Every year, the world’s biggest festivals – Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Locarno, Sundance – select films that change the way we think about cinema. Not all of them make it to Polish cinemas. The MUST SEE MUST BE section at the BellaTOFIFEST International Film Festival in Toruń was created precisely so that none of these titles goes unnoticed.
This year’s MUST SEE MUST BE program spans from Tokyo to Madrid, from Kabul to the suburbs of Paris. It is a curatorial condensation of the most important discoveries and gems of the past festival season – films distinguished by their thematic originality, visual boldness, and outstanding performances, presented in Poland for the first time or almost for the first time.
Chie Hayakawa, in Renoir, a film from the main competition in Cannes, returns to her own childhood in Tokyo in 1987, where an eleven-year-old girl confronts her father’s illness and loneliness through hypnosis and imagination. In Yakushima’s Illusion, Naomi Kawase weaves a story of love and disappearance with the ethical dimension of organ transplantation. Vicky Krieps plays a French woman in Kobe who is engaged in a daily race against time to save a child’s life.
Heysel 85 by Teodora Ana Mihai takes the viewer to the stadium in Brussels just before the disaster of May 1985, mercilessly reconstructing the mechanism of tragic decisions. No Good Man by Shahrbanoo Sadat, the opening film of this year’s Berlinale, is set in Kabul in the final weeks before the Taliban’s return. It tells the story of a camera operator at Afghan television who no longer believes in good men and of what happens when that conviction begins to falter. Broken Voices by Ondřej Provazník, the 2026 Czech Lions winner, is inspired by true events and follows a thirteen-year-old girl accepted into a prestigious choir and the price she has to pay for being singled out.
Dragonfly by Paul Andrew Williams, a BAFTA winner, is a moving story of two women – an elderly pensioner forgotten by her family and her younger neighbour – in which mounting tensions lead to shocking consequences, with Brenda Blethyn and Andrea Riseborough delivering performances of a lifetime. Sleepless City by Guillermo Galoe, a debut from the Cannes Semaine de la Critique, takes us to the largest illegal settlement in Europe on the outskirts of Madrid, where a Roma teenager, Toni, must decide what he is willing to give up to protect his grandfather. Ablaze by Thomas Kruithof asks whether love can survive political commitment. In the film, Virginie Efira plays an activist whose convictions gradually consume everything she once had.
Quentin Dupieux in The Piano Accident, with his usual uncompromising subversiveness, takes aim at contemporary internet celebrity culture. Adèle Exarchopoulos, as a controversial social media star who, after a piano accident, retreats to the mountains only to fall into the hands of a ruthless journalist, anchors one of the most delirious films of the season. The duo Olivier Nakache and Éric Toledano, the creators of Intouchables, return in Just an Illusion to the Paris suburbs of 1985 to tenderly and humorously tell the story of an almost thirteen-year-old boy suspended between childhood and adulthood.
A Brief Affair by Ludovica Rampoldi marks the directorial debut of the screenwriter of Gomorrah, in which a no-strings-attached romance turns into an unsettling obsession. Hot Water by Syrian-American director Ramzi Bashour is a lyrical road movie across the vast landscapes of America. A teenager and his Lebanese mother travel westward carrying a bundle of unresolved identities. A Dump of Untitled Pieces by Turkish director Melik Kuru is a bittersweet, comedic journey through Istanbul’s crisis-ridden art market, with a young photographer and her awkward roommate at its center.
Mile End Kicks by Chandler Levack is a comedy set in Montreal in 2011 about a music critic who arrives to write a book on Alanis Morissette but instead becomes the press manager of an indie rock band and gets entangled in two romantic affairs at the same time. Finally, Last Night I Conquered the City of Thebesby Gabriel Azorín, winner of the Grand Prix at the Belfort Entrevues festival, explores emotional intimacy between men across two distant eras, linking ancient baths in Galicia with the present in a single, continuous space. The Things Left Unspoken by Gabriele Muccino follows a summer trip of two Italian couples to Tangier that exposes everything none of them has been able to say out loud.
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.
