In Fiume o morte!, director Igor Bezinović brings together three hundred locals to re-stage the surreal 1919 occupation of Rijeka by poet-warrior Gabriele D’Annunzio. This re-enactement, both punk and playful, becomes a political act. Through a feverish mix of archives, performances, and testimonies, the film playfully and sharply dismantles the machinery of nationalist propaganda, exposing the toxic legacies of fascism. D’Annunzio appears as a grotesque — yet visionary — prototype of the authoritarian clown, foreshadowing many others we need not name.

The American filmmaker Marie Valentine Regan captures a vibrant portrait of 96-year-old Lebanese poet and painter Etel Adnan in her final creative moments before she disappeared in 2021. Tenderness and humor mix with her reflections on love, desire, time, and death, set in intimate scenes of daily life - a light-filled flat, a small birthday party, the mountains that haunt her imagination. An ode to joy, self-affirmation, and art as resistance.

In 1961, the Italian collective Cantacronache secretly crossed Franco’s Spain to record popular songs of resistance. In 2022, Pablo Gil Rituerto retraces this journey, guided by Emilio Jona, the last living witness. Archives, landscapes, and contemporary voices weave a powerful reminder of a struggle still unfinished: singing is a political act, and listening a form of resistance.

Despite sexist and condescending criticism in the 1960s-70s, Monk stayed true to her own path, becoming a unique and unclassifiable artist. “Monk in Pieces” weaves archives, performances, and interviews into the portrait of a visionary who made her body and voice instruments of freedom.

In a gesture both intimate and universal, Tamara Stepanyan evokes the memory of her father, actor Vigen Stepanyan, and dives into a film heritage too often reduced to clichés. “Mes Fantômes Arméniens” breaks these reductive views and reveals a vibrant cinema shaped by genocide, exile, wars, and an unyielding creative resilience.

Summer 1965: the arrival of the Beatles unleashes mass hysteria, while the Watts riots expose racial tensions and police brutality in African-American neighborhoods. Through archives, home movies, and animation, Andrei Ujică - master of the found-footage and godfather of the Romanian Nouvelle Vague - interweaves the exhilaration of a youth celebrating music with the harsh reality of political and racial divides. The voices of two witnesses - poet Geoffrey O’Brien and writer Judith Kristen - embodied by two animated characters, guide us through this collision.

Filmmaker Marie Losier takes us deep into the enigmatic, genre-defying world of The Residents, legendary figures of the American musical avant-garde for over half a century. Masked, elusive and fiercely independent, these pioneers of sonic experimentation have pushed the boundaries of underground music and visual art. With playful energy, Losier celebrates the radical freedom of a collective that has always rejected convention to create its own rules.

With their wild, home-built instruments, sound-art duo Lolo & Sosaku unleash squeaks, rumbles and crashes in a perfectly orchestrated chaos. Is it a concert, an acid-soaked happening, a daydream in the style of Quintin Dupieux? Sergio Caballero throws the two sound artists into an extravagant western where the desert becomes a playground for sonic and visual exploration. A delirious plunge into the imagination — a trip where machines are never efficient, but always magical.

In 1974, Linda Rosenkrantz asked her artist friends to recount their last day, hour by hour. Peter Hujar took part. The lost recording resurfaced as a transcript, and Ira Sachs revives the conversation with Rebecca Hall and Ben Whishaw—a portrait about friendship, art, words, and silences.

In December 2000, a celebrated photographer, invited by an influential critic, selects four “artists” for a supposedly groundbreaking Biennale. Their work is indefensible—artistically, aesthetically, and ethically—yet the art world embraces it. Tirana Conspiracy reconstructs the scandal through unseen testimonies and archival footage, exposing a system more corrupt than it appears.