Next of Kin

The celebrated filmmaker revisits decades of personal footage after the sudden death of his son, weaving suddenly tragic family archives withan ongoing attempt to realize a Hollywood remake of his classic 1985 essay film Sherman’s March.

Through his characteristic deadpan humour and a deceivingly simple premise, the director reflects on how having the most generic name in the English language has impacted on his sense of self.

How do you write a letter to a person you have never met? A moving image about family, reconciliation and the inevitability of death spanning from 1970s Greece to the present day.

A young filmmaker uses film diaries of everyday encounters, most importantly with his own family to construct a deeply personal essay film about belonging and self-acceptance, while confronting a hereditary facial condition with his own queer identity.

Wandering through labyrinths of desire and memory in a gay-cruising forest, a filmmaker searches for traces of his grandfather's forest-face, reimagining kinship and ways of seeing through the more-than-human world.

Driven by the desire to defeat his demons, artist Jeroen Kooijmans pays tribute in Love-22-Love to art, his love for his wife, and the dark corners of his psyche. At the lowest point of his life, love serves as a remedy.

In 1985 McElwee set out to document the lingering traces of General Sherman's march through the American South. He instead created a landmark autobiographical essay film in which history gives way to self-portraiture, a method he would later reexamine with Remake (2025), which is also screening at this festival.

How do you trace the past? After his mother’s death, the filmmaker returns to his empty childhood home. While dealing with grief, the past, and memories he explores his father’s involvement in the Greek dictatorship of the late 1960s.

“I’ve been on a sex strike now for almost four years.” A personal and political story of the cracks in the heterosexual model seen through a blend of film archives and found footage.

Moving between memories of summer with a past relationship and political protests in the city of Athens, this diary film explores the urgency for collectiveness and the act of moving on.