13/12/2024 - Arild Østin Ommundsen's Everything Must Go will open the gathering, which includes a sidebar for new musical movies, its signature Films from the North showcase and a focus on Iran

Unspooling from 13-19 January 2025 in the eponymous northern Norwegian city, the Tromsø International Film Festival has just announced its full programme, including competition titles and sidebar line-ups for its 35th edition. The festival will open with the Norwegian family drama Everything Must Go [+see also:
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Tromsø’s competition section includes a slate of 12 high-profile films, all of which are enjoying their Norwegian premiere at the festival and will be competing for the Aurora Prize. Featuring in the competition are a set of fiction features that have collected top prizes at leading international festivals, including Brady Corbet’s Venice Silver Lion winner The Brutalist [+see also:
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interview: Maura Delpero
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interview: Scandar Copti
film profile], with Copti expected to be in attendance at the festival in January.

Joining them are other well-received new works, including prolific British filmmaker Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths [+see also:
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film profile] and Mahdi Fleifel’s To a Land Unknown [+see also:
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interview: Mahdi Fleifel
film profile]. Two documentaries round off the competition: the San Sebastián-winning Afternoons of Solitude [+see also:
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interview: Albert Serra
film profile] by Catalonian filmmaker Albert Serra, and Gaucho Gaucho by Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw, the filmmaking duo behind The Truffle Hunters [+see also:
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interview: Gregory Kershaw and Michael…
film profile].

The festival’s wide-ranging Horizons strand includes Payal Kapadia’s Cannes Grand Prix winner All We Imagine as Light [+see also:
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film profile], Adam Elliot’s Annecy-winning Memoir of a Snail and Laura Carreira’s acclaimed directorial debut, On Falling [+see also:
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interview: Laura Carreira
film profile]. The section also includes several LGBTQ+-centred films, including Marcel Caetano’s coming-of-age tale Baby [+see also:
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interview: Victoria Verseau
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film profile], and Emanuel Pârvu’s Three Kilometres to the End of the World [+see also:
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interview: Emanuel Pârvu
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The East Side Stories sidebar highlights works from former Soviet republics with a focus on “critical voices and stories from the region”, with this year’s line-up including Tato Kotetishvili’s Holy Electricity [+see also:
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interview: Tato Kotetishvili
film profile], Oksana Karpovych’s Intercepted [+see also:
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interview: Saulė Bliuvaitė
film profile], Mother and Daughter, or the Night is Never Complete [+see also:
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film profile] by iconic nonagenarian Georgian filmmaker Lana Gogoberidze and Damien Kocur’s Under the Volcano [+see also:
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interview: Damian Kocur
film profile]. Owing to its location north of the Arctic Circle, the festival also notably uses the phenomenon of the polar night to conduct daytime outdoor screenings as part of its Winter Cinema section, whose line-up includes the Latvian animated favourite Flow [+see also:
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interview: Gints Zilbalodis
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interview: Virpi Suutari
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The Films from the North – Features section includes films from all across the High North. The line-up includes #Hvaldimir, Conversation with a Spy Whale by French environmental explorer and filmmaker Jérôme Delafosse, about the titular animal who became infamous for supposedly escaping from a Russian military base; Teenage Life Interrupted [+see also:
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The Overdrive section – akin to many festivals’ “midnight” selections – includes the Taiwanese horror-comedy Dead Talents Society and the French satire Plastic Guns [+see also:
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interview: Jean-Christophe Meurisse
film profile], while the Critics’ Week programme, curated by the Norwegian Film Critics’ Association, features two films toplined by Norwegian actress Renate Reinsve: Armand [+see also:
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interview: Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel
interview: Renate Reinsve
film profile] and Handling the Undead [+see also:
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trailer
film profile]. This edition’s “Focus: Iran” strand includes The Seed of the Sacred Fig [+see also:
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interview: Mohammad Rasoulof
film profile], My Stolen Planet [+see also:
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film profile] and My Favourite Cake [+see also:
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film profile], among others. Tromsø’s other speciality section, “The New Musical”, brings attention to several innovative musical films that have been released in 2024, such as Emilia Pérez [+see also:
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interview: Carlos Marqués-Marcet
film profile].

The full selection of films can be explored on the Tromsø International Film Festival website.