The festival is fast approaching, and the programme has rarely been more exciting!
Tickets are now on sale on the RIFF website, where you can also explore this year’s programme.
The festival is packed with outstanding films from around the world, with something unforgettable for everyone to enjoy.
To get you in the cinema mood, here are 10 hot picks at RIFF 2026!
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma
Director: Jane Schoenbrun
Direct from Nonstop: After years of hastily made sequels and dwindling interest, the Camp Miasma slasher franchise is entrusted to an ambitious young director determined to revive it. But when she seeks out the original film’s mysterious, reclusive star, the two women are drawn into a blood-soaked realm of desire, terror, and delirium.
Nightborn
Director: Hanna Bergholm
In Finnish forest, Saga and her husband Jon embark on a new chapter as parents. But Saga’s joy is overshadowed by a chilling suspicion about their newborn, unbeknownst to Jon, causing a rift as she alone grapples with the disturbing truth.
Club Kid
Director: Jordan Firstman
A hard-partying New York City club promoter sees his whirlwind lifestyle upended by the arrival of the 10-year-old son he never knew he had.
Fatherland
Director: Paweł Pawlikowski
In 1949, German writer Thomas Mann and his daughter Erika embark on a road trip across a Germany in ruins, from US-dominated Frankfurt to Soviet-controlled Weimar.
I Only Rest In the Storm
Director: Pedro Pinho
Sérgio travels to a metropolis in Guinea-Bissau to work for an NGO as an environmental engineer on a road project between the desert and the forest. There, he becomes entangled in an intimate yet unbalanced relationship with two inhabitants of the city, Diara and Gui.
La Gradiva
Director: Marine Atlan
A class of high school students travels to Pompeii to discover ruins and bodies petrified by Vesuvius. The trip becomes a rare moment when the force of youth meets a world frozen in time. Their desires start to surface with unexpected intensity, leading them toward an irreversible fracture.
Brace Your Heart
Director: Amanda Kernell
In a remote Sámi village high in the mountains, 20-year-old Ejva inherits her late father’s reindeer herd. As she struggles to keep the herd thriving, local leader Heaika develops romantic feelings for her, and though hesitant, she feels compelled to accept. But everything changes when Nejla, Heaika’s cousin, arrives, and Ejva discovers true love for the first time.
Red Rocks
Director: Bruno Dumont
On the French Riviera, two gangs of kids compete in the perilous game of cliff jumping. Géo, barely five years old, discovers over the course of a summer a world where friendship blends with rivalry, and where the first stirrings of the heart emerge against the dazzling Mediterranean landscape.
Chronovisor
Directors: Jack Auen, Kevin Walker
An armchair mystery in which the life of a reclusive academic collides with the story of a clandestine technology that can photograph the past.
Bitter Christmas
Director: Pedro Almodóvar
Bitter Christman follows Elsa, an advertising director whose mother dies during a long December holiday. She works non-stop and, without realizing, doesn’t give herself time to mourn her mother’s absence. After a crisis, Elsa decides to travel to the island of Lanzarote accompanied by her friend Patricia, who also needs to get away from the city. The story of these characters run parallel to that of a screenwriter and film director, exploring how life and fiction are inseparably linked, sometimes painfully so.
