What happens when a tailor facing the loss of everything decides to put his shop on wheels? Or when a father leaves a secure job to become an actor, despite his family's mockery? What happens when music becomes rebellion, dinner becomes a plot, and a football match becomes a battle for dignity?
اضافة اعلان
These are some of the questions raised by the films of the 38th edition of the European Film Festival, running from September 12 through the beginning of October. The films come from Greece, Ireland, Italy, Hungary, Belgium, Romania, and Spain, and nearly all converge around characters who refuse to stay in the place others have chosen for them.
In the first week's screenings, held daily at the Royal Film Commission, we don't see superheroes, but ordinary people facing a moment they can't turn back from: a doctor confronting a medical establishment that refuses the truth, a daughter trying to save her father from his own failure, a son filming his father in hopes of bringing his late mother back, and a woman entering a virtual world in search of a way out of her depression. So while these films differ in language and country, they share common concerns; all of them ask about freedom, memory, dreams, and the ability to start over.
Escaping the Role: The Tailor and the Father Who Became a "Sausage"
The program opened with the Greek film Tailor (Raftis), by Greek-German director Sonja Liza Kenterman. Its lead, Nikos, is a tailor in his fifties, living isolated in the attic above his family's shop, like an old piece of furniture in the space. His trade is collapsing, his father pressures him, and life seems to have shut every door.
But Nikos decides to turn his shop into a mobile sewing cart, roaming Athens. The idea at first seems closer to the whim of a man refusing to admit his time has passed, but it quickly becomes an opportunity to reinvent himself. Sewing here isn't just a trade, but an attempt to mend a torn life, and to stitch together a new relationship with the city, with women, and with love.
Kenterman captures her protagonist's fragility without turning him into a pitiable figure. And beneath the comedy, the film poses a serious question: what does a person do when they discover that what they inherited from their family can no longer save them? Tailor is a film about coming out of the attic, both literally and symbolically, and about turning failure into motion.
From Greece to Belgium comes My Dad Is a Sausage, by director Anouk Fortunier. Here too, a father escapes the role imposed on him. He leaves his dull bank job to become an actor, amid his family's mockery and disbelief, except for his twelve-year-old daughter, Zoé.
The film is a family comedy, but smarter than its playful title suggests. Zoé, who feels sidelined within her family, finds in her father's ambition a reflection of her own need to be believed in by someone. And as the father tries to become an actor, the daughter learns that supporting someone else can also be a way to save herself.
Fortunier uses exaggeration and playfulness to dismantle the image of the serious father who isn't allowed to fail. In the film, the dream isn't the object of ridicule, rather, ridicule itself becomes the tool used to suppress anyone who dares to change their life.
A Clash Between Talent and Authority: "Glòria!" and "Semmelweis"
Set in Venice in 1800, Italian director Margherita Vicario places her musical film Glòria! inside a Catholic girls' institute. Teresa is a silent, isolated servant, but she discovers in music a world that doesn't need words to declare rebellion.
Teresa joins a group of gifted girls, and together they begin creating music ahead of its time. Here, music becomes a collective act of defiance against a system that wants women to be obedient performers, not creators. The instruments, the rhythm, the liberated noise, all challenge a long history of silencing women.
Vicario ventures into her first feature with a clear visual and musical identity. The film seems less concerned with historical accuracy than with reimagining history: what if women had, early on, claimed their right to compose and invent? Glòria! doesn't so much revisit the past as rewrite it to a new rhythm.
Hungarian film Semmelweis, directed by Lajos Koltai, takes on a different confrontation with authority. Set in Vienna in 1847, it follows Hungarian doctor Ignaz Semmelweis as he tries to uncover the cause of childbed fever killing mothers after childbirth.
Semmelweis knows the solution is tied to handwashing, but the medical establishment rejects his idea, since accepting it would mean admitting that doctors themselves might be the cause of their patients' deaths. From here, the film becomes more than the biography of a brilliant doctor, it becomes a drama about resisting truth when it threatens an institution's pride.
Koltai, coming from a background in cinematography, gives the film a heavy visual texture befitting a hospital where blood mixes with fear and ignorance. Semmelweis's tragedy isn't that he didn't know the truth, but that he knew it before others were ready to hear it.
When Family Becomes an Archive: "Life After Siham"
The Egyptian-French film Life After Siham, by director Namir Abdel Messeeh, is the program's most intimate confrontation with grief. After the death of his mother, Siham, the director begins filming his sad, isolated father in their apartment in France. But the camera doesn't just record sorrow; it tries to pry open the door of memory.
Slowly, the son pushes his father to talk about the past, about 1960s Egypt, and about the love story that brought him and Siham together. The camera thus becomes party to a family relationship, and a tool for confronting a long silence.
The film's strength lies in the fact that Siham, despite her physical absence, remains its most present character. She appears in photos, in memories, in the father's tone of voice, and in the way the son tries to understand the woman who was his mother, and the wife his father loved. The film isn't just about death, but about our inability to ever fully know our loved ones before they're gone.
Saipan and the Dinner: Politics Hiding Behind Celebration
Irish film Saipan, by directors Lisa Barros D'Sa and Glenn Leyburn, revisits the famous 2002 conflict between Irish national team captain Roy Keane and his manager Mick McCarthy, ahead of the World Cup.
The story unfolds at the training camp on the island of Saipan, where the dispute at first looks like a clash between a player and his manager, but quickly swells into a confrontation over authority, dignity, and national image. Roy Keane refuses to let belonging become blind obedience, while the manager sees the rebellion as a threat to the entire system.
The sports film here isn't just about football, but about the way nations create their heroes and then demand their silence. The isolated island amplifies the conflict, turning the confrontation into something like a closed stage with no way out.
In Spanish film The Dinner (La cena), by director Manuel Gómez Pereira, politics moves to a dinner table in Madrid in 1939, after the end of the Spanish Civil War. Franco is planning a celebratory banquet at a luxury hotel, but the kitchen staff is made up of Republican political prisoners, plotting their escape.
From this irony, the film builds a dark political comedy: a regime celebrating its victory, while prisoners are ordered to prepare the food marking their own defeat. The kitchen, meant to be a place of service, becomes a center of resistance and planning.
Gómez Pereira knows how to draw comedy out of the most suffocating moments. The laughter doesn't cancel out the tragedy, it exposes its absurdity; nothing is more ironic than a regime staging a victory party while its entire history stands atop the bodies of the defeated.
"The Secret of Pin-Up Island": When AI Enters the Depths of the Psyche
Romanian director Alex Năstuiu presents, in The Secret of Pin-Up Island, a journey between science fiction and psychological drama. Alicia undergoes a revolutionary AI- and hypnosis-based treatment for depression, and finds herself inside a virtual world where reality and memory intertwine.
The film doesn't just ask whether AI can heal the psyche, but asks: can technology understand wounds we ourselves don't understand? The deeper Alicia goes into the experience, the more she's forced to confront the demons of her past, not as fleeting images, but as repressed parts of her own identity.
The film has a clear visual curiosity, using surrealism to turn the psychological state into a space one can enter and wander through. But at its core, it warns against the desire to shrink pain down or turn it into a fixable technical glitch. Regaining balance doesn't mean erasing the past, it means having the courage to look at it.
The films of this edition leave behind more than beautiful stories or charming characters. They put us in front of people trying to change their lives at the very moment change seems impossible. Some do it through work, some through art, some through love, memory, or even humor. And here lies the program's strength: it doesn't present cinema as a world removed from our own lives, but returns everyday things to their first questions, since behind every detail lies a struggle for the right to choose who we are.
The festival succeeds when it makes us leave the theater seeing the same world a little differently. And these films do exactly that, because they don't shout their ideas, they let them move quietly within us. They remind us that cinema, at its best, doesn't hand us ready-made answers; it gives us characters and questions that keep living with us long after the screening ends.
Resource: Alghad. Reporting:Israa Al-Radaydeh
