Bojayá: Caught in the Crossfire

Director: Oisín Kearney

Year: 2025

An anxious young man, Ruari, arrives to meet his dad, Liam, in their local pub. They reminisce about the past, as Ruari struggles to share some big news. Conversation turns to Liam’s alcoholism, which resulted in the breakdown of Liam’s marriage to Ruari’s Mum, Bridget. As tensions rise over the strained father-son relationship, Ruari finally tells his dad the reason for their impromptu meeting – he has Motor Neurone Disease. He is going to die. The shock forces them to finally connect and talk properly, as they realise what is ahead of them. Desperate, Ruari asks his dad to help him break the news to his mum. Liam, reluctant at first, downs another pint, and it hits Ruari that his dad is drinking non-alcoholic beer. As Bridget, Ruari’s mum, walks through the door, Liam is caught in the headlights by the family reunion. In tragedy and celebration, and with their differences finally set aside, we know that these two men will navigate their days ahead, together. Official Selection Galway Film Fleadh 2026

Director: Alex Darby, George Leith, Sophie Mei Birkin

Year: 2026

Adlais (Echo) weaves Welsh language folklore and histories through their shared subjects of poetry and drowning – and asks whether we’re listening to the past as it surfaces today.

Director: Luca Anzalone

Year: 2026

Caught between her indigenous Buryat roots—where art is a shamanic window between worlds—and a Western market that treats culture as a commodity, artist Yuma Radne constructs a monumental canvas to confront the psychological distortions of colonization at the edge of an irreversible era. "Either you make art, or you suffer. It’s like a curse." For painter Yuma Radne, the act of creation is not an aesthetic choice, but an ancestral code carried in the blood. Moving from a remote Siberian village to the high-stakes European art world, Yuma finds herself navigating a surreal landscape where sacred cultural identity is rapidly converted into a luxury product. Through intimate studio dialogues and raw philosophical reflections, the film captures the gruelling physical and mental labour behind her graduation masterpiece, The End of Times. Centred around a gargantuan erupting booze (a traditional Buryat dumpling) mutated into an absurd, monumental symbol of a colonised and erased national identity, the film transcends a typical artist portrait. It becomes a vital, cosmic meditation on why humanity continues to create art in the face of systemic collapse—and a powerful testament to an indigenous culture refusing to be reduced to a souvenir.