Official Selection 2025
Documentary
This year’s Documentary programme tunes into intimate reckonings and astonishing revelations through global perspectives and singular encounters. Featuring distant workers training self-driving cars, influencers raised on camera, and challenges in a Tokyo classroom, these films ask what it really means to be seen, heard, and understood in an increasingly mediated world.
Sunday 21st September, 5.50pm
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THEIR EYES
Dir: Nicolas Gourault
How does a machine learn to read the world? Testimonies and screen recordings introduce the experience of online micro-workers from the Global South: their job is to teach the AI of self-driving cars to navigate the streets of the Global North.
CHRISTMAS EVERY DAY
Dir: Faye Tsakas
Preteen influencers Peyton and Lyla perform for online fans under their mother’s guidance. Between rural life and the virtual world, performance and the realities of late stage capitalism, ideas of self-presentation as empowerment, female confidence, and self-branding come to the fore.
INSTRUMENTS OF A BEATING HEART
Dir: Ema Ryan Yamazaki
First graders in a Tokyo elementary school are presented with a challenge for the final semester: to form an orchestra and perform ‘Ode to Joy’ at a school ceremony. An Oscar-nominated examination of the Japanese educational system’s tenuous balance between self-sacrifice and personal growth as it teaches the next generation to become part of society.
HELLO STRANGER
Dir: Amélie Hardy
At the laundromat, Cooper, a young trans woman, shares her gender transition story and seeks peace with the last male imprint remaining on her body: a lingering deep voice.
IRELAND
Dir: Daniel Jaffe
A Californian filmmaker travels across Ireland and Scotland in the summer of 2023, and documents his experience while thinking of friends back home.
BEEPS
Dir: Kirk Johnson
Two young men embark on a quirky mission to silence a mysterious dying smoke alarm beeping somewhere in their L.A. neighbourhood. As they knock on strangers’ doors, the search turns into an unexpected journey of awkward encounters and community connection.
Official Selection 2025
Take me to: Animation 1 Animation 2 Change Comedy Documentary Drama Music Video Student Film
