Director: Will Sharpe With: Benedict Cumberbatch, Claire Foy, Olivia Colman, Andrea Riseborough, Toby Jones
Benedict Cumberbatch, plays Louis Wain, the late 19th and early 20th century illustrator whose fanciful pictures of cats were so popular they helped inspire the widespread adoption of cats as pets. The film charts the painter's life as new governess Emily (Claire Foy) is introduced to the family home. Hired to educate Wain's younger sisters, a romance soon blossoms.
"The man responsible for some of Victorian England's most beloved feline paintings led rather an interesting life, as this delightfully odd biopic attests." PETER DEBRUGE, VARIETY
Fragments of hundreds of films from around the world, from the early years of the medium, bring together an ensemble cast of actors with one thing in common: each is no longer alive. Together, they contend with a fragile existence lived solely through these traces of their work. Existing only on a single 35mm print, The Afterlight is a rare gem of a film that constructs an original narrative through collective memory. Every time the print is shown, it becomes further eroded by wear and time, until it fades forever. This exquisite film captures the tactile beauty of the physical print, and a traditional tale that evokes the magic of the past.
Camera Catalonia's favourite, Agustí Villaronga, returns to the Festival with a hard-hitting court drama that pits a surviving officer and a sailor from the French ship Medusa, which sank off the coast of present-day Mauritania, in a moral and historical confrontation. Popularised by Gericault, a hero of French Romanticism, his iconic work, The Raft of Medusa, depicted the torturous journey of the sailors cast adrift on a make-shift raft, whilst the officers sailed away securely in lifeboats. Villaronga's emotive and distinctive style places the events from 1816 into a modern narrative that challenges whether the same would and is happening today.
TITANE is a spectacular, brutal and hypnotic ride that keeps the viewer on a certain edge, not knowing what could possibly happen next. In 2021, Ducournau became only the second woman ever to win the coveted Palme D'Or at the Cannes Film Festival for this unforgettable film.
"TITANE consolidates a filmmaking style based on visceral shock, grisly absurdism and high thematic ambition. Violence is often played for comedy. Cruelty collides with tenderness. Eroticism keeps company with disgust. Through the stroboscopic aggression of Ducournau’s images you can glimpse ideas about gender, lust and the intimacy that connects people and machines." A.O.SCOTT, NYTIMES
On the surface, Manuel is an exceptionally talented world-famous conductor and feted public persona. This facade hides his angry, violent outbursts towards his suffering wife Aura. Set in the Dominican Republic, this story of domestic abuse highlights the difficulty in raising women's voices when confronting domestic abuse in the context of traditional family values and the complexity of navigating government support agencies. Aura's painful journey and escape from her abuser is also a path to self-discovery and freedom.
A timely reflection on the zeitgeist of 1980s Beirut through the lens of a mysterious trove of photos, notebooks, and recordings that arrive one Christmas Eve.
"A winning cast of fine actresses and an engrossing back-and-forth timeline that jumps from wartime Beirut under the bombs to the staid tranquility of modern-day Montreal." HOLLYWOOD REPORTER
Nisan Dag takes us into the buzzing rap scene in Istanbul and a glorious combination of music, composed by Da Poet, and colour provided by the neon lights so characteristic of the global music scene and Istanbul inner-city streets...[Read more]
Laura Samani takes us on an epic journey over mountains and seas in this beautiful period drama set in Italy in 1900, shot in Friuli Venezia-Giulia and featuring dialect from the region...[Read more]
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