DOX:AWARD

Balomania

With police and bounty hunters hot on her heels, a young filmmaker embarks on a wild ride with a Brazilian brotherhood of balloon builders. A real-life action film with an incredible story about finding freedom against all odds.

Sissel Morell Dargis / Denmark & Spain / 2024 / World Premiere

E.1027 – Eileen Gray and the House by the Sea

A love triangle of jealousy in the Parisian art scene of the 1930s is brought to life in a stylish docufiction about iconic artist and architect Eileen Gray, who built her modernist dream house on the Riviera, only to be upstaged by Le Corbusier.

Beatrice Minger & Christoph Schaub / Switzerland / 2024 / World Premiere

Immortals

A feminist who sneaks out of the house dressed as a man and a filmmaker who uses his camera as a weapon. Milo and Khalili are two young Iraqis who risk their lives for freedom and the future in an unusual and cinematic film about life in Baghdad.

Maja Tschumi / Switzerland & Iraq / 2024 / World Premiere

Life and Other Problems

The meaning of life, death and everything else? The possible answers are plenty in Max Kestner's adventurous film, which starts when the death of a giraffe at the Copenhagen Zoo goes viral from Hollywood to Chechnya.

Max Kestner / Denmark, Sweden & United Kingdom / 2024 / World Premiere

Motherboard

Joys, sorrows and life's great tragicomedy in a video diary about motherhood and much more, recorded over nearly 20 years by award-winning British director Victoria Mapplebeck. A deeply personal and completely unsentimental film.

Victoria Mapplebeck / United Kingdom / 2024 / World Premiere

Night of Nights

A nocturnal and semi-surrealistic science fiction portrait of life in two Asian megacities after 2020, shot at night with an hypnotic intensity and with the lens pointing to the future.

Truman / United States / 2024 / World Premiere

Once Upon a Time in a Forest

Biodiversity and generation gaps collide in a politically urgent and thoughtful film about two young activists' fight to save the vast Finnish forests. Is it still civil disobedience when you know you have both history and the future on your side?

Virpi Suutari / Finland / 2024 / World Premiere

Phantoms of the Sierra Madre

Three men embark on a boyhood dream of a Western adventure in search of a lost Apache tribe in Mexico, but end up in a very different place than they had planned. A thought-provoking film about being out of place - and about realising it along the way.

Håvard Bustnes / Norway, Finland, United States & Mexico / 2024 / World Premiere

The Black Garden

With cinematic brushstrokes and few words, a bleak story is told of three generations living in the shadow of the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. A brilliantly orchestrated study in how conflicts recreate themselves.

Alexis Pazoumian / France & Belgium / 2024 / World Premiere

The Flats

A run-down Belfast housing estate becomes a haunted inner landscape in a dark, cinematic film where the echoes of the conflict in Northern Ireland still reverberate in the corridors. An aging man on his final, existential mission confronts the ghosts of the past.

Alessandra Celesia / France, United Kingdom, Ireland & Belgium / 2024 / World Premiere

Two Strangers Trying Not To Kill Each Other

Life, death and making meaning are the heart of a beautiful and often very funny film about an aging couple who, after an accident, face the inevitability of impermanence and seek a deep peace in their relationship while they still can.

Jacob Perlmutter & Manon Ouimet / United Kingdom, Denmark & United States / 2024 / World Premiere

Wilfred Buck

An elderly member of the indigenous Cree people of Canada is our spiritual guide in a film that, like its charismatic protagonist, moves between past and present, and between Earth and the stars, to overcome the ghosts of colonisation.

Lisa Jackson / Canada / 2024 / World Premiere