Drone

Short

Fanny is a bookseller by day and a soft-hearted person the rest of the time. In love with her friend Louise and to repress the sadness of this impossible love, she has a series of one-night stands with uninteresting men. One evening, she invites Louise to a literary gathering she's hosting. Fanny may be about to have a bingo.

Short

At nightfall, the boxers of the La Frapppppe collective are training in a park in Marseille. Bodies are set into motion and start shaping a community of gestures, sensations, and emotions.

Short

An African musician meets a charming courtesan in a small French seaside town for a rare and secret moment of intimacy.

DocumentaryVIRTUAL EXCLUSIVE

Is intimacy coordination censorship? Does it kill the magic? In France, where having an intimacy coordinator is the exception, Paloma Garcia Martens is helping creators to privilege process as much as results. Together, striving for feminist content where “bodies, breath, touch” lead to connection, not exploitation. Scenes of intimacy are a stunt like any other, capable of great danger and lasting harm. But intimacy coordination requires precious hours, and even those on board can feel tested by the process. Edith Chapin’s documentary is a searching portrait of the profession, featuring a wide array of women in the TV/film industry—everyone from the director and actresses of the queer TV show Split in Paris, which features a particularly novel squirt scene, to the intimacy coordinators of Sex Education and Bridgerton in London. These women listen to and debate with one another about what’s being transformed because of their influence and what’s changing far too slowly. Leading the push for an industry with fewer “weird stratagems” and outright lies, and more modesty garments, more consensus. Hoping to shape not only how bodies are filmed, but how we, as a society, see them. Also in this programme : SPLIT/ ÉPISODES 1 + 2 IRIS BREY | FRANCE | 2023 | 37 MIN | FRENCH EST On the set of a film, Anna, a 30-year-old stuntwoman, falls in love with the star she is body double for. Will Ana—who thought she was happy in her relationship—have the courage to come out of her heterosexual shell to confront this overwhelming desire?

FeatureVIRTUAL EXCLUSIVE

FINNISH • FRENCH ST | A 15-year-old Finnish girl—and her older incarnation—ponder the resemblance between first love and nuclear explosions under a sky heavy with Chernobyl clouds. Befriending a loner who seems radioactive to others, Mariia tries to keep their connection from melting down, basking in the light of devotion, however blinding. By-the-book Mariia (played at different ages by Rebekka Baer and Laura Birn) comes from a close-knit but struggling household, her mother affected by a mysterious cancer. Her situation is contrasted with that of self-possessed Mimi (Anni Iikkanen), whose home is blighted by alcoholism and neglect, its wallpaper peeling. But, swimming beneath crystalline surfaces and entwined in one another’s arms, they try to drown out the ills of the world. Crimped hair and oversized sweaters capturing the innocent 80s bubble Mariia thrives in and the euphoria Mimi strives to inhabit, despite the heaviness of experience. Guided by its source material, the 2011 novel by Vilja-Tuulia Huotarinen, and inflected with the shifting haze of ennui and energy that is a hallmark of Sofia Coppola’s star-dusted tragedies, Inari Niemi’s film is a tonally precise mood piece about girlhood in all its ominous, scintillating paradoxes.

Short

PART OF THE PROGRAMME: LA RÉVOLUTION DES COORDINATEURS D'INTIMITÉ (SEX IS COMEDY) On the set of a film, Anna, a 30-year-old stuntwoman, falls in love with the star she is body double for. Will Ana—who thought she was happy in her relationship—have the courage to come out of her heterosexual shell to confront this overwhelming desire?

FeatureVIRTUAL EXCLUSIVE

DUTCH • ENGLISH ST | Capturing the recklessness of youth and the excitement of newfound sexual liberties in sensuous black-and-white cinematography, Dennis Alink’s Out offers up a vivid and tender tale of being young and gay. Tom (Bas Keizer, in a star-making performance) and Ajani (an effervescent Jefferson Yaw Frempong-Manson) are closeted secondary school sweethearts who yearn for life outside of their small-minded, rural community in the Netherlands. Their solution is Amsterdam, where the queer scene is thriving and they can work at their dreams of becoming filmmakers. Quickly falling into the Dutch capital’s gay nightlife offers the pair some initial thrills: cheeky games of Never Have I Ever, limo rides across the city, eye-opening trips to the bathhouse. But the challenges quickly follow, pushing them to separately question: “Who am I, and where do I fit in?” Recalling such classic monochromatic films about wayward youth as The Last Picture Show and Gus Van Sant’s Mala Noche, Alink and his queer collaborators present a lived-in, piercing portrait that proves coming out isn’t just a pronouncement of one’s sexuality, it’s a simultaneously joyous and heartbreaking journey of self-discovery.

Short

A very powerful short animated film on what it means to be a queer person in a cisheteronormative society.

Feature

Welcome to the French commune of Saint-Martial, where nightmares or sprouting mushrooms may spill your secrets. Returning for a funeral, Jérémie is greeted with the rough touches of a childhood companion and accused of exploiting a widow’s grief, sending him down an ever-contorting path of pansexual frenzy and escalating dread. At first, Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) is friendly and inquisitive, avoiding the increasingly unhinged Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand) but bonding over an alluring photo of the deceased with the widow (the legendary Catherine Frot) and cozying up to a local loner (David Ayala), pastis flowing. Soon, however, a disappearance sets him on edge, invasive police and a perceptive abbot (Jacques Develay) ratcheting up his paranoia. Allies appearing where he least expects them. So that, increasingly, it is unclear whether the village wants him excised or enmeshed there indefinitely. Sprung from the singular genius of Alain Guiraudie, known for his modern-day fairy tales with wicked senses of humour, Miséricorde is as genre-hopping as it is morally ambiguous—it’s Ripley meets The End of Eddy with the psychodrama of Saltburn. A riveting tale of the lengths we go to for love.

Short

During the summer, three friends meet on a wild Mediterranean island. Maxime is madly in love with Yann. Carried by this consuming desire, Maxime throws himself in an intense romantic quest, swaying between dream and reality, at the risk of losing himself.