Projects in genres: Woman Director

Synopsis

With the clock ticking on her trip to the amusements, a downbeat ten year old girl needs to act quickly to make her funds count and win her dream prize, but she hasn’t contended with the self-appointed king of the amusements and his attempts to thwart her simple plan. Official Selection, Aesthetica Film Festival 2026 Official Selection, London Breeze 2026 Official Selection, Short Up Rouen 2026 Official Selection, Bournemouth Film Festival 2026

Synopsis

In a Japanese coastal town still haunted by the 2011 tsunami, a taxi becomes a moving confession booth. Over the course of one night, a series of conversations between drivers and their passengers reveal how those who survived live with the dead - as ghostly tales, dreams and everyday life merge in a magical drift between reality and imagination. Official Selection Visions du Reel 2026

Synopsis

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.

Synopsis

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.

Synopsis

Across India’s overlooked margins, India’s Circularity – Not a Trend, But a Tradition from the Margins reveals how reuse, repair, and regeneration are not innovations - but inherited ways of life rooted in culture, necessity, and care. Featuring voices across sectors - artists, makers, NGO leaders, entrepreneurs, government officials, planners, engineers, institutions, and homemakers - the film journeys through terracotta clusters in Rajasthan, bamboo-timber homes in Sikkim, palm-leaf artisans in Kerala, and community commons in Chhattisgarh. One story is deeply personal: the director’s mother, whose regenerative practices shaped the director’s own circular worldview long before her professional work in sustainability. With poetic narration, immersive visuals, and grounded research, the film reframes circularity as a lived tradition, not a future policy aspiration.

Synopsis

When two con men try to scam an elderly woman in her own home, they think they're on for a sure bet. But they quickly discover that she is not the gullible old dear they anticipated. Tables are turned when the victim turns predator.

Synopsis

Retracing Allen Ginsberg’s 1967 ‘trip’ to the Llanthony Valley, Wales Visitation follows an attempt to channel the poet and document his route through enactments, alignments and apparitions. Using clues gleaned from Ginsberg’s poem of the same name, the film unfolds as a semiotic trail where the filmmaker’s encounters echo and accumulate. Handheld footage of tourists, sleeping horses, birdcalls and day/night cycles signpost a route as it begins to form. A diary, a dramatisation and a spiritual road movie, Wales Visitation traces not a fixed path, but the conditions under which something might be called back. Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2026

Synopsis

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.

Synopsis

With her teenage daughter being relentlessly bullied for her appearance, her mother - an esteemed plastic surgeon - finds herself in a complex moral dilemma.

Synopsis

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

Synopsis

A disciplined dancer, consumed by the pursuit of perfection, traps herself in an endless rehearsal. With each repetition, her body is pushed beyond its limits, until pain becomes part of the choreography. As her reality fractures, she continues to perform. When she finally collapses mid-routine, she is met with overwhelming applause from an unseen audience. In that moment, destruction and fulfilment become one.

Synopsis

A disenfranchised birdwatcher heads into the woods to find solitude from society, but events soon conspire against her. Will she go to extreme lengths to preserve her tranquillity?