LEFFEST's Official Competition presents 12 of the best films of 2024, now competing for the NOS Grand Prize. Among the featured works, we find both established authors and new talents, in a selection that promises to surprise and challenge the audience.
This promise comes true, as the works featured address a variety of themes, such as the unhappiness of death as a motto for inspiring cinema, in the case of Thierry de Peretti, with À son Image, Maura Delpero, with Vermiglio, or David Cronenberg, with The Shrouds. Speaking to Variety, Delpero believes that cinema, and in particular Vermiglio, inspired by the death of her father, can help her to overcome death; Cronenberg, on the other hand, affirmed he is certain that cinema doesn't have to play the role of therapy.
Other works are based on historical events — Maldoror, by Fabrice du Welz, inspired by the real case of Belgian pedophile and murderer Marc Dutroux; An Unfinished Film, by Lou Ye, fueled by the trauma of the covid-19 pandemic; Rendez-vous avec Pol Pot, by Rithy Panh, based on the book Les larmes du Cambodge, to tell the story of the Cambodian genocide between 1975 and 1979; The New Year that Never Came, by Bogdan Muresanu, a tragicomedy about the Romanian revolution of December 20, 1989, which led to the end of Nicolae Ceaușescu's communist dictatorship, which had been in place since 1964; or Black Dog, one of the two films Guan Hu released this year, which portrays Lang as he tries to clean up the city before the 2008 Beijing Olympics, but can only find work hunting stray dogs.
On the other hand, the political tensions in Iran serve as a backdrop to the individual and collective story of directors Maryam Moghaddam, Behtash Sanaeeha and Mohammad Rasoulof. The first two have been accused of spreading propaganda against the regime with the film My Favourite Cake, which shows a bubble of precious intimacy between the main characters, who have just met, in the midst of an oppressive society. The latter, who had already been arrested in 2022 after criticizing government violence, escaped another prison sentence this year by fleeing the country. Between his first release and learning of his new sentence, Rasoulof began filming The Seed of the Sacred Fig, which centers on Iman, a civil servant, lawyer and bailiff who is promoted to the Tehran Revolutionary Court.
Finally, the festival gives space to other irreverent directors, either because they have radically changed their style, like Jean-Marie Larrieu and Arnaud Larrieu, who went from a musical (their previous work) to Le Roman de Jim, a melodrama about fatherhood and the passage of time, about love and resignation; or because they are making their feature film debut, like the portuguese Laura Carreira with On Falling, which portrays alienation from the world of work, so present that the main character (Joana Santos) identifies herself more as B83-45-56 (the worker's serial number) than as Aurora (herself). This film, which recently won the award for best first feature at the BFI London Film Festival, is being presented for the first time in Portugal at LEFFEST.