In 1937, the Nazi regime launched its war on modernity, branding artists like Picasso, Chagall, Van Gogh, and Matisse as "degenerate". Their works were banned, destroyed, or mocked in grotesque exhibitions, while Aryan ideals were glorified in state-sponsored shows. Framed by a major new exhibition at the Musée Picasso in Paris, the documentary revisits this ideological assault through rare footage, suppressed artworks, and the voices of curators and survivors. It broadens its scope to music, literature, and architecture, exposing how the Reich targeted all forms of dissenting expression. A timely meditation on repression, resistance, and the enduring fight for creative freedom.

What if the chicken left an industrial farm, hitched a ride on a truck, evaded the jaws of a hungry fox, and then crossed the road? What would happen next? György Pálfi's Hen answers this age-old question, giving his feathered leading lady the chance to tell her side of the story. Co-written with frequent collaborator Zsófia Ruttkay, this heartfelt, often humorous adventure of a resilient hen is entwined with a darker story, as our heroine finds that the pecking order applies not only to chickens, but to humans too. Navigating a Greek seaside village amidst the migrant crisis and investigating various instances of ‘fowl' play, she encounters the cruelty and kindness that humans extend to other animals, and to each other. The film succeeds due to Pálfi's genuine connection to his plucky protagonist - played by eight real-life chickens. Hen uses no CGI, AI, or special effects to construct the chicken's point-of-view, providing an unexpectedly intimate look at interspecies connection. The egg may come first in Hen, but it raises another important question: is any creature truly free to live on their own terms, unbridled by the events around them? - Madison Marshall

Jim Anderton has said he did not leave the Labour Party, rather, all of his colleagues did. The left-wing politician was a successful candidate for Sydenham in Christchurch, before his lone opposition to the Fourth Labour Government's free-market reforms led him to resign in 1989, and lead Alliance, a merger of four smaller parties. Through a wide lens on the era, we see how a more viciously competitive political environment began to emerge in New Zealand in the ‘90s along with the electoral system transition to MMP, as smaller parties including New Zealand First and ACT jostled for influence — a more pressurised climate that, in the wake of a family tragedy, prompted Anderton to temporarily step back from politics and hand the party reins to Sandra Lee, also featured prominently. This is an essential span of Anderton's time in politics, from the weaponised scandal of 1976's Moyle Affair, to 9/11, when he was Acting Prime Minister, and the Christchurch earthquake, which upended his 2011 mayoral run. - Carmen Gray

Indie filmmaking duo Kelly O'Sullivan and Alex Thompson follow up their award-winning feature debut Ghostlight with a bittersweet coming-of age-story steeped in the pre-social media innocence of the early 2000s. Mouse follows the story of best friends Callie and Minnie. Callie is the golden child of their suburban American community and a prodigal theatrical talent. Minnie, by contrast, lives a much quieter, constrained life, shaped by the responsibilities of a working-class household led by her solo mother. As the pair approach their final year of high school, their relationship is suddenly upended, leaving Minnie adrift in unfamiliar social and emotional territory. Struggling to find her footing, Minnie struggles with the vulnerabilities of teenage life, and in the process, forms an unexpected and deeply affecting bond with Callie's mother, Helen. Voted second runner-up for the popular Panorama Audience Award[KP1.1] at this year's Berlin International Film Festival, Mouse is a heartfelt, and tender indie gem. - Heperi Mita

When a charming house guest (Galitzine) arrives at a remote castle, the delicate dynamic between a neglectful husband, his innocent bride Cherry (Monroe), and their devoted maid Hero (Corrin), is thrown into chaos.

When impressionable 15-year-old runaway Jeanne (Clara Pacini) stumbles upon a soundstage, she's just looking for a warm place to rest. Realising the film in progress is an adaptation of her favourite story, Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen, Jeanne takes on the identity of another girl and slowly embeds herself into the production. Enchanted by mysterious lead actress Cristina (Marion Cotillard), Jeanne is drawn further and further into the film's icy realm. Seductive and otherworldly, this mesmeric crystalline fairytale plays out in the bitter mountain cold of a remote village in 1960s France. Known for her distinctive, sinister fables, director Lucile Hadžihalilović swirls around themes of artifice, corrupted desire, feminine obsession and false idols. The film premiered at the Berlinale where it was praised for its dazzling costuming and production design, grand cinematography and textured electronic score. Featuring a cameo from Hadžihalilović's partner, filmmaker Gaspar Noé, as the director of the film-within-a-film, this dark fantasy is a silvery meditation on trauma, artifice and sacrifice that is as sensual and hypnotic as The Ice Queen herself.

Set in Tangier, the story centers on an aging Spanish woman who has lived in the same apartment for decades - in Calle Málaga (Malaga Street). The titular street feels like a character in this story - every beautiful shot an intimate exploration of long-established lives, loves, and connections with the residents and the buildings themselves. Touzani captivates all senses in this deliberately paced, lush love letter to her home city. Life-long Tangier resident María Ángeles-Muñoz (played with a blend of fiery defiance, charm, and intimacy by an exquisite Carmen Maura) has her world turned upside down when her daughter arrives and gives her the choice of moving to Madrid with her, or being moved into a senior care facility. Maria soon finds herself out of place in a world that isn't hers. Full of defiance, she finds her way back, only to find an empty apartment and her lifetime of precious keepsakes sold to a local antiques dealer. As she finds ways to earn money to buy her belongings back, María leans on old friendships (including an amusing silent performance from María Alfonsa Rosso as Sister Josefa), and discovers unexpected new bonds that change the path ahead.

Mary is a slacker living with her mother and still trying to figure out what to do with her life in New Zealand suburbia. After an awkward sexual encounter with her neighbour, she suddenly finds herself in the midst of an accelerated alien pregnancy! What follows is a classic kiwi gross out take on pregnancy and parenthood that is not afraid to get weird, featuring standout performances from Hannah Lynch (Petrol) as the reluctant mother to be, Arlo Green (Workmates) as the hapless half-alien baby-daddy, and Yvette Parsons (Notes From a Fish) as Mary's overbearing mother. Coming off a premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in the Midnight Madness section, the debut from NZ filmmaking duo, THUNDERLIPS, builds on the concept of their earlier short film Help! I'm Alien Pregnant (Sitges, 2024). The full-length feature ramps up their signature boisterous energy, exploring the pitfalls of hosting a parasitic life form and the possibilities of what comes next. Complete with an arsenal of eye-popping special effects that harken back to the golden age of body horror, Mum, I'm Alien Pregnant is an unforgettable cinematic experience best enjoyed with a crowd. - Jordan Salomen

The marriage of Derya and Aziz is under pressure after losing their jobs because of state arbitrariness and moving to Istanbul to live with Aziz's parents. They and their 13-year-old daughter Ezgi have to redefine their way of life.

Probably the only documentary to ever draw thematic connections between Hallmark Christmas movies, affordable housing in New York City, and tattoo preservation after death, The History Of Concrete plays like a welcome continuation of John Wilson's delightfully peculiar HBO series How To With John Wilson. As with that Emmy-nominated show, Wilson here becomes interested in a seemingly rudimentary topic but then plunges down diverse rabbit holes, finding unlikely through-lines that eventually develop into something far more grand and strange. Though ostensibly a comedy that spotlights the bizarreness of ordinary people, the documentary is never snide. Wilson finds himself hanging out on a low-budget film shoot, talking to an ageing singer whose neighbourhood is being affected by pollution, or filming a unique 3100-mile race that takes place on only one city block, and always approaches these different worlds with curiosity. As a result, the people Wilson meets open him up to new ways of thinking, and the longer he spends with them, the richer the conversations become.

After skipping school and setting his pet rodent free in the woods outside his town of Lisieux, Normandy, Otto jumps from a high bridge into the river below. The backpack that was presumably meant to help him drown is quickly separated from him, and instead of continuing with his death wish, the poor, drenched lad gets back up at the rocky shore, contemplating his next move. While walking her dog, Lena spots Otto on one of his nightly bin raids for food, tracking him to the abandoned house with barely working facilities. This friendship between two lonely youngsters gradually blossoms into a romance; their plan to hide out inevitably turns into one in which they both escape across the country, never revealing the truth behind Otto's disappearance. Goodbye Cruel World is a remarkably assured debut feature overall, ending on an especially beautiful note both visually and aurally — composer Arnaud Toulo's melodies are a consistent highlight of the film's texture. Director Felix de Givry shows great promise as a maker of intimate, humanist works, where troubled souls are swept along by the currents of time as they try to make sense of themselves and their world. - Josh Slater-Williams, IndieWire

Renowned Icelandic poet and author Andri Snær Magnason is chasing something elusive. As the glacial ice of his homeland melts, he constructs a cinematic time capsule to hold onto this moment and send it to the future, before everything he loves slips away. Using his own collected archives, his grandparents' photographs, and films, as well as traditional songs and folktales, Andri interlaces his family's story with that of the land around him. From Academy Award®-nominated director Sara Dosa, TIME AND WATER is a universal reflection on the power of home and what it means to be alive amid profound epochal change.

Olga (Teresa Sánchez, Tótem) enjoys her life of solitude in an apartment block in Mexico City. When she runs into financial hardship, she reluctantly rents her spare room to an out-of-towner who wants to be close to his wife who is undergoing chemotherapy. Unbeknownst to Olga, Tulio (Hugo Ramírez) is sneaking his son into the flat, a well-meaning yet naive nine-year-old, Cristian (Bastián Escobar). Despite her initial reservations, Olga forms a bond with the boy when their lives intersect in a surprising and meaningful way. Director Fernando Eimbcke combines a nostalgic black-and-white aesthetic with the immediacy of youth in Flies, which largely assumes Cristian's innocent point-of-view as he tries to make sense of his mother's illness. Often dismissed as a nuisance, he finds solace in imagination and play. Whereas Olga enjoys the predictability and slow pace of Sudoku, Cristian manages his rising anxiety by combatting monsters in a two-bit arcade game reminiscent of Space Invaders. Olga and Cristian's friendship proves age is but a number - Flies is a testament to finding solace in life's tedium and triumphs through genuine human connection. - Madison Marshall

A Circassian-American teen in New Jersey balances working at his family's struggling ethnic diner with his wrestling aspirations, until his father's risky decision forces him to face harsh realities and grow up quickly.

Set in Indonesia's most dangerous prison, with one wing populated by violent criminals and an oppressive security team that is led by a tyrannical warden and another wing that houses politicians and white collar criminals who can do as they please. When an invisible presence starts to brutally murder the occupants and turn them into morbid works of art, rival gangs and outcasts are forced to work together and overcome their differences to decipher the entity's origins and wage war against the demon. An intense and unpredictable genre mash up featuring top notch martial arts sequences, spontaneous dance battles and extreme gore that masterfully blends horror, social commentary and pitch-black comedy. Instead of just flirting with extremes, Ghost in the Cell dives headfirst, making it one of the wildest film experiences of 2026. Indonesian director, Joko Anwar, ingeniously weaves biting political satire into his genre blend, using narrative film as a vehicle to critique capitalist corruption and taking the audience with him on a journey into the darkness that is an unsettling but hilarious reflection of modern society. - Jordan Salomen

Chen Emilie Yan puts in a fierce performance as a German-Korean prosecutor turned vigilante in a sharp, smart and of-the-minute legal thriller. Seyo entered her profession with an idealistic drive to fight far-right hate crime. All that is turned on its head when she is herself targeted in a racist attack. She soon has to admit that the country's public prosecution service is not as clean and objective as it likes to appear. Ignoring orders to stay off the case, she secretly investigates. As she fights to bring an assailant to trial and his wider network to light, she is confronted with the complicity of a criminal justice body she invested her life in, which has been shielding perpetrators in plain sight. This meticulously researched and gripping Berlinale audience favourite is a damning and timely indictment of a Germany that has made public noise of denazifying society after its darkest wartime shame only to allow extremists to infiltrate back into its institutions of power. Director Faraz Shariat, gifted with a flair for drama, infuses courtroom processes with an edge-of-the-seat intensity.

In January 2025, filmmaker Tamra Davis was preparing to evacuate her home as the Palisades wildfires raged, when she found a box of Sony Hi8 camcorder tapes she had shot in the mid-90s on a tour of Australia and Southeast Asia with bands in the Summersault festival lineup. Davis, a prolific music video director for Sonic Youth and others, was married to Mike D of the Beastie Boys at the time, and her close relationships with the artists grant an ease of access back-stage and in hotel rooms beyond the barrier of fame. Between concert footage, Davis and Bikini Kill frontwoman Kathleen Hanna conduct candid interviews with the likes of Kim Gordon, Adam Horowitz, Dave Grohl, and Stephen Malkmus on what they are reading, their personal mottos and feelings about live performance. The material has been kept unpolished, a nostalgic trace of a moment when MTV was catapulting alternative music into the mainstream, but a more posed celebrity culture of stylists and social media had not yet taken hold, and the era was vivid with punk-edged energy and possibility.

The Afghan filmmaker Shahrbanoo Sadat is a warm and approachable presence as writer, director and star of No Good Men - a tale of Afghanistan's women in 2021 as they are about to be surrendered to the Taliban with the withdrawal of US troops. Sadat is Naru, a woman effectively separated from her creep of a husband, burdened with sole charge of their son as well as being the only earner. She is a camera operator at a Kabul TV station; she has liberated friends with western attitudes - one cheerfully gives her a vibrator as a present. When ordered to do fatuous vox-pops about Valentine's Day, Naru does a great job; women open up to her about the awfulness of their men in a way they never would to a man. Her colleague Quodrat (Anwar Hashimi), once icily misogynist, is impressed by her professional abilities, and develops a new, extra-marital admiration for Naru.. Shrewd and pointed… This is a contemporary romance and the kind of film that tells you things about Afghanistan that aren't covered in our own nightly news. - Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

Turn-of-the-century Viennese writer Arthur Schnitzler's sharp, psychological novellas of desire and delusion have barely aged a day. Stanley Kubrick adapted one for Eyes Wide Shut, and now another has been updated to present-day New York City by American director Kent Jones: the Austrian's posthumously published story Late Fame. Willem Dafoe is brilliant as Ed Saxberger, an unassuming post office worker. He is approaching his twilight years, but still has a glint of the street smart, intellectual edge that coloured his youth as a poet in the downtown scene. The slender book of verse he once published is now all but forgotten, until a handful of students desperate to start their own movement seek him out. What follows is a bittersweet, unpredictable satire of the literary pretensions of a new, moneyed crowd pushing up rents and hollowing out culture. And, through the dramatic but fragile Gloria (a show-stealing Greta Lee), an associate of the group that sparks Saxberger's curiosity, it is also an ode to the rarest, most unexpected kind of creative light, in perpetual, defiant renewal. - CARMEN GRAY

A young Nigerian art collective creates DIY sci-fi films with homemade equipment, documenting their lives while exploring fantastical alternate realities. An energetic celebration of creativity and resourceful storytelling.

Polish Director, Jan Komasa (Corpus Christi NZIFF 2020), whips up a tense psychological thriller with a dark undercurrent of British humor as we're introduced to Tommy (Anson Boon), a rebellious teen and a narcissistic criminal. Tommy is on a path of destruction, amplified by drugs, alcohol and equally volatile friends, until one day, he wakes up in a basement with a chain around his neck. His captors are a clean-cut middle-class family with a goal of rehabilitating him a-la-Clockwork Orange, using videos of his own crimes and motivational content alongside classic literature. Stephen Graham (Adolescence) gives a thrilling and nuanced performance as Chris, the head of the family and a man obsessed with morality, even at the cost of the sanity of his family, dealing out absurd punishments to Tommy mixed with moments of tenderness. As the film progresses, we're left to wonder if Tommy really is capable of change (or merely playing the part to please his captors) and to ponder what trauma has caused his captors to embark on this moral crusade of madness.

Russia, in the early 1990's is the aftermath of the USSR's collapse. In a new world that promises freedom and flirts with chaos, a young artist-turned-TV producer, Vadim Baranov, unexpectedly becomes the spin doctor of a promising member of the FSB (ex-KGB), Vladimir Putin.