The 2025 Official Selection

The Official Selection of the 22nd edition of Giornate degli Autori presents the world premieres of films arriving from different contexts, geographies, and artistic sensibilities, yet all of which share an urgent need to tell stories of the times we live in. Times marked by wars, clashes over identity, technological transformations, and migrations – yet inhabited by rebellion, desires, memories, and acts of love. Whether documentaries or narrative features, our films unfold on a frontier between the real and the imagined, and personal stories or collective; works that have chosen cinema as the ideal medium to confront trauma, process the past, and look to the future. The ten films in competition form a political and emotional atlas uniting Lebanon and Greece, Italy and Mexico, Iran and Spain, and a futuristic Kenya with a Russia in the minds of those who have left and never returned.

A film of rare artistry and depth, with a potent theme, opens this year selection. With Memory, Vladlena Sandu embarks on a heartbreaking personal journey into the shards of her childhood. In the film, memories are intertwined – individual, collective, and historical – and a little girl’s point of view drives home the horror with an even more wrenching power.

Another artist in exile also works on re-elaborating the past, the Russian filmmaker Nastia Korkia, currently living in Germany. In Short Summer, the story of a summer only seemingly quiet, war remains on the sidelines, yet the film shows how it can infiltrate every corner of life, modifying one’s closest bonds and corroding even those that seemed damage-proof.

The Spanish director Gabriel Azorín toys with time in Last Night I Conquered the City of Thebes, in which characters meet symbolically in a space outside time. Two kids and two soldiers share the same spot: thermal springs, by night. They speak of friendship, solitude, and the fear of losing those they love.

Memory of Princess Mumbi by Kenyan filmmaker Damien Hauser is a dystopian fable set in the year 2093 in an imaginary Africa. The film blends a variety of genres and styles (from science fiction to love stories, and from mockumentaries to animation) to reflect on the future of cinema and humanity. The lead character is a young filmmaker who sets off to make a documentary about a global conflict that had exploded twenty years earlier – when humankind had handed over all control over artificial intelligence.

Past Future Continuous, the new documentary by Firouzeh Khosrovani, is a poetic and moving work from the director of the multiple-award-winning Radiograph of a Family, here sharing the helm with Morteza Ahmadvand. A woman has fled Iran after the Islamic Revolution and has never gone back; she can only observe her parents on the security cameras installed in their home in Tehran. The reality of this digital connection is the heart of the film.

The second Iranian title in competition is Inside Amir di Amir Azizi. It is a love letter to the city of Tehran and a personal exploration of the doubts that surface before the act of leaving one’s own country. In long bicycle rides, time spent with friends and family, brief flashbacks to earlier times, and phone calls with his girlfriend, already relocated to Italy, young Amir inhabits a space suspended in time, one that will never return.

Vainilla marks the directorial debut of Mexican actress Mayra Hermosillo. In northern Mexico in the late 1980s, in a cramped, crowded abode, seven women – grandmothers, mothers, aunts, daughters and a domestic who is part of the family – face the precariousness, shame, and messy beauty of life all together. At the center of this all-female microcosm, a young girl – the filmmaker’s alter ego – takes it all in and sizes up her world with the clear gaze of a child. 

A Sad and Beautiful World by Cyril Aris spans three decades of Lebanese history, placing at the forefront a romantic relationship between a man and a woman born the same day during the bombings, then separated, and only much later reunited, by chance. Alternating light-hearted moments and flashes of deep melancholy, the film is about their stubborn attempts to believe in love and to stay human while the world all around them collapses.

In the heart of the sunny Greek countryside, steeped in folklore, Bearcave by Krysianna B. Papadakis and Stergios Dinopoulos zooms in on the unspoken love between two young women who had grown up together in a village laden with traditions and patriarchal expectations. Filmed with a extraordinary visual sensibility, the film is about growing up queer in this context, and is divided into two acts alternating the points of view of the two protagonists and delicately conveying the ambivalence of their relationship.

The only Italian film on the competition lineup is La Gioia, the second feature film by Neapolitan filmmaker Nicolangelo Gelormini. Valeria Golino and Jasmine Trinca treat us to star turns as two women who are totally different, living in a city, Turin, that alienates them. Thanks to the same young man (Saul Nanni), lover of the former and son of the latter, both women try to up their game from the ordinary to the extraordinary. Comedy, however, will take a tragic turn. The film is based on a true story.

Our five special events broaden the scope of the official selection, multiplying voices and cinematic styles.

In Laguna, the famed Lithuanian filmmaker Sharunas Bartas takes a personal loss as his departure – the death of his older daughter – and turns it into a heart-wrenching paean to life and nature. Grief becomes a threshold and the landscape a refuge. The film is a silent and potent meditation on absence and continuity, fragility and the strength of invisible bonds.

In Writing Life, the renowned French documentarian Claire Simon treats us to a portrait of the Nobel Prize- winning novelist Annie Ernaux through readings of her books by French high school students. Which turns it into the portrait of a generation: using the words of the great woman writer, teenagers are able to speak about themselves and take on hot topics, like abortion, the patriarchy, the family, and social media.

Who Is Still Alive is the hard-hitting new documentary by Swiss filmmaker Nicolas Wadimoff. Nine Palestinian refugees who have survived the ongoing genocide in Gaza recreate their own experiences of suffering, resistance, and loss in the symbolic space of a theater. The film gives a voice to those who have none, trapped in the silence imposed by the war – and indifference.

Do You Love Me by Lana Daher is an impetuous stream of images and sound made up entirely of archive audiovisual material. It is a serenade to a country, Lebanon, that is wounded yet continually on the move, in which identities can be reconstructed from its own shattered pieces.

The new film by Gianluca Matarrese, Il quieto vivere, enlists the documentary form and the mise-en-scène to depict a family feud that seems of no consequence, yet swells to epic and grotesque dimensions. A tragicomedy on the domestic front, which muses on the incommunicability and overwhelming theatricality of life.

Our closing film, out of competition, is the Italian title Come ti muovi, sbagli, which marks the return to the Venice Lido of Gianni Di Gregorio, after winning the Lion of the Future for his hit Pranzo di ferragosto in 2008. The placid and monotonous existence of a retired professor (Di Gregorio himself) is shaken up by a surprise visit from his daughter (Greta Scarano) and rowdy grandchildren. It’s a gracious comedy that rounds out an emotionally intense lineup with a cinematic tribute to love that warms the heart.