Unspooling from 24 September-4 October, the Reykjavík International Film Festival (RIFF) is about to reach its 23rd edition, screening films from across Iceland, and indeed the world, in three main competitive strands and a wide variety of sidebars. RIFF is the country’s largest film festival and notably features screenings in unique locales like Raufarhólshellir, a cave and lava tube located near the city. The festival will open will Amir Bar-Lev’s The Last First: Winter K2, a documentary that premiered at Sundance and traces the 2021 attempt by Icelandic, Pakistani and Chilean mountaineers to scale the titular peak.

Nine films in RIFF’s New Visions section, dedicated to first or second features – open to both documentary and fiction – will compete for the festival’s top prize, the Golden Puffin. Among these are Sweden’s Oscars submission, the dark comedy Adult Supervision by Alex Schulman; Kosovo’s Oscars pick, the coming-of-age drama Dua by Blerta Basholli; the Cannes Critics’ Week Grand Prize winner La Gradiva by Marine Atlan; and A Day in the Life of Jo: Chapter Phaedra by Jacqueline Lentzou, direct from winning the top directing gong in Venice’s Orizzonti.

Dedicated exclusively to documentaries is a competitive section titled A Different Tomorrow. Films in this strand examine tough topics, and aim to create impact and inspire community discussion around environmental, social and human rights themes; this year, the section includes seven films. Lana Daher’s Do You Love Me? is an archival documentary and an account of audiovisual memory in Beirut. La Pietà by Pepe Andreu and Rafa Molés looks back at seven Icelandic siblings who lived near and documented Europe’s largest glacier, Vatnajökull. Gar O’Rourke’s The Siege of Paradise tracks mass tourism in Cinque Terre, while the Cannes Golden Eye winner Rehearsals for a Revolution by Pegah Ahangarani is a 40-plus-year collage of hope, memory, history and change.

RIFF’s Icelandic Panorama spotlights both features and shorts that have a strong connection to Iceland. Angelica Ruffier’s autobiographical documentary La Belle Année will play in this section alongside The Last First: Winter K2 and others. The non-competitive Documentaries section includes the CPH:DOX opener Christiania by Karl Friis Forchhammer, about the eponymous anarchist commune in Copenhagen, and the Berlinale Panorama FIPRESCI Award winner Tristan Forever by Tobias Nölle and Loran Bonnardot, following a burnt-out doctor on the world’s most remote inhabited island.

Portugal will be this year’s focus country, with director João Pedro Rodrigues and actress Maria de Medeiros present as special guests. The 2025 Berlinale Perspectives entry Two Times João Liberada by Paula Tomás Marques, the IFFR opener Providence and the Guitar by João Nicolau and the Cannes Un Certain Regard Best Actress Award winner (for Cléo Diára) I Only Rest in the Storm by Pedro Pinho will feature as part of this section.

Highlighting works from the Arctic region, the Films from the North section is created in collaboration with the Tromsø International Film Festival (a version of the strand also exists at the Norwegian gathering). RIFF is also one of the festivals participating in the SMART7 cooperation network and will thus screen all of the films in this year’s selection (see the news). The Open Seas section rounds up acclaimed movies from the last year, among them Pedro Almodóvar’s Bitter Christmas, Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland, Bruno Dumont’s Red Rocks and Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.

A variety of short films will compete for their respective awards, including Best Icelandic Short, Best International Short and Best Icelandic Student Short. The Golden Egg Award will be given out within a competition section exclusively for short films by up-and-coming directors and producers from the RIFF Talent Lab.