Imagine hearing your own body: eyes scratching, blood rushing, bones creaking, your heartbeat pounding endlessly. For most, it’s unthinkable. For Dave, it’s daily life. Since 2000, he has lived with Superior Semicircular Canal Dehiscence Syndrome (SCDS), a rare disorder that turns his body into an echo chamber.
This immersive short documentary draws viewers into Dave’s sonic reality through raw narration, stark black-and-white imagery, and an unsettling soundscape. As he recounts years of misdiagnosis and disbelief, the film explores resilience and isolation, ultimately asking why we doubt invisible pain and how empathy begins by truly listening to what we cannot see.
In a remote village in southeast Turkey, 35-year-old Meryem begins the annual olive harvest. For generations, the groves have sustained the village women's livelihoods, but this year, the harvest takes place under a shadow of fear. Following a devastating earthquake that destroyed Meryem’s home, 60% of the village’s olive lands have been seized by the government to build a new satellite city. As the concrete edge presses steadily toward their remaining fields, this harvest may be their last.
Once a stay-at-home mother, Meryem picks up a camera to document the slow unraveling of her community. Women, previously confined to the home, step into public life - leading protests, sit-ins, and a landmark lawsuit alongside thousands of indigenous landowners, to protect the land they have tended for centuries. Interweaving Meryem’s video diaries with observational footage, the film moves between intimate scenes of the family harvest and the female-led resistance. As the movement unfolds, the once-perfect harvest is gradually disrupted by destruction.
HERE TO STAY tells the story of a people’s fight for justice, tracing how tragedy transforms Meryem from mother to resistance leader, as she seeks to protect the land she calls home.
A filmmaker unpacks her evolving relationship with her adolescent German Shepherd, confronting the painful question of why, despite raising him, he seems to love her partner more. Blending observational and verité footage with personal narration, this tender story of unrequited love unfolds into an intimate inquiry into the complexities of caregiving and cross-species bonds. Contending with the influence of intergenerational parenting styles on the human–dog relationship and the ways dog’s express agency, the film ultimately asks whether it is possible to love truly without conditions.
Set in a mosque waiting room in 1980s South Wales, and inspired by the true story of writer-director Sara Nourizadeh's parents, a young couple whose relationship crossed boundaries of culture, faith and expectation.
At a time when Iranian politics dominated UK headlines and shaped public attitudes, a Welsh woman and her Iranian fiancé prepare for an Islamic conversion ceremony – a requirement they must fulfil if they are to marry. What follows is a quietly charged and emotionally intimate portrait of two people trying to navigate a moment that is both deeply personal and subtly political. As they wait for the ceremony to begin, small details – a trembling hand, a whispered joke, a fleeting moment of doubt – reveal the emotional stakes beneath the surface. Their conversation dances between humour and tension, affection and uncertainty, reflecting the push and pull of family pressures, cultural misunderstandings, and their own hopes for the future.
Authentic VHS archive footage of the real couple is interwoven within this scripted drama, grounding the film in lived experience and offering an unexpectedly tender glimpse into the decades that followed.
With her teenage daughter being relentlessly bullied for her appearance, her mother - an esteemed plastic surgeon - finds herself in a complex moral dilemma.
For centuries, fisherman Stan Rennie and family worked the waters off England’s North East coast . But when a vast tide of poisoned crabs washes ashore like a biblical plague, Stan’s world is turned upside down overnight.
Dealing with the devastation of his business and failing health, he is thrown into a battle for the future of the region where he’s spent his entire life, an unlikely figurehead for a grassroots campaign to find the truth, delivered the only way he knows how - with heart and gallows humour.
A film about the grief of navigating a world suddenly, inexplicably, irrevocably altered.
Official Selection CPH:DOX 2026 - F:ACT Competition - World premiere
A parent’s message to their child, narrated while remembering the course of their life via the medium of their footwear... Love, Loss, and Walking Boots.
In an era of increasing brain fog and cognitive decline a profound exploration of humanity’s greatest conundrum - the nature of consciousness and self. A powerful, dream-like journey delving into the hearts and minds of four individuals whose lives intersect at the threshold of memory and reality.
A quartet of voices: Maureen Winfield represents the struggle of the caregiver - her husband regressed to the period when they were engaged and no longer recognised her or the home they lived in for 40 years; Wendy Mitchell, diagnosed with young-onset dementia, embodies resilience, she uses ingenious coping mechanisms to navigate her changing perceptions; Pegeen O’Sullivan, daughter of novelist Liam O’Flaherty, offers a surprising perspective - although she has lost her memories, she has also been liberated her from fears; neuroscientistAnil Seth provides a scientific counterpoint, suggesting that our "normal" reality is itself a form of controlled hallucination.
By weaving together deeply personal lived experiences with performance and scientific theory, CONSCIOUS illustrates how dementia shifts our internal worlds, challenging our preconceptions of ageing, showing us that whilst there are devastating losses on on the dementia journey, there can also be triumphant gains.
Official Selection CPH:DOX 2026
In 1991, having just given birth, Farida struggles to cope without knowing if her family in Iraq is dead or alive after the gulf war breaks out. Though physically in Newport, her mind is at war... far away.
Young women see themselves as rivers, connecting poetic imagery to landscapes in a multi-voiced narrative that transforms into political commentary: Kazakh women choose to live without men.
Official Selection Berlin International Film Festival 2026 - Forum Special - World premiere
With dreams of starting a perfect family, Saga and her British husband Jon move to the isolated house deep in the Finnish forest where Saga spent much of her childhood. But as soon as their baby is born, despite the reassurances of everyone around her, Saga knows something is terribly wrong. As their marriage starts to crack and Jon struggles to support his wife, only Saga suspects the disturbing truth about their newborn child.
Official Selection Berlin International Film Festival 2026 - Competition - World premiere