Critcally acclaimed films and contemporary masterpieces are gathered here for the joy of cinephiles. These works showcase the distinct cinematic style of revered masters and emerging talents, including a hugely engrossing animated feature.
Festival Programme
Films — by Strand
Visions
All We Imagine As Light
Direct from Competition in Cannes where it scored the Grand Prix, this radiant Indian drama follows two nurses looking for love but finding sisterhood in the vibrant, heaving 20 million plus populace of Mumbai.
The Beast
La bête
Léa Seydoux and George MacKay’s fatal attraction endures across space and time in Bertrand Bonello’s audacious Lynchian reflection on love and obsession, mixing sci-fi, melodrama, and horror across three different time frames.
Dahomey
In 2021, 26 plundered artefacts from the Kingdom of Dahomey are returned to the modern day nation of Benin. Mati Diop’s dreamlike documentary skilfully examines the debate surrounding the repatriation of stolen cultural treasures.
Evil Does Not Exist
Aku wa sonzai shinai
Ryûsuke Hamaguchi follows up his Oscar-winning film Drive My Car with a modern eco-fable that provides a gorgeous meditation on humanity’s relation to nature and an unnerving commentary on the price of progress.
Green Border
Zielona granica
Brutal, enraging and heartrending, Polish writer-director Agnieszka Holland’s controversial take on the Polish-Belarusian border crisis serves as a startling call to arms in the face of a little-seen humanitarian crisis.
The Seed of the Sacred Fig
A conflicted family implodes as protests spread throughout Iran, Mohammad Rasoulof’s courageous and urgent film delivers a bold middle finger to the totalitarian regime of his homeland.