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 [+leggi anche:
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scheda 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 [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Maura Delpero
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intervista: Scandar Copti
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Joining them are other well-received new works, including prolific British filmmaker Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Mahdi Fleifel
scheda film]. Two documentaries round off the competition: the San Sebastián-winning Afternoons of Solitude [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Albert Serra
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intervista: Gregory Kershaw e 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 [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Laura Carreira
scheda film]. The section also includes several LGBTQ+-centred films, including Marcel Caetano’s coming-of-age tale Baby [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Victoria Verseau
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intervista: 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 [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Tato Kotetishvili
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intervista: Saulė Bliuvaitė
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intervista: Damian Kocur
scheda 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 [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Gints Zilbalodis
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intervista: 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 [+leggi anche:
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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 [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Jean-Christophe Meurisse
scheda film], while the Critics’ Week programme, curated by the Norwegian Film Critics’ Association, features two films toplined by Norwegian actress Renate Reinsve: Armand [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel
intervista: Renate Reinsve
scheda film] and Handling the Undead [+leggi anche:
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scheda film]. This edition’s “Focus: Iran” strand includes The Seed of the Sacred Fig [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Mohammad Rasoulof
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intervista: Carlos Marqués-Marcet
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The full selection of films can be explored on the Tromsø International Film Festival website.