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 [+lire aussi :
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fiche film] by Arild Østin Ommundsen, which featured in Haugesund’s New Nordic Films event that took place in August (see the news), while James Mangold’s Timothée Chalamet-led Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown will close the festival.

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 [+lire aussi :
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interview : Maura Delpero
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interview : Scandar Copti
fiche film], 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 [+lire aussi :
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interview : Mahdi Fleifel
fiche film]. Two documentaries round off the competition: the San Sebastián-winning Afternoons of Solitude [+lire aussi :
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interview : Albert Serra
fiche film] by Catalonian filmmaker Albert Serra, and Gaucho Gaucho by Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw, the filmmaking duo behind The Truffle Hunters [+lire aussi :
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interview : Gregory Kershaw et Michael…
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The festival’s wide-ranging Horizons strand includes Payal Kapadia’s Cannes Grand Prix winner All We Imagine as Light [+lire aussi :
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interview : Laura Carreira
fiche film]. The section also includes several LGBTQ+-centred films, including Marcel Caetano’s coming-of-age tale Baby [+lire aussi :
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interview : Victoria Verseau
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fiche film], and Emanuel Pârvu’s Three Kilometres to the End of the World [+lire aussi :
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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 [+lire aussi :
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interview : Tato Kotetishvili
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interview : Saulė Bliuvaitė
fiche film], Mother and Daughter, or the Night is Never Complete [+lire aussi :
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fiche film] by iconic nonagenarian Georgian filmmaker Lana Gogoberidze and Damien Kocur’s Under the Volcano [+lire aussi :
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interview : Damian Kocur
fiche film]. 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 [+lire aussi :
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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 [+lire aussi :
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fiche film] by Icelandic director Helena Stefánsdóttir; and Solitary Road by Swedish documentary filmmaker Johan Palmgren.

The Overdrive section – akin to many festivals’ “midnight” selections – includes the Taiwanese horror-comedy Dead Talents Society and the French satire Plastic Guns [+lire aussi :
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interview : Jean-Christophe Meurisse
fiche film], while the Critics’ Week programme, curated by the Norwegian Film Critics’ Association, features two films toplined by Norwegian actress Renate Reinsve: Armand [+lire aussi :
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interview : Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel
interview : Renate Reinsve
fiche film] and Handling the Undead [+lire aussi :
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fiche film]. This edition’s “Focus: Iran” strand includes The Seed of the Sacred Fig [+lire aussi :
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interview : Mohammad Rasoulof
fiche film], My Stolen Planet [+lire aussi :
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fiche film] and My Favourite Cake [+lire aussi :
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fiche film], 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 [+lire aussi :
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interview : Carlos Marqués-Marcet
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The full selection of films can be explored on the Tromsø International Film Festival website.