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.
Flow
Direct from wowing audiences at Cannes, this immersive animated wonder from Lativian director Gints Zilbalodis tells the surreal tale of an unlikely group of animals who must overcome their differences to survive a great flood.
Grand Tour
A runaway groom with his bride-to-be in hot pursuit takes us on an epic tour through colonial-era Asia in Miguel Gomes’s playful Cannes prize-winner which mingles the artificiality of classic cinema with a documentary sense of place.
Menus-Plaisirs - Les Troisgros
A quietly diligent examination of a family-run three-star Michelin restaurant in France, revealing minute details of a sprawling ecosystem as it unobtrusively traverses kitchens, dining rooms, suppliers, markets, cheese caves, farms, vineyards, and apiaries.
Pepe
One of Pablo Escobar’s “cocaine hippos” ponders the meaning of existence from beyond the grave in this gleefully unclassifiable film that playfully weaves fact, fiction and form into a truly unique cinematic experience.
The Universal Theory
Die Theorie von Allem
Featuring numerous unexpected twists and plenty of Hitchcockian suspense, German director Timm Kröger’s heady sci-fi thriller takes us on a gripping cinematic voyage packed with astute film references and brain-melting metaphysics.