Silent Friend

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.

A beguiling, bravely personal portrait of childhood featuring a superb lead performance by Yui Suzuki. As the 11-year-old Fuki, she faces down the adult world with a mixture of calm, curiosity, and courage.

On the night of March 31, 1943, famed lyricist Lorenz Hart holds court at Broadway's iconic Sardi’s bar. While his former collaborator, Richard Rodgers, celebrates the success of his new musical, Oklahoma!, Hart confronts his own shattered present.

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.

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

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 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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Chasing a rainbow through the woods, Iris comes across Arco, a boy who's stolen a time-travelling suit from his scientist parents — and crash-landed in 2075. This is a sweet, futuristic animated fantasy.

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

An orphan from a young age, 18-year-old Marina intends to pursue a university scholarship. The application, however, requires the signatures of her paternal grandparents, compelling her to embark on a pilgrimage and seek out the family she has never met.

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.

Inspired by real-life events of a man whose momentary lapse cost him everything, Father is a profoundly unsettling, devastating watch that doubles as a solemn, immaculately realized account of a tragedy of insurmountable proportions.

Magellan (Gael García Bernal) undertakes a bold expedition to the fabled lands of the East. Upon reaching the islands of the Malayan Archipelago, he becomes obsessed with conquest and conversion, which sparks violent uprisings beyond his control.