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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.