An array of remarkable narrative films from every corner of the globe
This year’s Panorama selection is the most expansive yet, with cinema from more than two dozen nations waiting to be discovered. Two-thirds of these films will be Canadian premieres. And what rich experiences they’ll offer, as viewers experience fraught homecomings, races against time, reckonings with the past, and transformative epiphanies. While these often take the form of immersive dramas, they also lend themselves to incisive comedies and haunting fables. All human life is here!
My Late Summer
Academy Award-winner Danis Tanović (No Man’s Land, 2002) charms with this summer romance about a woman arriving on a small Croatian island to claim her piece of inheritance from the estranged side of the family.
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Holy Cow
Compelled to look after his kid sister after their father dies, 18-year-old Totone resolves to try his hand at cheese-making, no matter that he has no budget and no experience. This earthy coming of age movie finds good reasons to think he'll succeed.
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Eephus
A small town New England recreational baseball league gathers to play the final game on their local diamond before its impending demolition. Carson Lund’s lovely, unassuming debut is an ode to amateur baseball and a meditation on the passage of time.
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Armand
When six-year-old Armand is accused of abusing another boy, his mother is called in for a school meeting. With the boys themselves never seen or heard from, it becomes clear that this sordid situation is about much more than just the children.
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Christmas Eve in Miller's Point
There’s no place like home for the holidays and the extended Balsano family gathers to celebrate Christmas Eve together for perhaps the last time. A warmly humorous yuletide rhapsody, this captures the Christmas spirit and puts a bow on it.
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Solids by the Seashore
This breezy, poetic film mounts a sharp political critique even as it portrays romance with exquisite gentleness. Set in the beaches, cafes, and galleries of southern Thailand, it focuses on two women united in love but divided by culture.
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Super Happy Forever
This haunting film depicts a man’s return to the town where he met his now-deceased wife. Shot in long takes, graced with enigmatic motifs, and structured around a lengthy flashback, this is a disturbing but ultimately relatable exploration of love.
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Julie Keeps Quiet
When her coach falls under investigation after the suicide of a former trainee, a young tennis ace is thrown into turmoil. Finding herself under acute pressure to speak out, but reluctant to do so, she faces a struggle that she alone can resolve.
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On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
After finding her uncle's dead body on the roadside by a brothel, Shula grapples with her Zambian family's sanctification of a monstrous man. This darkly comedic absurdist drama was a prize winner at Cannes for director Rungano Nyoni (I Am Not a Witch).
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Rosinante
When Salih loses his job, his middle-class life with his wife and son is thrown into jeopardy. After a string of job rejections, he joins an app-based motorcycle taxi driving service—until his bike, Rosinante, goes mysteriously missing.
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Carnival Is Over
Attempting to escape the illegal gambling business owned by his uncle, Valerio, and Regina are swept into the violent undertow of Rio de Janeiro’s crime world, leaving behind a bloody wake of bodies and betrayal in this bleakly comic tragedy.
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When We Lost to the Germans
After the Netherlands loses the FIFA World Cup to West Germany in the summer of 1974, the cautious Jonas and impulsive Daan make their way through their sleepy Dutch town and learn about the complexities of human nature the hard way.
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Sex
Two chimney sweeps living in heterosexual marriages find their views on sexuality and gender challenged by a series of unexpected events. In a set of sharply scripted conversations, both men confront heretofore unexplored aspects of their identity.
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Sleeping With a Tiger
In this unconventional biopic, the Austrian painter Maria Lassnig asserts herself as a female artist in the male-dominated art world of postwar Austria. Radically mixing documentary and fiction, the film captures the enduring enigma of Lassnig’s art.
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Black Tea
After turning down her unfaithful groom at the altar, Aya leaves the Ivory Coast for a dreamy new life at a tea shop in Guangzhou, China. As her alluring boss, Cai teaches her the ancient art of the tea ceremony, a sensual and melancholic romance brews.
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Living in Two Worlds
This stirring drama traces the upbringing of Dai, a "Child of Deaf Adults" from rural Japan. Blaming his mother for his social differences, he leaves for Tokyo and becomes a magazine writer. New friendships help him see his mother in a poignant new light.
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Everybody Loves Touda
Irrepressible Touda dreams of being a Sheikha, a respected traditional Moroccan performer empowered by the lyrics of the fierce female poets who came before her. Inspired by their songs of resistance and emancipation, she sets her sights on Casablanca.
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Ghost Trail
In this crisp, psychological thriller, a Syrian refugee in Strasbourg zeroes in on the man he suspects tortured him and countless others in prison during the civil war. Proof remains elusive, but Hamad (Adam Bessa) will see justice served...
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Misericordia
Edgy, eccentric, and unapologetically queer, this film goes from drama to comedy without putting a foot wrong. Sex and murder are the subjects, and writer-director Alain Guiraudie (Stranger by the Lake) mines them for suspense and outrageous laughs.
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Fly Me to the Moon
Spanning three decades, this powerful drama tells the story of a Hong Kong family of immigrants from the Mainland. Working as writer, director, and star, Sasha Chuk maintains an intimate focus as she takes us through 30 years of love and struggle.
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Marco, the Invented Truth
An intricate web of lies unravels in Aitor Arregi and Jon Garaño’s riveting biographical thriller about Enric Marco, a high-profile activist in Spain who claimed to be a Holocaust survivor, only to be exposed in 2005 as an impostor.
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House of the Seasons
Distinguished by its complexity, its fine ensemble cast, and the beauty of its exteriors, this is a rich, relatable family drama. Making his feature debut, Oh Jung-min uses the seasons to create visual splendour and deep metaphorical power.
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Measures for a Funeral
When a young academic discovers a personal link to Canadian violinist Kathleen Parlow, she is compelled to dig deeper. Her investigations lead her on the trail of an elusive concerto, lost for over a century, but which she is determined to bring to light.
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The New Year That Never Came
Bogdan Mureşanu’s polyphonic tragi-comedy tracks six interconnected stories to capture the mood in Romania on the brink of revolution in 1989.
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Under the Volcano
While on holiday in the Canary Islands, a young Ukrainian family learns that war has broken out in their homeland. In the midst of familial tensions, they grapple with the reality of their newfound status as refugees.
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The Mother and the Bear
Johnny Ma’s film stars Kim Ho-jung as a Korean woman who flies to Winnipeg when her immigrant daughter is hospitalized there. This crowd-pleaser plays up cultural differences to hilarious effect and offers a touching take on mother-daughter tension.
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Reinas
Early 1990s Lima, Perú. Charming absentee father Carlos “El Loco” Molina tries to earn his way back into his daughters’ lives before their mother moves them to Minnesota. A tender family drama, Reinas won the Generation Kplus Grand Prix at Berlinale 2024.
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The Sparrow in the Chimney
In a spacious home, preparations are afoot for an extravagant party—which quickly becomes a pressure cooker of longstanding familial strife. An entropic symphony of domestic existence, this is a film whose luminous surfaces yield only deeper enigmas.
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To a Land Unknown
In this outstanding crime drama, two Palestinian cousins are exiled in Athens and in dire need of funds for fake passports to move their family to Germany. A slippery slope of moral compromise awaits as they resort to human smuggling and hostage-taking.
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Most People Die on Sundays
In this mortifying comedy of embarrassment, chubby, gay, Jewish David (played by director Iair Said) returns to his native Buenos Aires. There he confronts the looming death of his comatose father, whom his mother has decided to pull the plug on.
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Brief History of a Family
Gripping, poetic, and darkly beautiful, Lin Jianjie’s domestic thriller tells of a high school slacker whose mysterious new friend slowly captures the hearts of his parents. This is a terrific debut from a director with a very bright future in cinema.
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Pierce
This hypnotic drama features two brothers separated by an awful uncertainty: one of them may or may not be a murderer. Using the sport of fencing as its central metaphor, Pierce has a thrilling atmosphere of danger and two superb lead performances.
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Angela's Shadow
When a socialite visits her nanny’s remote reserve, she discovers her Cree ancestry and delves into her new-found spiritual traditions to save herself and her newborn baby from her husband’s psychotic, and purity-obsessed racism.
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Who by Fire
Jeff, a 17-year-old aspiring filmmaker, goes on vacation with his friend Max and his family to an isolated lodge. Philippe Lesage’s film is a tense, mesmerizing tour de force that is both agonizing and cathartic. A Berlinale award winner.
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Souleymane's Story
Exhausted by the grueling grind of the Parisian gig economy and hopping between homeless shelters, Guinean immigrant Souleymane races against time to prepare for his asylum interview. An angry, tender film which is as gripping as any thriller.
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