13/02/2026 - The Hungarian director-screenwriter and the Dutch director-screenwriter-actor will form the focus of the festival’s upcoming edition, taking place between 7 and 15 March

Directors Ildikó Enyedi and Alex van Warmerdam (© Koen Broos)

The Europe, Now! section of the 44th Bergamo Film Meeting (7 - 15 March) will host retrospectives revolving around one of the most sensitive and original voices in Hungarian cinema - director-screenwriter Ildikó Enyedi - and Dutch director-screenwriter-actor Alex van Warmerdam.

Ildikó Enyedi will be attending the Bergamo Film Meeting between 10 and 13 March. This multi-award-winning filmmaker began her artistic journey within conceptual art and media circuits in post-communist Hungary, an experimental environment which has had a lasting impact on her vision. Her feature film debut came in 1989 with My 20th Century, which won the Golden Camera at Cannes. In the years that followed, Enyedi alternated between features, shorts and television work. After the HBO Europe series Terápia, she returned to feature films with On Body and Soul [+see also:
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interview: Ildiko Enyedi
interview: Ildiko Enyedi
interview: Réka Tenki
film profile], which scooped the Golden Bear in the Berlinale as well as being Oscar nominated. The Story of My Wife [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Ildikó Enyedi
film profile], presented in competition in Cannes, saw Enyedi adapting Milán Füst’s eponymous novel, while her latest film, Silent Friend [+see also:
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interview: Ildikó Enyedi
film profile], which bowed in competition in Venice, centres around a thousand-year-old tree which bears witness to three stories unfolding over more than a century.

One of the most original voices in contemporary Dutch cinema, Alex van Warmerdam has long embraced a cinematic language marked by black, surreal humour, disquieting atmospheres and a critical, grotesque view of bourgeois society. He often appears in his own films, as well as penning their stories and screenplays. His feature film debut came with Abel (1986), and The Northerners saw him earning wide international recognition and an array of awards in numerous festivals, including the Golden Camunian Rose in the 1993 Bergamo Film Meeting event. In the ensuing years, he consolidated his cinematic universe by way of Grimm, in which he offers a dark, contemporary reimagining of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale and, among his more recent titles, Borgman [+see also:
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trailer
interview: Alex van Varmerdam
interview: Reinout Scholten van Aschat
film profile], which competed in Cannes and which marked his international breakthrough. His latest work, Nr. 10 [+see also:
film review
film profile], was presented in competition in the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. His brother Marc van Warmerdam, who produced a number of Alex’s films, will be in Bergamo between 8 and 10 March.

For its part, the Europe, Now! section will boast a selection of eight graduate films from European film schools which are also members of CILECT – organised in collaboration with the Civica Scuola di Cinema Luchino Visconti di Milano – as well as the Europe, Now! Film Industry Meetings (11 - 12 March), which will consist of two days of professional updates aimed at industry professionals, with this year’s event devoted to theatrical distribution strategies and the new programming opportunities offered by immersive cinema.

(Translated from Italian)