Film Di Villa Medici

The fifth edition of the Villa Medici Film Festival kicks off on Wednesday, September 10, an event that has now become an essential fixture in both the Roman and international cultural calendar. The Festival confirms itself as a vibrant laboratory of visual experimentation and as a meeting point between languages, generations, and worldviews.

With more than thirty films from over twenty countries, divided into three main sections (Competition, Focus, and Piazzale), the Film Festival is much more than a simple film showcase: it is an invitation to cross through images as one crosses through the world—allowing oneself to be questioned, surprised, and moved. As Sam Stourdzé, Director of the French Academy in Rome – Villa Medici, states:
 “Five editions in the last five years are more than just a sign: they reflect a festival that has found its dimension, that continues with the intention of asserting itself and positioning itself both geographically and culturally. In this edition, the Festival reiterates its mission: to celebrate a cinema that is free, plural, and outside the box.”

The opening night takes place under the stars, in the Piazzale among the gardens of Villa Medici, with a highly anticipated Roman premiere: GRAND CIEL by Akihiro Hata (2025, France/Luxembourg, 92’, color, French original version with Italian subtitles), in the presence of the director.
A tense and unsettling story: in a futuristic neighborhood still under construction, a worker vanishes without a trace. Suspicion among his colleagues grows stronger until a second worker disappears. The tension thickens in this tale of institutional silence and the dark side of progress.
The theatrical release is scheduled for February 2026, distributed by No.Mad Entertainment.

The complete screening program is available at the following link:
 https://villamedici.it/it/programme/festival-di-film-2025

During the Festival, screenings will be held on three screens throughout the Villa: the Grand Salon, the Michel Piccoli Hall, and the Piazzale, with a rich program of encounters and premieres.

This year’s jury brings together three prominent figures of the contemporary scene: Alain Guiraudie, director, photographer, and writer, author of seven feature films, three novels published by P.O.L., and photography exhibitions presented since 2019 in France and abroad; Guslagie Malanda, actress and independent curator, nominated in 2023 for the César Award as Most Promising Actress and featured at the latest Cannes Festival, as well as author of exhibitions in Paris and Lima; Anri Sala, visual artist who has exhibited in major international events since 2000 and who represented France at the Venice Biennale in 2013. In addition to the official awards, the jurors will also present their cartes blanches, special programs reflecting their creative worlds.

THE INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION

The beating heart of the Festival is, as always, the international competition, which brings together twelve recent works from around the world—capable of narrating, through different approaches, languages, and formats, the tensions, desires, and contradictions of our times. It is a heterogeneous and profoundly free selection, where poetic and political perspectives coexist with visual invention and critical reflection, intimate experiences with social insights.

From France comes +10K by Gala Hernández López, a sharp portrait of a 21-year-old obsessed with quick success and cryptocurrency culture, ready to do anything to “make it.” Also from France is Bonne journée by Pauline Bastard, which transforms a second-hand objects workshop into a surprising collective participatory art project.

With a lighter yet equally profound tone, Dieu est timide by Jocelyn Charles stages a curious encounter between two passengers and a mysterious woman on a train, in a delicate play of fears and confessions. In Comment ça va?, Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel imagine a world without human beings, where eight animals take care of each other while trying to overcome the traumas left by humanity.

From Lebanon, Children of Darkness by Haig Aivazian leads us through the tunnels of power and memory, between found footage and experimental animation, while Vietnamese filmmaker Nguyễn Lê Hoàng Phúc presents Bury Us in a Lone Desert, an unusual and moving road movie about a thief, a grieving man, and an unexpected journey.

History is also present, irreverently reinterpreted by Igor Bezinović in Fiume o morte!, a punk blend of fiction and documentary about the mad months of d’Annunzio’s occupation of Fiume. And there is also personal and urban history in Hemel by Danielle Dean, shot in 16mm with non-professional actors, exploring the hidden face of an English city shaped by post-war utopian plans.

With the monumental O Riso e a Faca, Pedro Pinho takes us to West Africa, where a Portuguese engineer finds himself caught in a web of relationships, disappearances, and new alliances: an ambitious work that crosses both geographical and inner territories. Of a completely different nature is Lloyd Wong, Unfinished by Lesley Loksi Chan, which assembles and edits material left behind by the late Sino-Canadian artist of the 1990s, reflecting on incompleteness, time, and memory.

The Italian landscape returns in Paraflu, a film by Michela de Mattei and the duo Invernomuto, which tells—through analog film and artificial intelligence—the return of the wolf in Northern Italy as a metaphor for the conflict between nature, technology, and identity.

The selection concludes with The Hand That Feeds by Mtume Gant, presented as a world premiere: an intense portrait of a hip-hop musician in existential crisis, alone in a cold and alienating New York, forced to reinvent his relationship with the world and with himself.

FOCUS – CONTRECHAMPS

In the Contrechamps section, the Festival proposes a dialogue between contemporary works and historical films, with special attention to the works of artists and directors in residence at Villa Medici. Here, images interact with each other without hierarchies of format or genre, creating unexpected connections between politics, memory, nature, and belonging.

Thu Van Tran, 2025–26 resident fellow, gives voice to colonial statues in The Yellow Speaks, while Ben Russell, also in residence, takes us to the South Pacific to tell the story of cargo cults in Let Us Persevere…. From the past comes the epic of reality by Werner Herzog with La Soufrière, a journey into a foretold eruption.

Among recurring themes, migration takes center stage in the poetic Centro di permanenza temporanea by Adrian Paci and in Bab Sebta by Randa Maroufi, which observes borders as spaces of resistance. Chilean artist Enrique Ramírez, also a fellow, creates with Deux faisceaux blancs… a visual symphony on the sea and light, while Artavazd Pelechian, in Les Habitants, evokes a world inhabited only by animals, where man is a disturbing absence.

Closing the program are Bingo Show by Christelle Lheureux, an ironic still life on television liturgy, and Chaque mur est une porte by Elitza Gueorguieva, where the end of Bulgarian communism is told through the eyes of a child and her mother’s videocassettes.

FOCUS – CARTE BLANCHE

Alain Guiraudie offers an incursion into his cinematic universe with Miséricorde, his latest feature film: an atypical noir set in a village in southern France, where the autumn atmosphere frames a sensual and political tale, suspended between dream, threat, and the absurd.

Anri Sala, instead, leads us into an immersive experience of image and sound: his carte blanche opens with Long Sorrow (2005), in which saxophonist Jemeel Moondoc improvises suspended in the void of a Berlin high-rise, and concludes with 1395 Days Without Red (2011), where a woman crosses Sarajevo during the siege, accompanied by Tchaikovsky’s inner notes. At the center is a live performance by saxophonist André Vida, conceived as a bridge between cinema and physical presence, between memory and resonance.

For Guslagie Malanda, the selection is a double focus on systemic violence and its banalization: Classified People (1987) by Yolande Zauberman takes us back to apartheid-era South Africa, where the absurdity of racial classification destroyed families and identities; La Frontière Bleue (2025) by Dinis M. Costa, meanwhile, observes with unflinching gaze the indifference of an Andalusian coastal city in the face of a migrant shipwreck. Two films that question the ethics of seeing and our degree of habituation to the suffering of others.

SPECIAL OUT-OF-COMPETITION SCREENINGS

Alongside the competition, the Festival also offers a program of special out-of-competition screenings. Alice Diop, already a jury member in the last edition, presents the premiere of Fragments for Venus, a short film reflecting on the representation of Black women in art history, weaving together images from the Louvre and New York.

Another film is Retratos Fantasmas (Pictures of Ghosts) by Kleber Mendonça Filho, a journey through memory and urban landscape that restores, through archives and recollections, the history and ghosts of the city of Recife.

French Academy in Rome — Villa Medici
Viale della Trinità dei Monti, 1 – Rome
Infoline: +39 06 67611
Official website: villamedici.it

Press Contacts
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For France and abroad (excluding Italy):
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Anaïs Fritsch: +33 6 62 09 43 63