Top Gear Festival: Sydney

I was scrounging around the neighborhood for inspiration. Within a block from my apartment, I found a wild mushroom in the grass, and an advertisement for a psychic named Sara.

What's it like starting a family when you're both transgender? This intimate film follows Hannah and Jake Graf on a journey through prejudice and surrogacy to birth during lockdown.

Gavin built a giant volcano sculpture that's now in his dad's shed. Gavin seeks his dad's understanding but he's uninterested in modern art and refuses to participate in the documentary.

The mother of animation director Rebecca Blöcher didn’t want to live an ordinary life. She wanted “something more,” she explains in this stop-motion film. The people around her didn’t understand—in a letter written in 1968, a girlfriend criticizes her for going out on her own and making men jealous, while advising her to dress in a more “feminine” way and to join a cooking course. Blöcher’s mother brushed aside the advice. Years later still, she divorced her husband and stepped into the big wide world.

Tereza e Bruno

Le silence entre les notes

1950s. An escape. A new family. Through VHS footage and rescued letters, a grandmother's past is revealed.

En el recuerdo habita el olvido

Teta Kaabour is an 83-year old family matriarch and sharp-witted queen bee of an old Beiruti quarter. She’s been gripped as of late by the silence of her once-buzzing household where she raised children and grandchildren. Resigned to Argileh smoking and day-long coffee drinking on a now-empty balcony, Teta now invokes the deepest memories of her violinist husband who died twenty years ago. She claims a preparedness to re-unite with him.

Home to the Mitterrand family since 1965, Latche was the former president's base for three decades. Family, friends, and world leaders gathered there for walks, hours of conversation, and some of the defining moments of the century. There, he was a different François Mitterrand, absorbed by the "spirit of the place," far from the trappings of the Republic. An intimate space, Latche was also a political territory open to the world, a powerful diplomatic asset serving the ambitions of its owner.

Istanbul: Chronopolis is an experimental documentary that explores the city as a living organism where the linear flow of time is disrupted and the past and future coexist. Structured around a thematic cycle of birth, speed, and decay, the film uses rhythmic visuals and archival footage to bridge temporal gaps. Through a fourteen-minute mathematical edit, it replaces linguistic narrative with the evocative language of time-lapse and slow-motion cinematography. The project invites the audience to transcend chronological time and experience Istanbul as an eternal moment—an entity existing solely within its own timeless cycle.

Adapted from famous French actor Philippe Torreton’s best-seller, GRANDMA is the portrait of the actor’s grandmother: a modest, unique but universal Norman peasant. Enriched with amateur films, nourished by major historical events, GRANDMA also tells the story of the end of a world, that of the countryside of our grandmothers, before the abyss of modernity.

Entre nos mains (In our hands)

A short documentary looking into the relationship between teenage siblings.

Two elderly sisters share the delicate art of making traditional Hungarian strudel and reveal a deeply personal family story about their mother, who taught them everything they know.

Justice

30 Kilo Heimat

Homelessness in the United States takes many forms. For Elizabeth Herrera, David Lima and their four children, housing instability has meant moving between unsafe apartments, motels, relatives’ couches, shelters, the streets and their car. After 15 years of this uncertainty, the family moved into their first stable housing — an apartment in the San Francisco Bay Area — in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.

Quiet towns across rural Australia are in the grip of an Ice epidemic. Major international drug cartels are working with local outlawed motorcycle gangs to push crystal meth to a captive market of children.

Miyamoto-cho is a community of Mom-and-Pop stores and family enterprises located near the center of Tokyo. Competition from supermarkets and shopping centers threatens the livelihoods of long-term residents. High land prices tempt owners to tear down old homes and replace them with apartment buildings; this in turn is changing the composition of the population. Against this backdrop, residents strive to maintain the close social ties, symbols of local identity, and community rituals that keep Miyamoto-cho from becoming just another mailing address. Theodore Bestor began his research here in 1979. His prize winning book of the same name is available through Stanford University Press. This documentary is one of a series depicting the variety of life in today's Japan in the context of human problems common to all industrial nations. A comprehensive study guide is available.