The LEFFEST Official Competition offers a sensitive map of contemporary cinema. Eleven films traverse different geographies and cinematic languages to explore the tensions of private life, power relations and collective experience. From established filmmakers to emerging voices on the international scene, this selection brings together different ways of questioning the world through cinema. The Official Competition jury is chaired by filmmaker David Cronenberg and comprises artist and playwright Angélica Liddell, filmmaker Charles Burnett, director Milagros Mumenthaler, violinist and conductor Gidon Kremer, and journalist Andrea Camprincoli. The jury will select the winner of the NOS Best Film Award, created by artist Julião Sarmento.
The family emerges as a realm of affection, conflict and secrets that withstand the passage of time. In Orange Flavoured Wedding, by Christophe Honoré, Jacques’s wedding in March 1978 brings together the seven Puig siblings. As the celebrations unfold, long-buried secrets and childhood wounds come to the surface. Adapting his own play, Le Ciel de Nantes, Honoré turns this family reunion into a reflection on the marks left by the past and the fragility of family ties. In Trick, Mario Martone brings together a widowed illustrator and his five-year-old grandson. Returning to Naples to look after the child for a few days, Daniele Mallarico finds his routine disrupted by a generational duel in which space and authority are at stake. With Toni Servillo in the lead role, Martone examines the delicate balances and conventions of family life.
The desire to escape a destiny shaped by others also runs through stories of coming of age and survival. In Butterfly Jam, Kantemir Balagov follows Pyteh, a sixteen-year-old who divides his time between wrestling and working at his family’s Circassian restaurant in Newark. When his father makes an impulsive decision that threatens the family business, the teenager is forced to grow up quickly, caught between responsibility and tradition. Featuring Barry Keoghan, Riley Keough and Harry Melling, the film explores the conflict between inherited expectations and the pursuit of an independent path. In Flies, Fernando Eimbcke follows Olga, who begins renting a room to a man whose wife is being treated at a nearby hospital. The arrival of her tenant’s nine-year-old son disrupts her carefully ordered routine, giving rise to an unexpected bond. The film received the Ecumenical Jury Prize at the 2026 Berlin International Film Festival.
Geographical and social borders open onto worlds that initially remain invisible. In The Dreamed Adventure, by Valeska Grisebach, Veska, an archaeologist in a small Bulgarian border town, tries to help Said, an acquaintance whose car has been stolen. Her gesture draws her into a network of criminal connections concealed beneath the community’s apparent tranquillity. Awarded a prize by the jury at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, the film draws on the western genre to explore a territory where moral boundaries are as uncertain as geographical ones. In Diary of a Chambermaid, Radu Jude follows Gianina, a young Romanian woman living in France and working as a domestic servant for a bourgeois family. In the evenings, she attends rehearsals with an amateur theatre company preparing an adaptation of Octave Mirbeau’s Diary of a Chambermaid, while her daughter, back in Romania, feels her absence. Moving between work, performance and distance, Jude brings together two realities shaped by migration and social inequality.
Memory breaks into the present, transforming our relationships with those around us. In Everytime, Sandra Wollner follows a mother, her younger daughter and the older daughter’s boyfriend, whose lives are bound together by a tragedy in Berlin. A year later, the three travel to Tenerife to resume a holiday that had been cut short. Beneath the Canary Islands’ sun, past and present intertwine in an attempt to come to terms with grief. Featuring Birgit Minichmayr and Lotte Shirin Keiling, the film was selected for the Un Certain Regard section at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. In La perra, Dominga Sotomayor takes us to a remote island off southern Chile, where Silvia, a solitary seaweed gatherer, adopts an abandoned dog and names her Yuri—the same name she had chosen for the daughter she never had. When the animal disappears, a childhood trauma resurfaces. Questioning the conventions of narratives about human–animal relationships, Sotomayor creates a film about loneliness, memory and the desire for motherhood. The film was presented in the Directors’ Fortnight section at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival.
Art and politics expose the contradictions of the systems that shape collective life. In The Christophers, Steven Soderbergh brings together Ian McKellen, Michaela Coel, Jessica Gunning and James Corden in a comedy about art, commerce and resentment. Julian Sklar, a renowned figure on the London art scene since the 1960s, is estranged from his children, who hire a forger to complete a series of unfinished paintings and secure their inheritance. Their plan sets in motion a game of competing interests surrounding authorship and the value of art. In A Man of His Time, Emmanuel Marre returns to September 1940, as the Pétain regime takes hold in France. Henri Marre, a 49-year-old engineer with neither money nor connections, arrives in Vichy carrying a political treaty that he believes could help save the country. Convinced that he can influence the course of History, he seeks to secure a place within the new regime. But is he trying to save France—or himself? The film received the Best Screenplay award at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival.
The selection also includes She Looked Without Seeing, the new film by Fanny Ardant, produced in Portugal and shot in the Azores. Found beside a lagoon on a remote island, a young woman with no name is taken in by Gabriela, an enigmatic woman who names her Malvina. In a place marked by secrets, grief, smuggling and revenge, memory returns in fragments. Featuring Carolina Amaral, Ana Padrão, Paulo Pires, Miguel Borges and Gérard Depardieu, the film weaves a mystery around an identity that must be pieced back together.
From 6 to 15 November, these eleven films come together at LEFFEST to compete for the NOS Best Film Award. From family tensions to political contradictions, from the migrant experience to the enduring traces of memory, the Official Competition brings together different ways of filming and thinking about the present. It is an encounter between films, filmmakers and audiences that makes cinema a space for discovery and exchange.