SECULAR | Aa'La'Ma'Ni

Director: Khaldoun H. Shami

Year: 2019

Eliane from Chile, Milad from Iran, and Georgia from Greece are three migrants in the UK who share their thoughts on love, home, family, and Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.

Director: Lilyana Torres, Carlos Morales

Year: 2027

When filmmaker Lilyana Torres learns that her grandfather hired hitmen to nearly kill her father, she sets out to confront him in Tamaulipas, Mexico, and force an apology. The attack left her father with cracked ribs, a broken nose, and loose teeth. Its architect was his own father. Like much of Lilyana’s family history, nobody spoke of it again. So she begins planning his murder. In darkly comic fictional reenactments, Lilyana trains for revenge with the help of a retired detective. Some methods are efficient, others grotesque, all adapted to an ageing man. Against these fantasies, family home videos reveal a more unsettling contradiction: birthday parties, tenderness, and a grandfather who once appeared devoted to his son and granddaughter. How could a parent put their own child’s life at risk? Before Lilyana reaches him, her grandfather dies peacefully in bed, taking every explanation with him. Determined to complete the film, she casts an actor named Perfecto to play him and kills him on screen, again and again. But the performance exposes the question she cannot escape: what does revenge actually resolve? Lilyana confronts the possibility that the violence she wants to destroy may already live inside her.

Director: Pegah Ahangarani

Year: 2026

Through five portraits of relatives and mentors, five expressions of resistance, director Pegah Ahangarani sketches her life story. Drawing from personal archives, home videos, street protests footage, newspapers, and recorded voices, she retraces more than 40 years of Iran’s history. From the early days of 1979, until the war that began in 2026, she pieces together intimate and collective memories, forming the portrait of a country shaped by political repression and in constant hope for a revolution. Official Selection Cannes Film Festival 2026 - Special Screenings Official Selection Telluride Film Festival 2026