Togashi is a naturally gifted runner who wins every race effortlessly. In sixth grade, he meets Komiya, who is full of determination but lacks technique, and takes him under his wing. Years later the two meet again as rivals on the track and reveal their true selves. Based on the popular manga, the director of the hit On-Gaku: Our Sound takes on the sports anime delivering a thrilling mix of competition and heart.

At 92 years old, legendary documentarian Frederick Wiseman (Titicut Follies) has made only a couple fiction films. His latest is one of those rare instances yet again, a collaboration with Nathalie Boutefeu who co-wrote and stars in this adaptation of letters and diary entries from Leo and Sophia Tolstoy.

Dialogue with Filmmaker Frederick Wiseman (virtual)

Reclaiming a collection of still and moving images taken by the IDF from the archive collection of the Palestine Research Center in Beirut in the summer of 1982, this poignant exploration of identity, memory, and resistance, uses a unique blend of documentary and experimental filmmaking techniques to create a counter-narrative to loss—a cinematic sabotage to restore looted memories.

The debut feature film of premier French provocateur Catherine Breillat, is an adaptation of her novel, Le soupirail. Fourteen-year-old Alice Bonnard as she returns home from boarding school on summer vacation. Burdened by boredom and her own burgeoning sexuality, Alice’s adolescent desires latch onto Jim, a surly young worker employed at her father’s sawmill.

A young teacher hopes to be appointed to Istanbul after mandatory duty at a small village. After a long time waiting he loses all hope of escaping from this gloomy life. However, his colleague Nuray helps him to regain perspective.

Musician Marc Ribot will perform a live score to accompany Yakov Protazanov’s pioneering 1924 sci-fi film Aelita: Queen of Mars, which is celebrating its centennial anniversary.

Loosely inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’ short story The Aleph, Iva Radivojević’s Aleph is an exploration of Borges’ obsession with the infinite. Hybridizing interviews and scripted content with local actors and performers spanning from Greece to Nepal, we witness the ways in which our actions, however small, have vast, unforeseeable consequences, forcing the audience to reckon with their own significance in the grand design of human experience.

Willie Stark is a dynamic backwoods personality who rides a wave of populist fervor straight into the governor's mansion, only to fall prey to the corruption he pledged to fight. Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Robert Penn Warren, this dynamic political noir took home the Academy Award for Best Picture.

In an old house in an unnamed Midwest town, former child-prodigy writer Barbara Fowler and her sci-fi author husband Richard are entwined in a love triangle with their pious maid Based on a true story and built around the labor of writing, Fairfield, Iowa-based director and screenwriter Graham Swon is currently adapting the film into a novel.

U.S. Premiere

Argentine actress Agustina Muñoz (playing a version of herself) travels to the Azores Islands to perform in a production of The Tempest with the Galician company Voadora. But upon her arrival she is thrown by the peculiar eccentricities of the inhabitants that make even checking into her hotel a perplexing affair. She soon finds Ariel, who serves as a guide on this island where the real and the imaginary, the dreamlike and the spectral, seem to merge in an ambiguous space. Born out of an exploration of Ariel from The Tempest, the film incorporates a variety of characters from Shakespeare's work, reflecting on the poetry, humanity, and depth of the texts.

This modern immigrant story is a re-imagining of a traditional medieval legend in which a Ghanaian couple goes to Europe to find a better life only to land in a refugee camp in Serbia. When Strahinja's wife, Ababuo, goes missing, he must go on an epic journey to get her back, risking his safety and freedom in an inhospitable and unwelcoming land.

In loving tribute to the late master filmmaker, we present one of his many adaptations. Band of Outsiders was adapted from the novel Fool's Gold by Dolores Hitchens. Franz (Sami Frey) and Arthur (Claude Brasseur) don’t have money, jobs, or prospects, but they do have a black convertible and a shared romantic interest in Odile (Anna Karina). When Odile lets slip that a stash of cash is ineptly hidden in the isolated villa where she lives, the men hatch a plan to take it for themselves.

An ex-Foreign Legion officer recalls his once glorious life leading troops in Djibouti.

Iowa City based artist Tracie Morris remixes and reimagines the narrative of the 2018 blockbuster film through a live, experimental, multi-voiced reading accompanying a visual-only screening of the film.

Dialogue with Artist Tracie Morris and cast

Dai's life is completely changed the day he discovers jazz. A dedicated saxophonist, he moves from his small town to Tokyo and starts a young trio, determined to be the best player in the world.

Adapted by Iowa Writers Workshop alum David Kajganich from the novel of the same name by Camille DeAngelis, this unconventional tale of first love follows Maren (Taylor Russell), a young woman learning how to survive on the margins of society, and Lee (Timothée Chalamet), an intense and disenfranchised drifter. The two misfits venture across the midwest, searching for identity and chasing beauty in a perilous world that cannot abide who they are — cannibals.

Dialogue with Producer / screenwriter David Kajganich and novelist Camille DeAngelis

When Margot (Emilia Jones), a college sophomore goes on a date with the older Robert (Nicholas Braun), she finds that IRL Robert doesn't live up to the Robert she has been flirting with over texts.

Legendary film director Werner Herzog will receive FilmScene’s Cinema Savant award and appear in conversation to discuss his life in film and will read from his soon-to-be-released autobiography, Every Man for Himself and God Against All: A Memoir.

During the 1800s, paroled Brazilian bandit Cobra Verde is sent to West Africa with a few troops to man an old Portuguese fort and to convince the local African ruler to resume the slave trade with Brazil.

Using footage, form, and structure from big budget action blockbusters of the past four decades to create a climate disaster film that is just as bombastic and ridiculous as the films it's sourced from while also speaking to our current climate crisis is no small task. But the Anti-banality Union have managed to do just that complete with an all-star cast.

Dialogue with Filmmaker from the Anti-banality Union

Touching on themes of sexuality and class in contemporary Japan, this deeply moving story follows fashion magazine editor Kosuke and personal trainer Ryuta whose romantic relationship flies in the face of their society's traditional values.

Adapted from Ottessa Moshfegh's celebrated novel of the same name, this dark tale of friendship and unrequited love in the 1964 Boston suburbs follows Eileen, a young secretary (Thomasin McKenzie) at a juvenile correctional facility, who is immediately taken by the new psychologist (Anne Hathaway).

Ernest and Celestine fight a fascist ban on music in this loveable follow up to the Oscar-nominated film based on characters from the French children's book series by Gabrielle Vincent.

Inspired by Terry Masear's book, Fastest Things on Wings: Rescuing Hummingbirds in Hollywood, this joyous documentary offers profound truths and moments of wonder in a deceptively simple story. In tending to fragile yet resilient hummingbirds, Masear finds a sense of healing from her own past.

The #1 podcast for the movie buff according to the New York Times, Chicago’s Filmspotting has been going strong since 2005. In this conversation, Adam and Sam share their picks for some of the best recent films adapted from fiction, plays, musicals, and more.

Dialogue with hosts Adam Kempenaar, Sam Van Hallgren

An adaptation of a modern cult classic (One Cut of the Dead) that itself was an adaptation of a play from the Academy Award winning director of The Artist, this bloody zom-com stays true to its predecessor, even casting one of the the actors from the original film in one of many meta shoutouts.

After discovering the 1950s case files of a trans woman forced to choose between honesty and access to care, a trans director and cast interpret archival transcripts as talk show in a meta examination of the power, privilege, and perils of visibility.

Dialogue with the Filmmaker (virtual)

Join AP as she tries to lift a curse in a 16mm bubblegum grindhouse adventure through sunny and romantic Trashtown, USA. This raucous odyssey reimagines The Fool’s Journey of the Major Arcana of the Tarot through a dreamy landscape of smut, filth and psychics as AP scooters her way deeper into the night colliding with a series of larger-than-life characters and absurd situations—a rich collage of humid industrial landscapes and pastel cotton candy skies.

Filmed in live action and rotoscoped to animation, this manga adaptation follows 11-year-old Karin who finds herself abandoned by her father in a small Japanese town. Her grandfather asks his jovial but rather capricious ghost cat, Anzu, to look after her. As their spirited personalities collide, sparks fly.

This adaptation of a novel by André Boucler features a foreign-legion Casanova – the “lady killer” Lucien Bourrache – who meets his match in the mysterious seductress Madeleine.

Nia DaCosta (Little Woods) writes/directs a provocative, modern reimagining of Henrik Ibsen’s classic play, Hedda Gabler. Hedda (Tessa Thompson) finds herself torn between the lingering ache of a past love and the quiet suffocation of her present life. Over the course of one charged night, long-repressed desires and hidden tensions erupt—pulling her and everyone around her into a spiral of manipulation, passion, and betrayal.

This cerebral drama follows Clarisse who has left her husband and children without explanation. In almost a dream-like haze, details begin to emerge as we cut back and forth between this portrait of a woman in crisis and the family she has left behind.

In Marseille, the gates and doors are multiplying. The streets are closing. The whole city is affected. Distrust and fear have taken hold everywhere. To free the city from this spreading evil, an unlikely Don Quixote and a scooter-riding Sancho Panza embark on an improbable journey, battling with the castles that are colonizing the city and its spirit in a modern docunarrative interpretation of Cervantes.

John Irving is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop who he won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Cider House Rules. Irving will join us in person for a screening and discussion of how his acclaimed book became an Oscar-winning script.

When Orsolya oversees the eviction of a local elderly man in Cluj, Transylvania, the unintended consequences come to shatter her and her understanding of her place in society. Spiraling into an existential crisis, she traverses the city, meeting with various people in her life — her husband, an old friend, her former student, a priest — to consider and reconcile her place in an increasingly maddening modern world in director Radu Jude’s (Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World) furious and hysterical reimagining of Roberto Rossellini's Europa '51.

Based on Arnold Wesker's 1957 play of the same name, this comedic drama follows a melting pot of restaurant workers at a Times Square restaurant. Amidst the pandemonium of the kitchen, an undocumented cook (Raúl Briones) falls for an American waitress (Rooney Mara) who coolly keeps their affair hidden until a shocking revelation.

Two billion years ahead of us, a future race of humans finds itself on the verge of extinction. Almost all that is left in the world are lone and surreal monuments, beaming their message into the wilderness.

A trio of fortysomething actors living in Mexico City who happen to be in a mundane love triangle navigate unorthodox auditions for the same film. In discussions they begin to reminisce on an acting workshop that leads into a unique retelling of Aladdin.

Adapted from the Hebrew language novel of the same name by Palestinian author Sayed Kashua, this gently comedic drama deals with charged issues of class and identity from the director of The Band's Visit as a bussinessman gets stuck in the Arabic village where he grew up when it is put under lockdown by Israeli soldiers without explanation.

The world is a perplexing, peaceful mystery to Amélie until a miraculous encounter with chocolate ignites her wild sense of curiosity. As she develops a deep attachment to her family’s housekeeper, Nishio-san, Amélie discovers the wonders of nature and deeper emotional truths of her family’s idyllic life as foreigners in post-war Japan. Adapted from the autobiographical novel by Amélie Nothomb, this tender, poignant and visually stunning story shows us the healing power of human connection.

An immersive journey through the New York music scene of the early 2000s. A new generation kick-started a musical rebirth for New York City that reverberated around the world.

Dialogue with Author Lizzy Goodman

An open-hearted, unrelentingly energetic orphan struggles to make the best of his life on the streets of Milan.

Dialogue with directors Mamadou Yattassaye (Vis-à-Vis) and Christopher Harris (Speaking in Tongues: Take One)

A Refocus Film Festival shorts block, featuring five selections that expand our understanding of art and adaptation—from gorgeous stop-motion animation to intimate family stories and experimental work.

Vis-à-Vis · Entre le Feu et le Clair de Lune · Inkwo For When the Starving Return · all the love i could handle · Speaking in Tongues: Take One

A Refocus Film Festival shorts block, featuring four selections that expand our understanding of art and adaptation, from directors Jean-Luc Godard, Anthony Ing, Elizabeth Hobbs, and Lonnie Holley & Cyrus Moussavi

A Refocus Film Festival Short Film Block featuring personal works from up-and-coming directors and anchored by the latest a piece by Leos Carax the reflects on his 40 year career while paying homage to Jean-Luc Godard.

When her parents split, Renko, a bright and energetic 6th grader, is left alone with her mother, Nazuna, in Kyoto. As Nazuna sets out new rules for their life together, Renko makes plans of her own, seeing to it that any changes happen on her terms. Adapted from Hiko Tanaka's novel, this gem of a film is a breathtaking masterpiece begging for rediscovery.

Freely inspired by the story of Oedipus, Angela Schanelec's latest is as terrifying as myth and as gentle as a folk song.

Oscar-nominated director RaMell Ross (Hale County This Morning, This Evening) poetically adapts Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel for his narrative debut. After being sent to the brutal Nickel Academy as punishment for a crime he didn’t commit, Elwood Curtis meets Turner, a kindred spirit who becomes his closest ally.

A woman (Amy Adams) pauses her career to be a stay-at-home mom, but soon her new domesticity takes a surreal turn when she believes she may be turning into a dog. Based on the novel by Iowa City's Rachel Yoder.

After being unemployed for several years, a man devises a unique plan to secure a new job: eliminate his competition. Director Park Chan-wook (Oldboy) adapts Donald Westlake's The Axe in this delirious and chilling satire of workplace politics.

An audio-driven VR experience that reveals and dramatizes the fundamental injustice of a world held hostage by nuclear weapons. Open to the public throughout the festival, reservations suggested, beginning October 6.

Dialogue with Advocate from Games for Change

Inspired by Bernard Cendron and Gérard Chenu's 1974 biography Onoda, seul en guerre dans la jungle and the life of Hiroo Onoda, the film follows a 22-year-old Japanese soldier as he retreats into the jungles after World War II has ended only to continue the fight for 10,000 days.

Adapted from the novel of the same title by Virginia Woolf and presented in a stunning 4K restoration, Sally Potter’s Orlando recounts 400 years in the life of a shapeshifting poet who assumes the guise of multiple genders.

Academic virtuoso turned filmmaker Paul B. Preciado's doc tells his and others' stories of transition through unique reenactments and visual interpretations of Virginia Woolf's Orlando.

George Orwell was one of the most radical and visionary authors of the 20th Century, whose 1940s novels, such as 1984 and Animal Farm, foretold a chilling, all-too-believable authoritarian future that has become scarily prescient in our modern era. Acclaimed director Raoul Peck (I Am Not Your Negro), working in collaboration with the Orwell Estate, seamlessly interweaves historical clips, readings from Orwell's diary, cinematic references, and dynamic modern day footage to craft not only a definitive portrait of the writer himself, but an entirely fresh take on how remarkably relevant and prophetic his work has become. Featuring award-winning actor Damian Lewis as the voice of Orwell.

Virtual dialogue with director Diana Allan 10/10

Partition fuses archival footage from the British occupation of Palestine with audio recorded of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon—tracing lines of continuity left by seismic displacement—and presents silent films gathered in imperial collections that hold histories that have barely been told and ways of colonial seeing that seep into the present. Presented with short film The Flowers Stand, Silently Witnessing (dir. The Panagopoulos, 2025, 17 mins)

In this unconventional prismatic, narrative, scripted, documentary, musical, metatextual hybrid rock-doc, Alex Ross Perry blends performance footage and interviews with a biopic, a staged jukebox musical, and a gallery exhibit to tell the story of the iconic ‘90s rock group Pavement.

Director Ira Sachs (Passages) freely and imaginatively recreates a conversation recorded in 1974 between photographer Peter Hujar (Ben Wishaw) and writer Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall). The wonderfully discursive exchange focused on a single 24 hours in the life of Hujar, the brilliant and famously uncompromising artist who was one of the most important figures in downtown New York’s legendary cultural scene of the 70s and 80s.

Peter Von Kant, a successful, famous director, lives with his assistant Karl, whom he likes to mistreat and humiliate. Through the great actress Sidonie, he meets and falls in love with Amir, a handsome young man of modest means.

High school seniors in the 1970s, Jun and Ibuki form a band, drawn to each other by their shared love of glam-rock. As the demands of adulthood loom, the young couple drifts apart. Years later, the band reunites. Will Jun and Ibuki reunite as well? Inspired by Kensuke Ide's 2021 concept album Strolling Planet ’74.

Maria (Tuesday Weld) is frustrated with her loveless marriage to an ambitious film director who would rather work on his career than their relationship and numbs herself with drugs and sex with strangers. Only her friendship with a sensitive gay movie producer (Anthony Perkins) offers a semblance of solace. But even that relationship proves to be fleeting amidst the empty decadence of Hollywood in this adaptation of the Joan Didion novel.

The first feature film to unpack the inimitable life and career of great American New Journalist Tom Wolfe is as illuminating as it is deeply personal, pulling back the curtain on the man in the white suit.

Director Alain Gomis recontextualizes the footage of Monk's time in Paris, before his evening concert, to give us a raw and intimate look at an artist who is in the grip of the violent factory of stereotypes from which he is trying to escape.

Virtual dialogue with director Sasha Wortzel 10/11

Director Sasha Wortzel reimagines environmentalist Marjory Stoneman Douglas’s celebrated book, The Everglades: River of Grass, which transformed the public’s understanding of the area from worthless swamps to an essential source of freshwater, enabling the ecosystem to endure, just barely, today.

Marina must travel to Spain’s Atlantic coast to obtain a signature for a scholarship application from the paternal grandparents she has never met. Stirring long-buried emotions, reviving tenderness, and uncovering unspoken wounds tied to the past, Marina pieces together fragmented memories of the parents she barely remembers. Using her mother's letters as a backbone to the story Carla Simón crafts a film with universal resonance through its exploration of family bonds.

North American Premiere

After schoolteacher Saïd Effendi and his family are evicted from their home, they must settle into their modest new neighborhood in 1950s Baghdad. Tensions come to boiling point when the Effendi children butt heads with the cobbler's kids. Adapted from the short story "Fight" by writer Edmond Sabri, this landmark work of Iraqi cinema takes influence from Italian neorealism to explore one man's struggle to balance parenting, community harmony, and personal ethics.

Pioneering director Sarah Maldoror presents a revolutionary bombshell–an electrifying chronicle of Angola’s awakening independence movement and a stirring hymn to those who risked everything in the fight for freedom. Based on the novella The Real Life of Domingos Xavier by José Luandino Vieira.

Set in rural California and Mexico’s Pacific coast, this documentary is a portrait of the unlikely friendship of two Mexican migrants, told within the frame of the dramatic clash between systemic forces and personal choices that envelop young, incarcerated men of color in America.

Dialogue with Director Rodrigo Reyes

When the community of Covas do Barroso, Portugal discovers that the British company Savannah Resources plans to build the largest open-pit lithium mine in Europe just a few meters from their homes, they decide to organize and expel them from their lands. Using the people as actors, incorporating footage from their protests, and playing their protest songs, director Paulo Carneiro worked with the villagers to document their resistance as a tool for intervention. U.S. PREMIERE

See this special screening before its official U.S. premiere! Kids bring your parents for this brand new animated film featuring a beloved storybook character come to life.

Dialogue with producer Halley Albert

Director Siobhan McCarthy takes inspiration from early 2000s teen rom-coms while flipping the heternormative script in an adaption of their unproduced play. During the last week of senior year Ethan and Alex pretend to be trans women in order to stop rumors that they are gay and get Alex closer to his crush, Sasha. When Ethan puts on a dress, she realizes she really is trans and comes out to Alex at the girl’s slumber party. But when Alex spills the beans, the girls turn against them, and the boys take inspiration to invade the locker room themselves. With their relationship on the rocks, the two best friends must reunite with each other and the girls whose trust they betrayed to stop the onslaught.

While making a delivery to the local convent, devoted father and coal merchant Bill Furlong (Cillian Murphy) makes a shocking discovery kept by the convent in his sleepy Irish town that threaten to disrupt his perception of the past and the peace of his community.

Subject explores the life-altering experience of sharing one’s life on screen profiling the participants of five acclaimed documentaries. The filmmakers allow the film’s collaborators to have the last word, contextualizing their own participation in the project. As tens of millions of people consume documentaries in an unprecedented, “golden era,” the film urges audiences to consider the impact on documentary participants.

Using footage from hundreds of films over decades of film history, this ghost story, of sorts, brings together an ensemble cast of actors with one thing in common: each is no longer alive. There exists only a single 35mm print of the film that is touring around the world and is meant to deteriorate with each projection.

Dialogue with Director Charlie Shackleton (virtual)

Young Edmond Dantès is arrested for a crime he did not commit. After a daring escape from his island prison he assumes the identity of the Count of Monte Cristo to exact his revenge in this thrilling adaptation that is Alexandre Dumas by way of Mission: Impossible.

In collaboration with Brazil’s indigenous Yanomami people, this documentary follows leader and shaman Davi Kopenawa as he fights to return the world to balance in closely observed rituals and trenchant comments on the ruthless logic of a materialistic outside culture. Based on the shaman's book of the same name, the film holds up a mirror to capitalist societies that threaten the survival of humanity as a whole.

Inspired by a postcard that French critic Serge Daney sent to director João César Monteiro mentioning John Wayne, this singular piece of cinema ostensibly sees a director (Monteiro) putting on a production of an adaptation of August Strindberg’s novel Inferno. But with writing credits given to Pier Paolo Pasolini, Teixeira de Pascoaes, and André Breton alongside Strindberg and Monteiro, the levels of adaptation are unwieldy to the point of irrelevance.

Jeanne (Clara Pacini), a 15-year-old runaway orphan, witnesses the shoot for a film adaptation of the fairy tale The Snow Queen and becomes fascinated by its star, Cristina (Marion Cotillard), an actress who is just as mysterious and alluring as the Queen she is playing. When her fascination becomes all consuming, Jeanne cons her way in front of the camera, doing anything she can to get closer to the object of her desire.

A compilation film designed to evoke nostalgia for the shared entertainment experiences of early baby boomers, including clips from television programs and B-movies of the 1950s and 1960s, as well as commercials, newsreels, blooper outtakes, satiric short films and promotional and government films.

A fallen aristocrat's crumbling opulence is on full display in this incandescent depiction of the clash between tradition and modernity, one of the defining works of the master filmmaker Satyajit Ray.

An examination of the perception and processing of the phenomenon of mass destruction of the German civilian population in European post-war literature.

In this adaptation of Stephen King's horror story, a family heads to an isolated hotel for the winter where a sinister presence influences the father into violence, while his psychic son sees horrific forebodings from both past and future.

Dialogue with Noma Dixon (daughter of director Ivan Dixon)

Based on the best-selling novel of the same name by Sam Greenlee, director Ivan Dixon explored what he considered to be “a fantasy” as an African-American male in the United States with the deeply complex story of Dan Freeman, the fictional mild-mannered first black CIA agent, who uses his specialized paramilitary training to organize a black revolution—one of the most daring political films of the 1970s that remains just as significant today.

A young boy dodges monsters, warriors, and natural forces on a rescue mission to save his surrogate father, who has fallen under a mysterious spell while searching for a legendary textile. In this latest film from China’s indie animation auteur, Busifan, traditional ink wash paintings become a vivid landscape for a colorful and fantastical adventure.

The story of Eugenie, an esteemed cook, and Dodin, the fine gourmet she has been working for over the last 20 years.

Orson Welles’ thrilling and cinematic adaptation of Franz Kafka’s novel follows Josef K (Anthony Perkins), a meek bank clerk as he is accused of an unspecified crime. Forced to navigate an increasingly hostile bureaucracy as he seeks both answers and the opportunity to clear his name, Josef K’s reality crumbles around him.

Armed only with the family video camera, Suha captures the Second Intifada from within the West Bank at the start of the 2000s. Woven into her images of family life under occupation, Suha makes promises to God to spare her family. Seventeen years later, her filmmaker son Yousef finds the footage and assembles it, excavating his own forgotten childhood in the process.

Do you remember making sure to power down and unplug your computer on December 31, 1999? Created using entirely archival footage, this documentary travels back to the turn of the millennium, showcasing a panoply of eccentric characters and all manner of hilariously dated clips.

Based on the beloved novella by Iowa Writers' Workshop alum Denis Johnson, Train Dreams is the moving portrait of Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton), whose life unfolds during an era of unprecedented change in early 20th century America.

Repurposing archival footage from personal recordings and news reports and incorporating diary entries of the time as voiceover, this city symphony starts with the arrival of the Beatles in New York for their August 1965 concert at Shea Stadium. But as the frame of reference steadily broadens, adjacent realities of 1965 are juxtaposed—the New York World’s Fair, the Watts riots filtering through from the East Coast on television.

Ubu, a crass duke, murders King Wenceslau at the suggestion of his scheming wife. When Ubu takes the throne, Poland plunges into chaos, with the country at the mercy of Ubu’s whims and eccentricities. Paulo Abreu’s adaptation of Alfred Jarry’s turn-of-the-century satire, rendered in stark black and white, captures the cruelty and irrational behavior living at the core of fascism. U.S. PREMIERE

Inspired by and featuring clips from Daniel Herbert's Videoland: Movie Culture at the American Video Store, this entirely archival documentary takes us on a journey into the socio-cultural hub, consumer mecca, and source of existential dread of the video rental store through the films of the era with narration from Maya Hawke—diving into a lost phenomenon that forever changed the way we interact with movies. With footage culled from hundreds of sources (from TV commercials to blockbuster films), director Alex Ross Perry (Pavements, Refocus '24) tells the story of an industry's glorious, confusing, novel, sometimes seedy, but undeniably seismic impact on American movie culture.

When Jason isn't the only beast in the woods, no one is safe. An unauthorized fiction film for Friday the 13th fans.

A naive young man witnesses an escalation of violence in his small hometown following the arrival of a mysterious circus attraction.

Emilia Jones stars as the titular translator who leaked classified documents leading to a 63 month prison sentence in this humorous and heartfelt inside look into a public figure known for one courageous act and a funny name. Susanna Fogel (Cat Person) directs this adaptation of Kerry Howley's 2017 profile for New York Magazine.

Footage of life in Gaza from 2001 of a search for a former prison mate from 1989 was recently rediscovered. The search resulted in an unexpected road trip with Hasan, a local guide whose fate remains unknown. Refocus Film Festival alum Kamal Aljafari (A Fidai Film) transforms this forgotten footage into a cinematic reflection on memory, loss and the passage of time, capturing a Gaza of the past and lives that may never be found again.

Dialogue with director Ian Bell

An immersive archival documentary that reanimates the clash between the then-emerging World Trade Organization (WTO) and the more than 40,000 people who took to the streets of Seattle to protest its impacts on the environment, human rights, and labor. The protesters were met with extreme violence by a militarized police force, an all-too-fitting way to usher in a new century—one that is now defined by US failure to address climate change and increasing state aggression.

A corrupt politician is cursed with impotence on the night of his third wedding after embezzling 100 tons of rice.

Using a unique, text-centered approach, Matías Piñeiro adapts Sea Foam, a chapter of Cesare Pavese’s Dialogues With Leucò. Exploring heartbreak and desire through a conversation between the poet Sappho and Britomartis, who threw herself into the sea to escape the advances of a man, Piñeiro creates a unique cinematic hybrid, asking the audience to read the film by filming both the act of reading and images associated with the story.

Dialogue with director Charlie Shackleton

Refocus Film Festival alum Charlie Shackleton (The Afterlight) tells the story of what might have been in this wholly original, self-aware cinematic work that cheekily indicts the true crime boom by putting it under the microscope, detailing what he would have done with his failed adaptation of a Zodiac Killer book he found on Amazon. Over vacant Bay Area landscapes, stylised re-enactments, and clips from recent true crime hits, his wry voiceover conjures the unrealised project in real time, describing beat-by-beat how he imagined it playing out. The result is an object lesson in creative frustration—and a hilarious critique of a genre at its saturation point.