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.
On a chaotic London film set, tensions simmer between a rising Black actor, a frustrated sound man, and an ambitious young director. Between takes, cultural clashes, class anxieties, and hidden insecurities bubble to the surface - all over a table of sausage rolls and jollof rice.
A sharp, darkly comic meta-film exploring identity, tokenism, and the politics of ‘representation’ in the British film industry. As the line between the film-within-the-film and reality begins to blur, each character is forced to confront who really gets to tell their story - and what’s left on the cutting-room floor when ‘diversity’ becomes performance, and identity itself becomes the role.
A grieving father reunites with friends on a thrilling mystery adventure in the UK's wild west. But as a sinister plot unfolds, their perfect reunion quickly descends into a terrifying trip into the unknown.
When an innocent 15-year-old school boy begins an illicit affair with a 29-year-old woman, love, lust and trauma combine with devastating consequences.
At the turn of the millennium, closeted Irish pop star, Charity, is completely under the control of her evil record label. With rumours about her sexuality in the tabloids and her ludicrous ideas of writing songs for her next album herself, her Swedish manager and his Stylist / lead singer of a boyband, sidekick decide it's time for Charity to undergo her latest transformation; from teen, bubble-gum pop princess to an over sexualised Y2K pop star. The lack of control in her own life leads to a breakdown for Charity and she must learn to rid herself of her evil management and rip out the belly button piercing they're using to control her... Literally.
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.
An experimental documentary that unfolds as a ceremony of queer belonging, inheritance, and sound. At its heart is a dialogue with Afro-Cuban priestess and musician Amelia Pedroso, whose legacy is invoked through archival traces, letters, and performance. Narrated as a letter to an ancestor, the film situates the search for connection within an interior, oceanic dreamscape where water, memory, and ritual become both setting and subject.
Cinematically, MODUPE moves between a stylised ensemble rehearsal and a sacred library-archive. The ensemble of voice, drum, and dance provides the film’s pulse, collapsing rehearsal and ritual into one. Deep blue light, reflective surfaces, and submerged imagery create a sensorial architecture that is both intimate and expansive, with water presence throughout evoking both flood and transformation.
Formally, the film resists linear storytelling, privileging atmosphere, rhythm, and sonic immersion. Objects, archives, and sacred materials hold the same cinematic weight as bodies in performance, reframing the archive as altar and sound as shrine. Narrative unfolds through resonance rather than resolution, drawing the viewer into a space of listening and reflection. MODUPE proposes cinema as a vessel for inheritance, where identity is fluid, memory is alive and liberation is lived through sound.
The story of Carter The Bandit, a Peckham-born rapper navigating London's music industry and the challenges of being a visible, gay black man in a nation struggling to keep pace.
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
