Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari often says, “an image lasts longer than human lives”. His films and those of most of his fellow filmmakers in this competition make memories, cross referencing tales from the past and the present to give us a dizzying analysis of history.
In Kamal Aljafari's gripping 2002 documentary With Hasan in Gaza, finally edited and released in 2025, the colours and the smiles are clearly present, although already wounded by history and hit full force by the situation in Gaza which darkens daily.
Another cruel fate is that of Ukraine for whom the end of the conflict, to which we have all become accustomed, is still so uncertain. However, cinema continues to record the upheavals and the memories. In Under the Volcano, a Ukrainian family's peaceful holiday abroad is disrupted by the sudden outbreak of war, revealing each family member's fears and frailties when faced with the unimaginable. The harsh reality of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict and its impact on people’s day-to-day lives is also the subject of Militantropos, a powerful manifesto of the Tabor collective.
We return to the Middle East with The President’s Cake in which a birthday cake for the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein becomes for young Lamia a matter of survival and emancipation. From one personality cult to another, we move to Paraguay where Alfredo Stroessner’s dictatorship (one of the longest recorded) is examined in the richly detailed and erudite documentary Under the Flags, the Sun which uses archive images to look back over the dark times of the regime and the complacency of foreign powers. Back to fiction and tales of brothers with a sudden change of fate. My Father’s Shadow follows a father and his two sons through an eye-opening journey of emancipation in a Lagos in the grip of political unrest, while Edge of Night portrays, in the style of a thriller, the conflict between two brothers who are officers in a deeply destabilized Turkey.
Imago is a documentary following the journey home of an exiled Chechen who inherits land, a tale of memory and upheaval. Another story of memory and trauma is In the Land of Arto, in which Céline travels through Armenia, the country of her dead husband, encountering the ghosts of a troubled past. Lost Land, another story of exile, follows the perilous journey of two children from the persecuted Muslim minority, the Rohingya. Finally, the animated film The Square takes us to the heart of totalitarian North Korea through an impossible love story.
Here’s wishing you a great festival!
