The very word competition suggests rivalry—yet it hardly captures the essence of what takes place at the Festival. Although the jury must reach its decisions and prizes await the winners, the competition is, above all, not about contest but rather about encounter—an exchange and amalgamation of different styles, approaches, and visions. It is a synthesis of scales and geographies.

This year, the curators of the International Competition were delighted to include films from across the globe—including countries rarely represented on screen. Have you ever seen a film from Puerto Rico or Myanmar? Not really? Then come for In Between Storms by Fran Zayas and One Summer Day, I Drank Bubble Tea by Maung Sun, and stay for witnessing the cosmic chaos of forests and swamps in Russia’s Arkhangelsk region (Fallout Zones by Igor Elukov).

At the heart of the 35th anniversary Message to Man International Competition are themes that have intrigued the Festival since its inception: the confrontation between camera and reality, between characters and themselves, between life and death. The films we have selected live within complex dialogues—speaking of a painful present and an equally painful past, as in Tales of the Wounded Land by Abbas Fahdel and The Governor by Danel Elpeleg; of a reality that undermines all social constructs (The Godmother by Marzena Sowa); or of life transformed into a perfect dream (Graziano – A Hermit’s Story by Jozefien van der Aelst).

You will see a three-minute Austrian animated grotesque (Challenges of a Solitary Mind by Astrid Rothaug) alongside a three-minute animated gouache from Russia (Socially Approved Positions of Bodies in Space by Lera Oleynikova).

You will see how the once-solid boundary between fiction and non-fiction continues to dissolve (Wind, Talk to Me by Stefan Djordjević), and how a machine recounts a compelling historical documentary about events that never happened (09/05/1982 by Camilo Restrepo and Jorge Caballero).

Each of these very different films, in its own way, reflects on the human being—as both a part of a vast world and a self-contained entity, a being equal to an entire universe.

Diana Abu Usef, Katerina Beloglazova, Maria Gotlib, Vasily Stepanov