Anastasia Trofimova, a Russian-Canadian filmmaker, gains unprecedented access to follow a Russian Army battalion in Ukraine. Without any official clearance or permits, she earns the trust of foot soldiers and embeds herself over the span of a year with one battalion as it makes its way across Eastern Ukraine. What she discovers is far from the propaganda and labels pushed by the East or the West: an army in disarray, soldiers disillusioned and often struggling to understand what they are fighting for.

This film is about Theo, an industrial cleaner who is unhappy in these modern times. He desires a better, more natural world but feels he isn't capable of achieving his ideals.

Luciano cuts a slight figure as he wanders through the narrow streets of the improvised Barrio Tablada on the edge of Rosario, taking care of his mother and sister and the makeshift home they share, finding occasional work on building sites as the search for a proper job continues, lifting weights at the gym. Manuel Besedovsky lays out the different episodes of this precarious, if not atypical existence with such deliberate deemphasis that it feels almost like a plot twist when Luciano meets with a consultant to talk about the various options for constructing a penis. And yet this part of Luciano’s experience has actually been there all along – another thread woven often imperceptibly into the fabric of the film with gentleness and care. Handing CVs out, hormone injections, smoking joints with buddies from the neighbourhood, talking to his mother about the daughter that is no longer there, some slightly awkward rapping, thinking about having children – the most radical thing about this portrait is how each challenge, each diversion, each encounter is presented with the same sense of normality with which Luciano experiences it. Class, gender identity and their seldom-seen intersection shown as nothing more than getting on with life.

On opposite sides of the Bering Strait, Nikita in Siberia and Martha in Alaska watch their world collapse. Ancient permafrost thaws, destabilizing not only their communities and lives but also the planet itself. Meanwhile, as climate pledges fade and energy security becomes the global doctrine, fossil-fuel giants expand aggressively in the Arctic.

And She Didn’t Die tells the life story of South African writer and resistance fighter Lauretta Ngcobo, as seen through the eyes of her daughter, film director Kethiwe Ngcobo. Lauretta grew up in KwaZulu-Natal, became involved in the struggle against apartheid through her husband AB Ngcobo, leader of the Pan African Congress, and eventually fled to London. In exile, she found the freedom to write—becoming one of the first Black women to gain a literary voice. The director interweaves home videos, archival material, interviews, passages from books, and re-enacted scenes into a richly layered portrait blending the personal and the political. Kitchen table conversations about hairstyles and cultural traditions counterpoint reflections on the role of rural women in the anti-apartheid struggle. The oral storytelling tradition, in which her mother’s books are also rooted, has a central role. Kethiwe Ngcobo continues this theme through the medium of cinema. The result is a portrait not only of Lauretta, but also of the many other women who co-wrote history. A tribute to the power of stories as a form of resistance, healing, and cultural transmission.