Cinema Current brings together films that refuse to play nicely. They resist the forms we might expect from their subjects: fantasy becomes a form of resistance, beauty becomes as disruptive as confrontation, and private stories take on a political dimension. These are films that find their own forms rather than simply inherit them.

What connects these films is a willingness to let cinema become strange and a refusal of easy resolution. Contradictions are left open, making room for ambiguity rather than closing it down. Their politics are often found not in what they declare, but in how they make us experience something, leaving us to think for ourselves. 

When public debate hardens, documentaries can bring us closer to the people and places behind the headlines. This year’s selection takes us from a police chief’s final months before his assassination, to a war working its way into ordinary gestures, young people in Prague talking about love and fear, a refugee community making a home in a former sanatorium, and a Yugo driven across America, breaking down often enough for warm encounters. 

These films do not offer simple answers. Instead, they bring large questions – about war, identity, belonging, memory and change – into the lives of individuals and communities. Documentaries that open up a conversation by showing us what these questions look and feel like on the ground.

For the second year, ENFF expands its view to Central Asia, a film culture shaped by many of the same historical experiences as those explored throughout our programme. Between the steppe, China and Russia lives a cinema of remarkable courage and singularity.

Across radically different forms, these films draw on local mythology, history and present-day realities. They move from a snow-covered murder mystery haunted by colonial memory and family secrets, to a poetic journey along a Kazakh river that becomes a portrait of women’s lives within patriarchy. Two films from a region where the past is never quite past, and where cinema finds strikingly original ways of making sense of the present. 

Between Film and Art presents experimental films that exist between cinema and the art world, continuing a long tradition of experimental filmmaking in Eastern Europe. This year’s programme features two selections. The first is a solo programme by Slovenian artist and filmmaker Nika Autor, whose Obzorniks reimagine the state newsreels once shown in cinemas across former Yugoslavia. Her films look at people travelling the Balkan route and the forests now divided by the EU border, asking what life persists where the world has failed.

The second programme explores images as living, transforming things rather than simple representations of the world. Alexandre Koberidze, Katja Novitskova and Dane Komljen use low-resolution footage, machine-made images, home movies and abandoned spaces to explore memory, nature and transformation. The screenings reveal how an image can become a place where new forms of life and meaning emerge.

A playful and imaginative selection of Czech and Slovak animated shorts that takes us from starry skies and mysterious forests to disastrous family holidays and mythical worlds. With humour, wonder and a touch of melancholy, these films explore courage, loss, friendship and otherness – proving that even the smallest stories can open up big questions. Suitable for kids 6 years and older.

The New Talents Competition is back for its seventh edition! Young and emerging filmmakers from our region submitted their graduating, debut or second films to compete for the New Talents Award. This year, for the very first time, a jury will choose the winner rather than the audience. An industry meeting for NTC guests will also take place, creating a space for filmmakers to connect and exchange ideas with industry professionals from the Netherlands. 

We are proud to present yet another incredible selection of films, filled with curiosity and concern towards our world. With both risk and responsibility, they attempt to portray their slivers of reality on the big screen for us to experience. These artists question their surroundings and the traditions that shaped them; through their cameras, they try to bridge generations, both past and future, leaning towards intimacy and understanding.

A record number of submissions was received this year, making the selection process particularly difficult once again. Seven films were selected from Hungary, Lithuania, Moldova, Poland, Serbia and Slovakia.

Click here for New Talents Competition #1 and here for New Talents Competition #2.

A century after his birth, Pavle Vuisić remains one of the defining faces of Yugoslav cinema. Gruff, funny, tender and effortlessly human, he brought ordinary characters to life with a rare authenticity, whether playing a mechanic, innkeeper, neighbour or drunken uncle. This selection showcases his remarkable range across black comedy, intimate drama and stories of a society caught between camaraderie and violence, with Petria’s Wreath (1980), The Marathon Family (1982) and Life Is Beautiful (1985).

After the festival, from 14 to 28 November, we continue to celebrate Vuisić with these three classics. Not a polished star, but a people’s actor in the truest sense, Vuisić remains, a century after his birth, impossible to look away from.