Synopsis

Karoline, a pregnant factory worker living in post-WW1 Copenhagen, is struggling to make ends meet. Fearing her unborn child will be doomed to a life of poverty and hardship, she searches for a solution. By chance (or is it fate?) she meets Dagmar, a friendly woman who runs an illegal adoption agency hidden behind the facade of a candy store. Seeing a way out, Karoline accepts a job as a wet nurse. But she slowly begins to realize that things are not what they seem. Director Magnus von Horn, helmer of the Gold Hugo-winning Sweat, returns to the Festival with this expressive, nightmarish, Gothic fairytale. Sublime black and white photography, long shadows, and grimy streets conjure a striking, if grim, vision of early 20th century Copenhagen that hides dark secrets and unsettling truths.

Synopsis

Young Wei is a blossoming scientist continuing the controversial, yet innovative research on skin grafting begun by her late father. Shunned by her family in China because of a hereditary facial disfigurement, she gets a scholarship to study in New Zealand, where she stays with her kind but absent aunt and mean-girl cousin Angela. Wei proves herself a brilliant student who catches the attention of a down-on-his-luck professor, but is still mercilessly bullied by Angela and her popular friends. Then she reaches her breaking point. What ensues is a gut-wrenching dive into visceral body horror, where vengeance and scientific hubris collide to lead Wei on a violent quest to possess the power of beauty and popularity at any cost. Grafted is a deliciously disgusting ride that pushes the societal obsession with normative beauty to horrific extremes.

Synopsis

A cast of characters waiting in limbo must decide which memory they want to preserve before moving on in this fantastical and poignant drama.

Synopsis

A deadbeat dad is trapped with his family waiting out a typhoon. There, the fractured clan reckons with their past as they look to an uncertain future.

Synopsis

An eccentric documentary crew treks across the vast roadways of Alberta, Canada to document monuments, museums, and other roadside curios. Armed with only a loose idea of the project’s final form, the wayward director struggles to manage a slew of messy personal entanglements and rivalries embroiling her collaborators. They look for meaning in the landscape, but their search turns inward as they’re inspired to reckon with their own lives.

Directed with a light touch, this charming cross-country odyssey is part revisionist Western and part road movie. Punctuated by moments of extraordinary tenderness and unexpected violence, it invokes poetry, magic, and prayer to imagine a radical, caring form of wildness on the Canadian frontier.