Exceptional films by revered directors, major award winners, and work that’s very much of the moment
The impressive roll call for this year’s Showcase proves just how bountiful the cinema of 2025 has proven to be. This is also where you’ll find several director-actor teams continuing their longstanding collaborations, including Richard Linklater and Ethan Hawke, Paulo Sorrentino and Tony Servillo, Christian Petzold and Paula Beer, and Hong Sangsoo and Kwon Haehyo. Meanwhile, Shih-Ching Tsou, Chie Hayakawa, and Mascha Schilinski all demonstrate a remarkable capacity for eliciting astonishing performances from their youngest cast members.
The Blue Trail
In a near-future Brazil, elderly citizens are forcibly relocated to live out their days in a senior housing colony. When 77-year-old Tereza learns that she will soon be taken away, she embarks on a fantastical odyssey into the Amazon.
In the Room
Brishkay Ahmed's documentary explores the resilience and cultural identity of Afghan women through intimate interviews and archival images. Powerful, urgent, and informative, it reminds us that human rights are fragile and must be fiercely protected.
Two Prosecutors
In the midst of Stalin’s purges, a naïve prosecutor sets out to investigate a prisoner’s innocence, unaware of the labyrinthine bureaucracy awaiting him. A Kafkaesque procedural thriller about the pursuit of justice in the face of corruption.
Image: © SBS Productions
La Grazia
Hot from opening the Venice Film Festival, this is a serious ethical drama from director Paolo Sorrentino and his long-serving collaborator, actor Toni Servillo, who plays a fictional Italian President wrestling with a moral dilemma.
Image: © Andrea Pirrello
Wrong Husband
In a remote Arctic village, two young lovers are promised to each other from birth. When the girl’s father suddenly dies, however, her mother remarries a man from another camp, forcing her to leave her betrothed and upsetting the balance of their lives.
The Little Sister
The youngest of three sisters in a conservative Franco-Arab household, Fatima is absorbed in her studies and resisting the family pressure to be married off. But the pull to explore sensual realms grows stronger by the day.
Image: © Entract Films
Silent Friend
On the grounds of a medieval German university town looms an old Ginkgo biloba, which features in three intimate, human-scaled stories. Moving between time periods, this is a singular meditation on how we connect to the natural world.
The Golden Spurtle
Each year the sleepy highland village of Carrbridge awakens with excitement as locals and competitors from around the globe vie for the honour of winning The Golden Spurtle in the World Porridge Making Championships.
Sound of Falling
A remote German farmhouse is the stage for the mundane and magical experiences of four girls who call the foreboding place home at various intervals over the course of a century. In turns delicate and devastating, this is cinema at its most experiential.
Image: © Fabian Gamper
Lovely Day
It’s Alain’s wedding day, and nothing is going to plan. Brimming with personality, this nonlinear comedy of errors from celebrated Québécois director Philippe Falardeau is a splendid adaptation of Alain Farah’s novel, Mille secrets mille dangers.
Miroirs No. 3
Following a car crash that kills her boyfriend, piano student Laura is physically unhurt but emotionally distraught. Following the accident, she finds solace with a local woman who takes her in, but soon finds herself in an eerie, enigmatic family situation.
Image: © Schramm Film A4 Kopie
What Does That Nature Say to You
VIFF mainstay Hong Sangsoo returns with another winner: a symmetrically designed, deceptively casual delight. An extended, drunken encounter between a poet and his girlfriend’s family progresses toward revelation — with many amusing stops along the way.
Pillion
A timid, young gay man becomes the submissive to a sexy, leather-clad biker in this wickedly funny and sensitive examination of power, autonomy, and love in the world of kink. Call Me by Your Name meets Phantom Thread in leather chaps.
Living the Land
Huo Meng’s film folds a grand historical reckoning into the story of one rural family in 1990s China. Visually rich and finely detailed in its human portraiture, this is a moving, elegiac work.
Tuner
A talented piano tuner (The White Lotus’ Leo Woodall in a breakout role) discovers that the patience and precision that allow him to excel at his day job are even more valuable when moonlighting as a safe cracker.
Case 137
When a teenage demonstrator is grievously injured by rubber bullets during a frenzied protest in the streets of Paris, an intrepid Internal Affairs investigator must determine whether her fellow officers employed excessive force.
Image: © Fannyde Gouville
Resurrection
In this broken-mirror reality, humanity has lost its ability to dream. A Fantasmer proves a puckish outlier, slipping into the dreamworld and being reincarnated over the course of a century, each time from within a different film genre.
Calle Malaga
Seventy-nine-year-old María Ángeles lives independently in Tangier's Spanish quarter. When her daughter pressures her into selling her apartment, she refuses to give in, finding in her old age a new resilience and an unexpected romantic connection.
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Orphan
Set in Hungary in the late 50s, the latest from Son of Saul director László Nemes is a piercingly vivid immersion into the angst of a young man confronted by a stranger who claims to be his father, a lie his mother seems prepared to accept.
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The Love That Remains
Anna and Magnús have separated, leaving her to raise their three children as he spends long stretches at sea, working as a fisherman. As the seasons pass, their emotions ebb and flow. A richly conceived story with unexpected delight and humour.
Image: © Hlynur Pálmason
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Orwell: 2+2=5
Oscar-nominated director Raoul Peck reimagines 1984 in this urgent essay on power, language, and control. With narration by Damian Lewis, it’s a chilling portrait of how Orwell’s warnings became our reality.
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Youngblood
After his impassioned outbursts ruin his chances of playing pro hockey, Dean Youngblood struggles to reconcile his father's overbearing influence with his coach's expectations when he gets one last shot in this nuanced, high-octane sports drama.
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Left-Handed Girl
Co-written and edited by Sean Baker (Anora), Shi-Ching Tsou’s heartwarming solo feature debut follows a single mom in Taipei who is too consumed with her noodle stand to keep tabs on her five-year-old daughter’s burgeoning shoplifting habit.
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