The OPEN SEAS section presents a selection of films that have attracted particular attention at film festivals around the world in recent months. These are films that have made a lasting impression on audiences, often created by some of today's most accomplished filmmakers.
Beloved / Kjærast
Director: Erik Poppe
BELOVED is a tender, visually powerful story of love’s fragility and longing. In a small coastal town, Asle and Gerd find each other and become parents to a boy. However their happiness is brief. As a sailor, Asle is drawn to escape, leaving Gerd alone with the child as distance grows between them. Told in Fosse’s minimalist style, through silence, glances and landscape, the story rests on deep compassion for three lives, and asks how much distance love can endure before it breaks.
Bitter Christmas / Amarga Navidad
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.
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.
Nightborn / Yön Lapsi
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.
Paper Tiger
Director: James Gray
In James Gray's deeply felt and intense drama, two brothers become entangled in a scheme that turns out to be too good to be true. As they try to navigate their way through the dangerous world of the Russian mafia, family bonds begin to fray with life-altering consequences.
Queen at Sea
Director: Lance Hammer
Amanda and her stepfather Martin struggle with a moral issue that divides them. Has Amanda’s mother, Leslie, who is experiencing advanced dementia, lost the ability to make critical decisions in her own best interest? If so, who is responsible – a spouse, a child, an institution – for making such a determination? As Amanda and Martin are forced to make increasingly difficult choices, the repercussions spiral out of their control.
Red Rocks / Les Roches Rouges
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.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma
Director: Jane Schoenbrun
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.
The Loneliest Man in Town
Directors: Tizza Covi, Rainier Frimmel
Blues musician Al Cook lives in an apartment filled with memories. Outside, the world carries on without him. But when his home is slated for demolition, out of the ruins of his existence, a long-forgotten dream suddenly resurfaces.
Wicker
Directors: Alex Huston Fischer, Eleanor Wilson
A fisherwoman lives on the fringes of a seaside village; she is unmarried, stinky, and constantly teased. One day, sick of her stuffy, narrow-minded neighbors, she orders a wicker husband for herself.
The winner will be announced at the RIFF awards ceremony during the festival’s closing event on Saturday, October 3, at 5:00 p.m. in Háskólabíó.
