Where can we find the cinema of the future? At BellaTOFIFEST IFF, the answer is simple: in the ON AIR section. The international competition for first and second feature films has long been one of the most highly anticipated events of the Toruń festival. This year, twelve titles selected from hundreds of submissions will be judged by a jury comprising director Magdalena Łazarkiewicz, actors Andrzej Chyra and Karolina Gruszka, director Xawery Żuławski and producer Wojciech Gostomczyk. The jury will select the film that will receive the festival’s Grand Prix, funded by the City of Toruń.
For years, the ON AIR section has been bringing forward voices that are only just beginning to fully resonate, presenting them before the world has had a chance to call them discoveries. This year’s program is a journey across nearly all continents, through the full spectrum of human experience and at the same time twelve different answers to the same question: what does it mean to say something that has not yet been said?
Lucía Aleñar Iglesias takes us to Mallorca, where mourning the loss of a grandmother turns into a haunting meditation on memory and spiritual inheritance (Forastera). Shahad Ameen leads us along the old pilgrimage routes of Saudi Arabia, where twelve-year-old Janna searches for her missing sister and uncovers family secrets hidden for generations (Hijra). From 1980s Mexico comes an intimate story by Mayra Hermosillo about eight-year-old Roberta, who watches as seven women fight to save their home and their dignity (Vanilla). Sophy Romvari blurs the line between fiction and documentary in a story of a Hungarian-Canadian family on Vancouver Island, where an idyll conceals increasingly dark fractures (Blue Heron).
The ON AIR section is also a space where European cinema speaks about itself with exceptional honesty. Kosara Mitić from North Macedonia explores what happens to girls when adults look away – her 17 is a film about violence, silence and solidarity, whose power comes as much from the precision of its screenplay as from the courage of its director. In Silent Rebellion, Marie-Elsa Sgualdo returns to a pre-war Swiss village, where fifteen-year-old Emma, after experiencing trauma, becomes an emancipator against her own will. In Understand Your Displeasure, Kilian Armando Friedrich portrays a woman who mediates every day between the demands of the market and her loyalty to a team of cleaning workers, doing so with a documentary-like, unflinching attentiveness. Lauri-Matti Parppei, a Finnish director and musician in one, tells in A Light That Never Goes Out the story of a flutist who, after a nervous breakdown, discovers that chaos can be a form of healing.
The Middle Eastern accent of the section is shaped by two titles of very different tones. In A Sad and Beautiful World, Cyril Aris, awarded the Audience Award at Giornate degli Autori in Venice, traces a Lebanese love story across three decades of impossible choices, where the country itself becomes the antagonist. In Nina Roza, Geneviève Dulude-De Celles sends a contemporary art expert to a Bulgarian village, where an eight-year-old girl creates viral artworks and where the protagonist’s past proves stronger than the present.
Yugo Florida by Vladimir Tagić is a Serbian comedy about a man who avoids the truth that his father is dying, until the moment when they both set off in the eponymous car on a journey to a monastery and finally meet as two equally lost people. And finally, No Ghosts on Good Street – the only Polish production in the competition, the feature debut of Emi Buchwald, in which four siblings try to enter adulthood without losing each other along the way. The film, with ten nominations for the Polish Film Awards Eagles, arrives in Toruń as one of the most talked-about Polish titles of the season.
The 24th BellaTOFIFEST International Film Festival will take place in Toruń from 27 June to 3 July 2026. As every year, we invite audiences to the Festival Centre at CKK Jordanki, Cinema City, the Dwór Artusa Cultural Centre, as well as the festival’s open-air cinema venues. All information about the upcoming festival can be found on our website. Follow us at bellatofifest.pl and on our Facebook profile.
