Armenia, before peace, yet after war. A soldier takes a girl on a road trip to conceal her father’s death. Christine Haroutounian’s transfixing debut, opened the Berlinale Forum and is MIRAGE Film of the Year!

Six women roam neon-lit Paris, sharing dreams, desires and fears in a shapeshifting 16mm feminist odyssey, winner of Locarno’s Best Emerging Director Award.

A journalist’s voyage opens into a cinematic album, weaving fiction, history, archives, art and family memory into an expansive vision of Black life across time and continents.

Convinced that alien forces are invading human bodies, an artist begins to see violence and estrangement everywhere. A science-fiction that transforms urban alienation into a thrilling assault on perception.

A fisherman survives the volcano Krakatoa’s eruption and descends towards the heart of the earth in a wordless, hallucinatory odyssey driven by Oscar-winner Nicolas Becker’s seismic sound design.

Join our celebration of the animation studio Mikrofilm and their miraculous 30 years of survival – with a fantastic lineup of short films, talks and after-party.

Step into the unknown with MIRAGE Mystery Screening. The title remains secret until the lights go down. Expect something immersive, challenging and/or surprising.

A selection of Norwegian short films: Sandy Fannies - by Ingrid Runde Saxegaard | Payé - by Mirko Stopar | Animalia - by Marius Rolfsvåg

William Greaves turns a chaotic film shoot into a playful, radical inquiry into cinema. What appears to be a film production in crisis gradually reveals itself as one of cinema’s boldest experiments.

In three tactile 16mm films, Ben Rivers travels to remote worlds where landscapes erode, solitude becomes freedom and lives beyond society reveal other ways of being.

Across Vietnam and Armenia, three early films by auteurs Lê Bảo and Christine Haroutounian. Audiovisual studies of human connection, family and loss.

Nearly 40 and still living with his mother, Alf dreams of touring Europe with his diabolo act. Shot on 16mm and starring a real-life mother and son, this tender Swedish oddity turns drifting into resistance.

Born in a cave more than sixty years ago, Cao Thị Hậu passes the endangered Rục language to her grandchildren. The Locarno Golden Leopard winner is a luminous 16mm film about memory, home and inheritance.

Godfrey Reggio’s wordless classic merges image, editing and iconic score in a hypnotic and unsettling reflection on the modern world. Regularly named one of the greatest documentaries ever made.

Step into the unknown with MIRAGE Mystery Screening. The title remains secret until the lights go down. Expect something immersive, challenging and/or surprising.

More than fifty years in the making, William and David Greaves’ remarkable film turns a historic gathering in 1972 of artists and thinkers of the Harlem Renaissance reunite into living, breathing cinema.

A son returns to the father he fled;not to forgive or condemn, but to ask why. IDFA’s Best First Feature winner, Paikar is a raw, tender journey through war, exile and inherited silence.

A projectionist secretly moves into a fading cinema, where an unlikely nocturnal community turns the empty theatre into a home. Warm,melancholic and quietly funny love story of cinema as a space.

A young Iranian woman’s refusal to marry becomes a quiet, radical act of resistance against a world determined to control her life. A powerful and strikingly modern portrait of female autonomy.

In Trillion, a woman walks barefoot across a moonlike landscape, carrying heavy bags towards the sea. Her repeated journey becomes a powerful reckoning with how we treat the living world and our oceans.

Vienna-based curatorial collective Twentysix visits MIRAGE presenting films by Laslo Chenchanna, Deborah Stratman and Apichatpong Weerasethakul to examine the experience of watching films itself.

A 1980 record of a Venezuelan choir singing in Farsi, Arabic and Yoruba opens a vivid archival history of oil and Global South solidarity. Through fragments the film makes political history feel newly alive.

Six women roam neon-lit Paris, sharing dreams, desires and fears in a shapeshifting 16mm feminist odyssey, winner of Locarno’s Best Emerging Director Award.

In these two closely connected films, British artist and filmmaker Beatrice Gibson turns to poets, friends and family to ask how we might live, love and care for one another amid political instability.

Meet legendary British filmmaker Ben Rivers expanding on a selection of poetry-films. Shot primarily on 16mm, poems become images and images begin to speak.

A poetic and visual hybrid work moving between film, performance, and installation, portraying three women, in three rooms, facing three similar conflicts

Born in a cave more than sixty years ago, Cao Thị Hậu passes the endangered Rục language to her grandchildren. The Locarno Golden Leopard winner is a luminous 16mm film about memory, home and inheritance.

A hen escapes an industrial farm and fights to build a family at a Greek restaurant while a human tragedy unfolds around her. Pálfi’s extraordinary animal odyssey is funny, tender and increasingly dark.

Following a stay at a psychiatric clinic, Morten calls emergency services. Police arrive, and thirteen minutes later he is shot and killed. His audio recorder captures the final minutes of his life.

Toronto, MoMa, Hot-Docs, Berlinale curator and programmer Jesse Cumming puts together two international short-film programs for MIRAGE 2026.

Rumours of a new gold vein draw Moussa and his friends deep into the Sahara.Visually breathtaking and charged with suspense, Mountain of Gold follows the pursuit of fortune and a new life.

In Luanda, a young poet turns precarious work and restless dreams into rap. A vibrant city symphony where music becomes resistance celebrating a generation that may be marginalised, but is never defeated.

Step into the unknown with MIRAGE Mystery Screening. The title remains secret until the lights go down. Expect something immersive, challenging and/or surprising.

A selection of Norwegian short films: Interlude - by Aasne Vaa Greibrokk | Nothing, Arizona - by Daniel Paida Larsen | Conversations On a Boat - by Sabina Jacobsson

In the second Qatsi film trilogy, human labour, ritual and movement become a vast cinematic symphony about beauty, survival and the hidden cost of progress.

Denis Lavant gives an astonishing physical performance as a farm worker building a fortress for his village, in John Skoog’s tactile black-and-white transformation of a true story into modern myth.

A gripping reconstruction of Algeria’s struggle for independence from French colonial rule. This Golden Lion winner was banned in France for five years, and studied by the Pentagon decades later.