This year’s Palme d’Or winner launches our Festival with a profound and galvanising reflection on truth, facts and fiction, pivoting around another extraordinary central performance from Sandra Hüller—familiar to audiences for her work in Toni Erdmann (NZIFF 2016) and In the Aisles, among other terrific films.
Festival Programme
Films — by Genre
- Action
- Animals
- Animation
- Artists
- Award-winners
- Based on Books
- Body and Mind
- Comedy
- Coming of Age
- Crime
- Education
- Environment
- Family Lives
- Fantasy
- Films about Films
- Finding Home
- Historical
- Horror
- Indigenous
- LGBTQIA+
- Love Stories
- Media and the Internet
- Music
- Māori/Pacific
- Photography
- Politics
- Religion
- Sci-Fi
- Stylistic
- Travel
- WTF?
- War Zones
- Writers and Theatre
Crime
Billion Dollar Heist
A deep-dive into the audacious attempt by a trans-global criminal organisation to steal a billion dollars from the Bangladesh Central Bank, highlighting the vulnerability of even the world’s biggest corporations in cyberspace.
Charcoal
Carvão
An appealingly twisted crime-thriller in which a poor rural family agree to a diabolical deal to shelter an Argentinian drug lord. This Brazilian debut feature delivers a wry, politically astute domestic psychodrama.
Holy Spider
A profoundly disturbing crime thriller about the so-called Spider Killer who terrorised sex workers in Iran and the lone journalist who strives for justice in a thoroughly misogynistic society.
How to Blow Up a Pipeline
A tense eco-thriller from US director Daniel Goldhaber questions just how far its young activist protagonists are willing to go in order to confront their nation’s complicity in the climate crisis.
Kidnapped
Rapito
Direct from Cannes this visually rich costume drama rips the jaw-dropping true story of the abduction of a young Jewish boy by the Catholic church from the pages of history.
Only the River Flows
He bian de cuo wu
This stylish neo noir from upcoming Chinese director Wei Shujun finds a long-suffering detective questioning his methods and eventually his mind after a series of mysterious murders in a small rural town.
Reality
Anchored by a remarkable performance from Sydney Sweeney, Reality reconstructs the interrogation and arrest of American whistleblower Reality Winner in real-time, to disturbing, pulse-pounding effect.
Saint Omer
Drawing on a tragic true event, this multi-awarded and mesmerising, stately courtroom drama upends notions of race, cultural heritage, class and female agency, and the mythologies and social prejudices underpinning received ideas.