New Directors Competition

In this sensitive, assured drama, rising star Taiga Nakano plays young parent Tasuku, who flees to Tokyo in shame after being caught drunk and naked on national TV during a local festival. After years of rock-bottom city living, he returns home, ready to embrace adulthood. But will the town and his family have him back?

Life is what happens when you stop living for others and start living for yourself. This poignant tragicomic journey of courage follows Mona from early childhood, when she is inculcated to be a quiet, obedient presence in the world. She blossoms into a talented young artist, but years of repressing her feelings have impaired her [...]

Sixty-year-old Palestinian fisherman and lifelong bachelor Issa (Salim Daw) holds a secret torch for Siham (Hiam Abbas), a dressmaker at the market. Just as he is getting up the courage to propose to her, Issa nets an ancient statue of a well-endowed, larger-than-life-sized Apollo. When the Hamas authorities get wind of the existence of this [...]

In southern Brazil—in a strange Austrian colony of sorts lost in time—indigenous-Black man Cristovam has arrived from the north to take a job at a milk factory. In the face of unrelenting xenophobia and racism, he finds refuge in an abandoned house filled with art objects and folkloric memorabilia that connect him back to his [...]

In this taut thriller set in the idyllic Swiss countryside, a single mom is raising her young daughter and running the family fish farm with the help of a farmhand-turned-friend. When his brother unexpectedly appears in search of debts owed, the specter of impending disaster looms large.

After building a successful career in the U.S., gifted neurosurgeon Márta impulsively returns home to Hungary in pursuit of the man of her dreams, but when she tracks him down in Budapest, he claims they’ve never met. Is he spinning an elaborate deception or has her obsession trapped her in a world of illusions?

Growing up in small-town Spain in the early '90s, 11-year-old Celia is ever the responsible student and considerate daughter. When impossibly cool Brisa storms in from Barcelona, she upsets the order of the girls’ strict Catholic school, run by nuns with a stern disposition and an iron fist. Unexpectedly, the two girls become fast friends, [...]

After a woman’s recurring nightmares send her on a search for answers, both she and her daughter find themselves drawn to a hotel where they become trapped in a web of unsettling visions as dreams and reality collide. A horror-tinged thriller that channels Grimms’ Fairy Tales by way of David Lynch.

In this deftly told and uplifting debut, a profoundly charming young man must navigate the challenges of early adulthood with Down Syndrome as he seeks to build a life of independence from his troubled father. Long separated by an ocean of silence and shame, will the two men be able to assemble a common future?

Writer-director Suzanne Lindon delivers an astonishingly assured turn as a restless Parisian teen bored by her peers and confronting her burgeoning sexuality. She embarks on a love affair with an actor 20 years her senior—only to wonder if the more innocent pleasures of youth are passing her by.

Fed up with his final year at film school, skilled sound recordist Kun takes up with a student production and embarks on a journey of self-discovery across China’s lush, varied landscape. Featuring winning performances and directed with a wry emotional clarity, Striding into the Wind is a keenly-observed meditation on movies, modern China, and the meandering restlessness of youth.