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One of the hardest things for a movie about childhood to capture is how much kids understand without really understanding why any of it is happening. AH GIRL gets that part so right, putting us alongside a seven-year-old who can recognize when something is wrong long before she has the emotional connection to her world to explain it. There’s no magic wisdom shoved into her dialogue and no attempt to turn her into an adult before she was ready. She’s a kid, and the adults around her keep creating problems that she somehow has to learn how to live with.

CHILDREN UNTOLD is more interested in what happens after the history books reach the end of the chapter. The bombs fell, the surrender happened, and the war may officially be over, but 12-year-old Kotoko is standing in the ruins without the family, comfort, or childhood she had before it. Writer/director Miwa Nishikawa doesn’t approach that aftermath as a dividing line between war and peace. For the people she follows, particularly the children, peace simply is a different fight for survival.

A story set in Mallorca, Spain, could easily fall into postcard simplicity, but FORASTERA bends that toward something more unsettling. Lucía Aleñar Iglesias utilizes her debut feature to craft an atmosphere where grief, adolescence, and memory intertwine, becoming indistinguishable from one another. It is a coming-of-age film that never feels conventional—grief isn’t a backdrop here but a force that shapes identity, distorting how family members see one another and, in turn, themselves.

History rarely gives us clean accounts. Some moments are captured in countless reels of film, studied and revisited until they become cultural touchstones. Others slip into silence, either ignored, erased, or deemed too dangerous to remember. NI-NAADAMAADIZ: RED POWER RISING faces that silence head-on, reconstructing a 1974 Indigenous youth-led occupation in Kenora, Ontario, from just eight surviving minutes of archival footage. What could have been another forgotten protest instead becomes a vivid retelling, crafted with purpose by director Shane Belcourt and journalist-producer Tanya Talaga.

In just nineteen minutes, RIPE achieves what many features spend an hour or two chasing: a world thick with history and spiritual resonance. Writer-director Solara Thanh Bình Đặng roots the film in the Mekong Delta, an ecological crossroads where fertility and precarity intertwine. The story follows a young woman faced with a decision that has shaped generations before her—whether to accept an arranged marriage for the sake of her family’s farm. What could read as a familiar coming-of-age negotiation is refracted through a lens, where the land itself and unseen forces press against her choice.

Valentyn Vasyanovych has built his reputation on quiet yet devastating portraits of Ukraine in crisis, from the haunting near-future visions of ATLANTIS to the clinical, unflinching gaze of REFLECTION. With TO THE VICTORY! he continues this trajectory, shifting from war itself to the space after it ends. The result is a film that resists pride, lingering instead on the emptiness that follows survival.

Weddings are often treated on screen as moments of release, filled with laughter, romance, and chaos that eventually resolve into a neat bow. Philippe Falardeau’s LOVELY DAY has no interest in indulging that fantasy. Instead, it asks what happens when the very rituals meant to unify become suffocating, when the perfect day amplifies every crack already running through a family. What emerges is a sharp and surprisingly deep dramedy that balances humor with a painful honesty, one that explores in a structure as fractured and restless as its protagonist’s mind.

TIFF often thrives on scale—gala premieres, sweeping epics, star-driven dramas. But every so often, it’s the smallest entry in the lineup that makes the strongest impact. With a runtime of just over three and a half minutes, MARRIAGINALIA holds the title of the festival’s shortest short, and yet it hardly feels like it. In fact, it plays like a concentrated dose of surreal comedy, twisting the rituals of marriage into something at once distorted and affectionate.

How do you confront a silence that’s lasted over four decades? Min Sook Lee’s THERE ARE NO WORDS begins with that question and carries it with determination through every frame. It’s a documentary that refuses to look away from a family’s wounds, even when the pain is too heavy to articulate. The result is a deeply personal film that expands far beyond one individual’s story, speaking to generational trauma and the complex intersections of memory, love, and loss.

Some short films lean on whimsy, but what makes THE GIRL WHO CRIED PEARLS compelling is how it threads the timeless qualities of a fable with the artistry of stop-motion animation. In just under twenty minutes, Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski transform grief, devotion, and temptation into a cautionary tale that feels both rooted in centuries-old storytelling and strikingly relevant today.

U ARE THE UNIVERSE catapults us into the not-so-distant future, where Andriy Melnyk (Volodymyr Kravchuk,) a space trucker from Ukraine, embarks on a routine cargo mission that unexpectedly turns into a desperate survival struggle. Following Earth's abrupt end, Andriy discovers he might be the last human floating through space—until a distress call from Catherine (Darya Plakhtiy,) another lone survivor on a distant station, pulls their fates together. Their interaction sparks an epic quest to explore what remains of human connection in a universe seemingly void of it.

SHEPHERDS takes us away to the dramatic expanse of the French Alps, where director Sophie Deraspe crafts a rugged and reflective narrative. In this cinematic journey, Félix-Antoine Duval portrays Mathyas, a Montreal executive whose disillusionment with city life drives him to seek serenity in the pastoral landscapes. However, what begins as a quest for simplicity evolves into a challenging saga of survival and self-awareness. As Mathyas faces the elemental forces of nature, the film becomes a testament to the human spirit's resilience.

THEY WILL BE DUST crafts a poignant narrative under director Carlos Marqués-Marcet's nuanced direction. It successfully melds the elements of drama into profound existential themes. As the storyline unfolds, it doesn't just walk you through the lives of its characters—it carries us, weaving the emotion with the aesthetic.

SEVEN DAYS whisks its viewers into the heart of a tension-filled drama where personal liberty and social justice clash. At the center of this emotional whirlwind is Maryam, portrayed by Vishka Asayesh, whose performance captures a woman at a crossroads. Maryam, a resilient Iranian human rights activist, must decide whether to embrace a fleeting chance at freedom or return to her oppressive imprisonment to continue her fight.