While this year’s Festival is rich with new works by established masters, discovering the work of emerging talents is part of the discovery, too. These debuts and second features indicate that new cinema talents are thriving worldwide and hold great promise.
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Aloys
Directed by Tobias Nölle
Aloys, a reclusive private investigator, experiences life from a safe distance. After a night of heavy drinking, he wakes up …
Apprentice
Directed by Junfeng Boo
Aiman, an ambitious 28-year-old correctional officer, is transferred to the Singapore territory’s top prison. He strikes up a friendship with …
Barakah Meets Barakah
Directed by Mahmoud Sabbagh
In Saudi Arabia, physical contact and meeting the opposite sex in public without a chaperone are prohibited, which makes this …
Clash
Directed by Mohamed Diab
Set in the midst of the 2013 riots in Cairo pitting Egypt’s pro-military supporters against the Muslim Brotherhood of the …
Hedi
Directed by Mohamed Ben Attia
Resigned to his fate, Hedi is stuck selling cars, a job he hates, and engaged to a woman he barely …
Indivisible
Directed by Edoardo De Angelis
Indivisible is a beguiling poetic fairy tale that plays with the idea that we carry our loved ones with us …
Kati Kati
Directed by Mbithi Masya
Kaleche, a young woman with no memory of her life or death, wanders into the otherworldly village of Kati Kati, …
Kills on Wheels
Directed by Attila Till
In this exuberant coming-of-age crime comedy, two aspiring comic book artists with disabilities become embroiled in the schemes of an …
Life After Life
Directed by Zhang Hanyi
A young boy becomes possessed by his late mother, whose spirit has wandered Shanxi Province’s disintegrating cave homes for years. …
Life+1Day
Directed by Saeed Roustayi
Somayeh is at a loss. Her only desire is to leave her family and take her life into her own …
Nakom
Directed by T.W. Pittman, Kelly Daniela Norris
When his father suddenly dies, Iddrisu, a promising medical student, leaves the university in the Ghanaian capital of Accra to …
Old Stone
Directed by Johnny Ma
Chinese taxi driver Lao Shi is thrown into a Kafkaesque nightmare where no charitable act goes unpunished. When a drunken …
One Week and a Day
Directed by Asaph Polonsky
Eyal and Vicky spend a week sitting shiva after the death of their 25-year-old son. While Vicky returns to teaching, …
Panamerican Machinery
Directed by Joaquín Del Paso
Panamerican Machinery may be the happiest place in the world to work. Workers and management get along like one tight-knit …
Parting
Directed by Navid Mahmoudi
Navid Mahmoudi’s debut feature is a migration story that has not only war, but love at its core. Fereshteh and …
Rara
Directed by Pepa San Martín
Twelve-year-old Sara has a warm and supportive home with her sister, mother, and her mother’s partner, and is taking her …
Suntan
Directed by Argyris Papadimitropoulos
Forty-something doctor Kostis arrives for his new posting on the island of Antiparos during the quiet winter months, which suits …
Ten Years
Directed by Ng Ka-Leung, Jevons Au, Chow Kwun-Wai, Fei-Pang Wong, Kwok Zune
Despite being branded a “virus of the mind” by China’s state organ Global Times, Ten Years won Best Film at …
The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki
Directed by Juho Kuosmanen
Winner of the Prix Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival and this year’s Finnish Oscar submission, Kuosmanen’s debut …
The Son of Joseph
Directed by Eugène Green
Wry visual humor, playful religious subtext, and a note of farce inform a coming of age story that takes aim …
The Stopover
Directed by Delphine Coulin, Muriel Coulin
Aurore and Marine are given three days of “decompression leave” with their unit, among tourists, at a five-star resort in …
The Women’s Balcony
Directed by Emil Ben Shimon
Emil Ben Shimon’s feature debut is a comical feminist narrative about finding the right path to happiness and the subjectivity …
Wùlu
Directed by Daouda Coulibaly
Set in Mali’s capital city of Bamako, Coulibaly’s debut feature offers perspective on the country’s enduring political turmoil. When low-level …