societal conditions, of theoretical discourses, human creations and realities of everyday life.

A lonely chair on an abandoned balcony, a photographer watching it days and nights, a strange thing happens that will change the life of the chair forever.

Are even the best and brightest revolutionary movements doomed to inevitable compromise, betrayal and failure? That question haunts this documentary, a biography of Angolan-born Mário Pinto de Andrade (1928–1990), a key figure in African revolutionary and anti-colonial struggles.

In Kohlberger’s second film that could be considered narrative driven, the artist fashions a dystopian fiction from the remnants of cinema’s past. Drawing on excerpts from obscure sci-fi films, The Electric Kiss imagines a world not unlike our own, in which people plug their brains into a kind of neuro-network that connects the whole of human consciousness. As cyberpunk imagery draped in VHS textures alternates with passages of prismatic visual noise (achieved, in trademark style, by feeding footage through self trained machine learning algorithms), a quasi-plot emerges: a man in a VR headset, literally and figuratively lost in space, subjects himself to a mysterious procedure to alleviate the ill effects of this new technology on the mind.

This feature documentary is a lyrical exploration of family, the craft of photography and the power of visual storytelling to create change. Following the careers of former National Geographic Magazine Editor in Chief, Chris Johns, and his daughter Louise, a young freelance photographer, it's an examination of the soul of journalism during a period of industry disruption and its role in preserving a planet balanced on the edge of devastation.

Polished obsidian mirrors, tezcatl, were once used in ancient Mexico for divination, to traverse into the worlds of the gods and ancestors. Through the obsidian mirror, the solar and lunar ritual used to be a celestial dance. In Ritual, suns and moons whirl around, glowing brighter as their paths cross.

Under the auspices of Rio Chiquito, Bruno Muel and Jean-Pierre Sergent’s 1965 report on the birth of the FARC, and Dunav Kuzmanich’s 1981 fiction film Canaguaro about the end of the Liberal guerillas, this is look back on 70 years of clandestine life in the Columbian forest. Women and men who took up arms amid profound social inequality and political violence recount their years as fighters and their return to civilian life, without disowning their past. From 2012, when the peace negotiations began, to 2022 — the story of a new struggle.

Negev Desert, Israel, 1987. Bashir Abu Rabi'a works as a pyrotechnics and special effects assistant on the film Rambo III, starring Sylvester Stallone, a shoot that will have far-reaching consequences for the local Bedouin population.