A total of nine titles are competing for this year’s Orange Grand Prix award, worth €10,000, including the much-hyped Irish film, The Quiet Girl--the first Irish-language film to make the final five in the 2023 Oscars for best international feature film.
It follows the story of young Cáit who has to stay with her distant relatives while her mother is pregnant. Despite blossoming under the care of this foster family she hadn’t before met, she ends up discovering a secret…
The official lineup also includes three Luxembourg (co-)productions, including the Haruki Murakami-inspired animation Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman by Pierre Földes, which follows three lonely characters through the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. The film was co-produced through Doghouse Films. Another, this time through Iris Productions, is The Kings of the World by Colombian director Laura Mora Ortega, which won three prizes at the San Sebastian International Film Festival. Maret, by Luxembourg Laura Schroeder, will also get its world premiere at this year’s LFF. Co-produced by Red Lion, the film about memory and loss was filmed in Lanzarote and Germany.
Others in the official competition include 1976, which takes place in Chile, when a woman’s family priest asks her to care for a man he’d been hiding, and Autobiography, which follows a young Indonesian man who ends up becoming the right-hand man of a general who is vying for political office. World War III, another in the running, is a darkly comedic, politically incorrect film about a labourer cast in a war film, while I Have Electric Dreams follows the life of a teenager who wants to move back in with her estranged father, who himself is having his own issues. Finally, Lenor Will Never Die, a Filipino psychological drama about an industry star who has a coma and finds herself reliving one of her unfinished scripts, bagged the special jury prize at last year’s Sundance Film Festival.
Documentary competition
Riotsville, USA by Sierra Pettengill is among the seven films in this year’s documentary competition. Undoubtedly a film that will resonate with modern discussions, it centres on the fake town of Riotsville, constructed by the US military in order to train police and other officials in light of the 1960s uprisings.
Others in the running include a look at the French health system in De Humani Corporis Fabrica; Paradise, about a villagers in Siberia that need to fend for themselves to fight forest fires, without the help of Moscow; Rojek, in which Kurdish filmmaker Zaynê Akyol interviews imprisoned jihadists; Silent House, spanning three generations of an Iranian family; We, Students!, which showcases the lives of students in the Central African Republic; and We Will Not Fade Away, where a 73-year-old takes five teenagers under his wing to teach them about alpining, as they conjure dreams to escape war-torn Donbas.
About the juries
The international jury is presided by Iranian director and two-time Oscar winner, Asghar Farhadi (A Separation, The Salesman). It should also include Luxembourg actress Marie Jung, Israeli director Nadav Lapid, French-Canadian actor Niels Schneider and French producer Sylvie Pialat.
The documentary lineup will be judged by another five, presided by CEO and director of the European Film Academy (Netherlands), Matthijs Wouter Knol. The jury also includes Jonas Holmberg of the Gotheburg Festival; German film critic Giovanni Marchini; Sophie Mirouze of Festival La Rochelle Cinéma; and Charlotte Serrand, La Roche-sur-Yon International Film Festival.
Additional juries include a VR jury, a 2030 award jury, a youth jury and--new for this edition--a Fipresci (International Federation of Film Critics) jury.
Other highlights
Period comedy My Crime will kick of this year’s festival, while the closing film is the highly anticipated A Good Person by Zach Braff (Garden State), starring Morgan Freeman and Florence Pugh. The awards ceremony will also screen the international premier of Ingeborg Bachmann – Journey Into the Desert, starring Vicky Krieps.
The festival’s Made In/With Luxembourg also offers a bit of a tribute to the late Pol Cruchten, with a remastered version of Hochzäitsnuecht by the Luxembourg director, as well as The Invitation by Fabrizio Maltese, which initally started off as a project between Maltese and Cruchten before the latter’s passing.
Outside the competition highlights also include the romantic comedy, What’s Love Got To Do With It, starring Lily James and Emma Thompson, while Golda showcases Helen Mirren as Golda Meir during the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
This year’s LFF also has the sixth edition of the virtual reality pavilion at Neimënster, running 1-19 March, with works immersing visitors into a variety of worlds, including the first-ever VR experience captured from the International Space Station and another delving into Paris’ Notre Dame Cathedral architectural details.
The Small Stories exhibition by David Lynch also opens to the public this Friday at Cercle Cité, running through 16 April. More information .
Ticket sales for LFF also begin this Friday. For more information, including agenda and ticketing, visit the .