A ritualistic and dizzying audio-visual poem, following singer Lei Lowe on an eruptous pilgrimage through ancient Sicilian landscapes where she communes with the Earth in search of emancipation.
Director: Aida Berisha
Production Company Ryan Sherman, Federica Vegnani
Country of Production Denmark, Italy
Length 13’
Year 2026
In the shadow of Vesuvius, Italian maestro Gianfranco Rosi follows the everyday lives of the Neapolitans. The final film in the award-winning Italy trilogy, told in sublime black-and-white images.
Naples is one of the world’s oldest cities, but its inhabitants know that they are living on borrowed time. The dormant volcano could bury the city in ash in an instant. Vesuvius’ eruption destroyed the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum in 79 AD, and the volcano is still active today. The inhabitants live in the shadow of Vesuvius, and the earth trembles beneath them. Gianfranco Rosi follows everyone from Japanese archaeologists to the tourist crowds among the ruins of Pompeii, to the local Carabinieri investigating grave robbers and antique thieves in the illegal tunnels under the city. We are there when the hard-pressed employees at the emergency call center take calls from all over the city. Some just ask what time it is, others are anxious and want to know if what they are feeling is an earthquake. Rosi is the only documentary filmmaker to have both the Berlinale’s Golden Bear and Venice’s Golden Lion on his mantelpiece. ‘Below the Clouds’ rounds off his Italy trilogy – from Rome to Lampedusa and now Naples. With his usual poetic but observant eye, he depicts a Naples where modernity and history coexist in razor-sharp and incredibly beautiful black-and-white images.
Director: Gianfranco Rosi
Production Company: 21uno Film, Stemal Entertainment, Rai Cinema, Arte
Country of Production: Italy
Length: 114’
Year: 2025
BOUCHRA
An animated autofiction from Morocco, in which a queer filmmaker calls home from NYC to her mother in Casablanca to talk things out. Truly original, and truly cool.
Bouchra is a 35-year-old Moroccan expat and filmmaker in New York. Her queerness has affected her relationship with her mother, and now she wants to talk things out. The phone line between New York City and Casablanca is red hot, as a lot that has been left unsaid until now. The mental distance between club nights, dates, and queer life in Brooklyn and a quiet home in Morocco is enormous. At the same time, Bouchra is experiencing writer’s block. She is writing an autobiographical script about a complex mother-daughter relationship. But through long and honest conversations, mother and daughter begin to grow closer. And yes, Bouchra is a coyote! And so is her mother. In fact, all the characters in ‘Bouchra’ are animated to the voices of her real friends and family in a playful docufiction. A humorous and touching story about migration, queerness, and everything we say – and don’t say – to those we love.
Director: Orian Barki, Meriem Bennani
Production Company: Fondazione Prada, 2 Lizards Production, Hi Production
Country of Production: Italy, Morocco, United States
Length: 83’
Year: 2025
ERRABONDA
An experimental and beautiful 16mm film about an organic Italian farm, where soil, weeds, and microbes leave their mark on both the fields and the film itself.
On an organic farm in Italy, people live side by side with nature and its plants, animals, insects, microbes, and weeds. They do so while industrial agriculture has depleted the soil for decades and sent the planet’s biodiversity into free fall. But the farm and its farmers are now trying to rethink agriculture as a place where species can coexist rather than exterminate each other, and where overlooked weeds come to the rescue. ‘Errabonda’ is a wonderfully beautiful and experimental observation of Italian agriculture and a sensory exploration of the intricate and interdependent relationships that exist between soil, plants, and people. A film that blurs the line between images and ecology by inviting organic materials into the image-making process through plant-based chemistry and by allowing the plants to be in direct contact with the film’s 16mm strip.
Director: Emma Harris
Production Company: Emma Harris
Country of Production: Denmark, Italy
Length: 20’
Year: 2026
I WANT HER DEAD
In a Calabrian village, peace is threatened by a long-standing family feud between two sisters-in-law. A tragicomic portrait of a tiny town where the art of the melodrama is alive and well.
Bastard, liar, bitch, idiot. These are the words Imma and Luisa use to address each other. They hate each other with the kind of passion that only Italian women in films can muster – and as if that weren’t enough, they are both family and neighbours. When one hangs freshly washed curtains to dry on the balcony, the other cuts them to shreds from the floor below. The feud between the two sisters-in-law shakes not only the family, but the entire village: Only 70 people live there, and they are all related in some way or another. In the end, three wise old ladies have to step in as mediators in a desperate attempt to heal a conflict with deep roots. Filmmaker Gianluca Matarrese draws on a ten-year conflict in his own family and has created a tragicomic, intense and emotional portrait of a southern Italian family on the brink of collapse.
Director: Gianluca Matarrese
Production Company: Faber Produzioni, Stemal Entertainment, Elefant Films, Rai Cinema
Country of Production: Italy, Switzerland
Length: 87’
Year: 2025
WAKING HOURS
Smugglers transport people across the border to Europe during an endless, sleepless night. A cinematic film shot in pitch darkness, which should be experienced in the cinema at all costs.
Instead of following the refugees, ‘Waking Hours’ turns the camera on those who have made the border their livelihood. The ocumentary provides a rare insight into the everyday life of a clan of Afghan smugglers who live in a tent camp, smoke cigarettes, cook over a campfire, and pass the time in a forest area near the Serbian-Hungarian border. They wait for the next opportunity to help a migrant cross the threshold into Europe. Through conversations, the smugglers’ personal stories emerge, hinting at the complex relationships
between migrants, smugglers, and border authorities. ‘Waking Hours’ was filmed exclusively in pitch darkness with minimal equipment to avoid police detection. The only light comes from campfires, torches, cell phones, and flashlights. The darkness of night becomes both an aesthetic device and a metaphor for the hidden life that unfolds along Europe’s outer borders.
Director: Federico Cammarata, Filippo Foscarini
Production Company: Volos Films, Pulpa Film, Rai Cinema
Country of Production: Italy
Length: 78’
Year: 2025