“We’re full-scale this time around – back in business after a couple of pretty rough years,” beamed Git Scheynius, long-time and tireless director of the Stockholm International Film Festival, as she and programme head Beatrice Karlsson unveiled the 2022 programme a couple of weeks ago at the House of Culture & City Theatre in downtown Stockholm. Playing out from 9-20 November and comprising 130 films from 50 countries, the line-up for the festival’s 33^rd edition was duly dubbed both “colourful” and “powerful” by the presenters, who have overseen a thorough handpicking of the best “pearls” from the top A-list festivals and more, not least some of the stronger Nordic titles of late.

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On this regional note, things will open with a national gala premiere of Tarik Saleh’s drama of intricate intrigues set within Egypt’s religious hierarchy of power, Boy from Heaven [+lee también:
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entrevista: Tarik Saleh
ficha de la película]. The film, rewarded with the Best Screenplay Award at this year’s Cannes, is Sweden’s official submission for the 2023 Oscars. Director Saleh will conduct a master class, and the movie’s co-star Fares Fares will receive the festival’s prize for career recognition, the Stockholm Achievement Award, for his dynamic three decades of work taking in titles such as Jalla! Jalla!, Zero Dark Thirty and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, to name but a few. Also honoured this year is British director Sam Mendes, the recipient of the Visionary Award for his artistic contributions. Mendes will be presenting his latest work, Empire of Light [+lee también:
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ficha de la película], a fitting love letter to the very movie theatres that this festival plans to fill up. Other luminaries on the playbill include Ali Abassi and Holy Spider [+lee también:
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entrevista: Ali Abbasi
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entrevista: Zar Amir Ebrahimi
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ficha de la película], and Laura Poitras’ recent Venice winner All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. Among the newcomers, the curators were keen to highlight Alauda Ruiz de Azúa's Lullaby [+lee también:
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ficha de la película] and Davy Chou’s Return to Seoul [+lee también:
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entrevista: Davy Chou
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A close-up and urgent focus on the cinema of Ukraine is also on the programme. Six titles are being presented – Freedom on Fire: Ukraine's Fight for Freedom [+lee también:
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entrevista: Maksym Nakonechnyi
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entrevista: Christina Tynkevych
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ficha de la película], A Rising Fury and Klondike [+lee también:
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entrevista: Maryna Er Gorbach
ficha de la película] – many of them depicting the current situation or the events leading up to it. The initiative, underlined Scheynius, is aesthetic as well as political, and the festival will hold a special work-in-progress presentation of selected Ukrainian projects with a cash award up for grabs. This cooperative effort, carried out in conjunction with the Swedish Institute, the Odesa International Film Festival, the Ukrainian Embassy in Sweden and various producer organisations, will also contain a support package for the distribution of Ukrainian films in Sweden.

The full programme of the festival can be found here.