The new in the established: PUSHING THE BOUNDARIES shows the most exciting films by boundary-pushing film artists.
Our PUSHING THE BOUNDARIES section complements the Competition with a look at directors' films after their first and second works. The selection includes 16 daring fictional feature-length films that test the boundaries of the medium of film and bring aesthetically and narratively consistent visions to the screen.
The section thus creates continuity: here you can also keep up with the careers of artists whose earlier work was already presented in the festival program.
This year, PUSHING THE BOUNDARIES features nine German premieres by exceptional directors. These include Marielle Heller's high-spirited ›Nightbitch‹ with an outstanding Amy Adams, Athina Rachel Tsangari's wild ›Harvest‹ with an apocalyptic Caleb Landry Jones, Monaco of all places as a place of Christmas warmth in ›Cent Mille Millards‹ by Virgil Vernier and Hong Sangsoo's ›By the Stream‹. Here, the South Korean cult director combines important themes and motifs from his work and develops them further. Jacques Audiard's Cannes triumph ›Emilia Pérez‹, another absolute highlight of the cinema year, can also look forward to Academy Awards, as can Matthew Rankin's ludicrous stroke of genius ›Universal Language‹ and Mohammad Rasoulof's ›The Seed of the Sacred Fig‹, which is in the running for Germany. Sean Price Williams, whose directorial debut ›The Sweet East‹ won an award at last year's IFFMH, returns as cinematographer with two films: in addition to ›Harvest‹, to which his images lend an incomparably enraptured, delirious note, with ›Between the Temples‹. Inspired by Hal Ashby's ›Harold and Maude', cult director Nathan Silver directs Jason Schwartzman as a Jewish cantor in an atypical romantic comedy.