International Competition 2025

​​When the viewer’s discerning gaze settles in the heart of the dark cinema hall, the films before them are transformed into hands that assume their own presence. In a third dimension, they reach out from the screen, draw near to the body, touch it, and carry it away on a shared journey, a shared experience.

Hands in various moods, intensities, and gestures, are facing an eye that watches, scrutinises, feels, chooses, follows, or remains detached.

Each of the twenty-two films in this year’s International Competition section of the DISFF is a hand—or, rather, multiple hands—intertwined, extended toward every spectator. Upon their skin, they carry the colour and temperament of eighteen countries, the intellectual vitality and youthful drive of their filmmakers, the scars borne by their characters, the drops of sweat and grains of dust from their long journey to this point.

These are films that become a hand, patting the viewer on the back and embracing them by the shoulder, like Hunters in the Snow; shielding their eyes in moments of ultimate inner terror, like God Is Shy; or inviting them, with a gesture of silence, on a journey through deep instinctual conflict, like Noi.

These are films that resemble hands reaching out for the heart, seeking the nuances and extent of erotic passion, like ¡Beso De Lengua!; exploring the limits of the force of love and the lust for power, like Skin On Skin; or searching, in the dark, for a way out of love when it turns toxic, like Because of (U).

Some others morph into hands with a pointing finger, indicating the direction of change: whether toward a material reality, like No Mean City, or a more personal path, turning inward and backward, like Sewing Machine, before ultimately resting, like a finger lowered in reconciliation, in an act of atonement with the past and its wounds, as in Casa Chica, Campolivar, and Tragédia.

More hands. Hands that clench into fists and rise to proclaim their ideals, like Loynes; that resist the decay of a world complicit in destruction and annihilation, like Un Matin and When You Were Young Were You Afraid of the Moon?; or hands that challenge and reframe the meaning of the “foreigner”, like Bimba.

Hands that open into an embrace of acceptance, like Correct Me If I’m Wrong; that wipe away tears with the back of their fingers in search of catharsis, like Blackbird; or that entwine their fingers tightly, as if bittersweet memories were interwoven, a futile effort to capture the fleeting moment, like 400 Cassettes.

Hands that attempt to grasp the wind, as if holding a whole life in the palm of a hand, like Magdalena Hausen: Frozen Time; hands that whisper confessions of guilt into the viewer’s ear, like I’m Glad You’re Dead Now; hands that smear and distort like chalk on a blackboard the hazy line between reality and illusion, like Favours— and the definitions of the familiar, the local, the foreign, the exotic, like Pirateland.

I welcome you all to the 31st edition of the International Competition section of Drama International Short Film Festival and invite you—with your own eyes—to surrender to these hands.

Vasileios Terzopoulos
Head Programmer, International Competition Section