In the summer of 1997, two 19 year old lovers set out from the Birmingham suburbs in a classic car. Their destination: the grave of Nick Drake, whose music had become a shared language between them and a comfort for their unacknowledged pain.
This journey, captured in memory and reimagined on screen, becomes a meditation on youth,
longing, and the quiet power of music to shape identity and connection where deeply hidden
vulnerabilities can be shared.
Interwoven with this personal narrative are intimate audio interviews with artists from different
generations who reflect on how Drake’s music shaped their lives and creative paths. Their
insights echo and deepen the emotional terrain of the road trip, creating a layered portrait of
influence, absence, and resonance.
The extraordinary story of Richard “Ric” O’Barry, once the world’s highest-paid dolphin trainer, now their most passionate defender, risking his life and liberty to free these remarkable creatures from captivity.
In the 1960s, Ric was America’s leading dolphin trainer at the Miami Seaquarium and the celebrated trainer behind the hit TV series 'Flipper', whose smiling stars enchanted a generation. Everything changed after the apparent suicide of one of the show’s dolphins, Kathie - a moment that shattered his beliefs and set him on a radical path from insider to activist.
For over 50 years, Ric has led a global campaign against dolphin captivity. As founder of Dolphin Project, he has risked arrest, injury, and personal loss to rescue dolphins and expose the industry’s darkest secrets. Both celebrated and criticised, he remains steadfast that every captive dolphin can either be retired to a sanctuary or returned to the wild.
Told through intimate family access, joyous underwater imagery, and covert filming, Ric’s mission has transformed a non-issue into a global movement. Now 85, he must ask: after a lifetime spent freeing others, can he finally set himself free?
What if you went on a holiday and the apocalypse happened?
GALICIA! is a found-footage, hybrid-documentary following a couple through home video footage as they visit their friends at a winery in rural Spain and inadvertently capture the end of days.
We live in a time where the sense of our impending mutually assured destruction is more real than it’s ever been. GALICIA! Takes the form of a holiday video - a document of a couple before - and after the great cataclysm. The film starts as something that feels unedited - an accidental video diary of an ordinary couple that feels somewhat ghostly as much as it is also pedestrian. As the film evolves and degrades, we are led to question the fragility of humanity, as well as its power to endure.
Following the director, Beryl Richards's adopted son Nathan/Joe’s journey from a one-year-old to adulthood, told from the viewpoints of parent and child.
Joe wants to make this film so people ‘get’ him, know what it means to be neurodivergent, and what he has been able to achieve despite many challenges. Beryl shows the evolution of a family created from scratch that’s had to keep adapting. The challenge and recalibration of being a parent and a lifetime carer.
The core of the story is told through 28 years of home movie footage- sparky, warm and funny as Nathan/Joe develops into the man he is today. Alongside, a growing boy is shown, much misunderstood and almost destroyed by the prejudice and ignorance surrounding neurodivergence. The family therapy received along the way offers some support, but also reveals how the family dynamic was influenced by Beryl’s own experience of childhood neglect.
Beryl first saw 6-month-old Nathan on a VHS tape. She and husband Dave responded with a video welcoming him to their home. For the past 28 years Beryl has recorded “our feelings, our joy and our pain" so that Nathan could better understand his story later in life.
A love letter to a remote Arctic community going through upheaval, depopulation and climate change.
When a church burns down in a storm, a remote arctic community come together to preserve their identity as they face an uncertain future.
An intimate journey through the storied careers and private lives of Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw, the visionary founders of Split Britches.
Through behind-the-scenes footage, exclusive interviews, and a deep dive into their most influential performances, we uncover how Split Britches have transformed discussions around gender, identity, and the role of performance in political activism. Throughout this journey we also uncover the real love story behind their life’s work - a universal tale of support, trial and tribulation.
Shot on location in both Upstate New York and New York City LOIS AND PEGGY reveals the essential domestic side of this iconic performance duo and lays bare the complexities of two artists juggling their work and their relationship simultaneously. Showcasing the depth, complexity, and universality of love, this documentary makes a valuable contribution to the cultural and historical legacy of LGBTQ+ communities - capturing and preserving the experiences of love and relationships within a context that has often been marginalized or erased from history.
A chance visit at a historic murder/ suicide location in Manhattan inexplicably draws a film producer into the crime and inner world of the murderer, American visionary poet and sun mystic Harry Crosby. As her research spirals into obsession, her grip on reality frays, culminating in a harrowing burnout- until she discovers a shocking personal link to the killer.
An original and emotional film dealing with the surreal nature of art and trauma.
When Russia started its full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Slava Vakarchuk immediately joined the army. He is the lead singer of Ukraine's most popular rock band, Okean Elzy. He has put himself in danger by performing hundreds of times for the troops at the front, and is an articulate and highly respected advocate for his country's right to exist. President Zelensky gave him and his band a new mission - a world tour to champion Ukrainian culture and raise the morale of refugees living abroad. The band's performance at their sell-out concert at the UK's Royal Albert Hall acts as the spine of the film.
The band was formed on the dawn of independence, and their songs have become anthems of pro-democracy revolutions ever since since. The film charts the band's 30-year history with contributions from a varied group, including Timothy Snyder, Andriy Shevchenko and music producer Ken Nelson, all to tell the story of how 'soft power' can be used as a weapon of self-defence.
Was 1978 the most glamorous year ever, and will it be remembered as... Glamour's Golden Sunset?
This is the bold claim made by filmmaker Marcel Grant in this film, which through archive footage along with contemporary interviews with some of the surviving characters, documents the star studded decadence of a scene in which the chic and famous of the world's major cities partied like there was no tomorrow.
In Japan, a culture shaped by restraint and social uniformity, skateboarding has long existed at the margins - regulated, discouraged, and only now tentatively embraced. SKATE IN JAPAN observes this contested space with quiet precision, tracing a community that finds freedom through movement, expression, and play.
Moving between street spots, domestic interiors and the shifting landscapes of Kyoto, the film approaches skateboarding as both a personal and collective language. In the fluid, almost choreographic movement of skater Issei Morinaka, it reveals an expression that resists containment, fleeting, yet deeply felt.
At its centre are individuals whose lives have unfolded at the edges of visibility. Homoro, a skate shop-owner whose own practice has been altered by injury, supports a younger generation of Boardwalk skaters. Alongside him is Caba, a once-renowned figure whose life was transformed by disability, and Hide, who leads efforts to realise a long-awaited public skatepark.
As the skatepark takes shape in Kyoto, it marks a subtle cultural negotiation between tradition and change. Accompanied by an original score, the film unfolds as a quiet meditation on time, belonging and the persistence of identity.
Reliving one of the first viral social media moments in rap culture, when a 17 year old female rapper’s life was turned upside down by admitting to having an orgy, FREE LYRIC explores the experience of online call out culture, gender and consent.
With the rise of social media as the backdrop, this film explores the journey of a young woman named Niki who was cancelled before being cancelled was a thing, and how she survived a sex scandal.
Official Selection Raindance Film Festival 2026 - World premiere
