Official Competition

The Best Film Award recognises inspiring, inventive and distinctive filmmaking.

The Award was established in 2009 and first won by Jacques Audiard for A Prophet. Recent winners include Alejandro Landes’ Monos, Sudabeh Mortezai’s Joy, Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Loveless and Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women.

 

Belle

Oscar-nominated anime director Mamoru Hosoda returns with an outstanding tale, following a socially awkward girl who transforms herself into a megastar within a virtual world.

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Il Buco

A decade after his acclaimed Le Quattro Volte, Michelangelo Frammartino returns with a meticulous and engrossing true story of cave mapping.

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The Hand of God

Paolo Sorrentino’s bitingly funny, semi-autobiographical family tale is set during the Maradona-obsessed Naples of the 1980s.

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Hit the Road

Panah Panahi’s thrilling debut is by turns tender, quirky, even laugh-out-loud funny – a wondrously-observed reflection on family and the ambivalence of saying goodbye.

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Lingui, the Sacred Bonds

Following his international success with A Screaming Man, Daratt and Abouna, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s powerful new drama once again celebrates the heroic individualism of ordinary people.

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Nitram

The disturbing true story of a young man who, in 1996, went on a killing spree in the Tasmanian town of Port Arthur.

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Sundown

From a filmmaker unafraid of tackling life’s more challenging questions comes a complex, searing study of what it means to try and become someone else.

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True Things

Harry Wootliff returns to the Festival with this fascinating psychological drama, starring Ruth Wilson and adapted from Deborah Kay Davies’ novel True Things About Me.

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