11/03/2025 - The Swiss festival looks to be "animated by a spirit of resistance" which places our freedoms and their fragility - especially true of them at present - centre-stage

Running 21 to 30 March, the Fribourg International Film Festival (FIFF), which is now at its 39th edition, is set to present 108 films - 17 of which in world premieres - hailing from 52 countries in its line-up. This year’s edition has chosen resistance in the face of an increasingly inwards-looking world as its guiding line. Looking to widen our horizons, the festival will urge us to turn our gaze to countries often shunned by the film market. With this in mind, audiences will get to travel to Sri Lanka (via the New Territory section) to discover the nation’s contemporary film offering, as well as journeying to the heart of Cold War Africa (in the Africa Beyond the Cold War line-up), while Ben Sturgulewski’s co-production between Afghanistan, Germany and the USA, Champions of the Golden Valley, has been selected as the festival’s opening film.

Shot through with this same spirit of resistance, the 28 films gracing the international competition (12 feature films and 16 shorts) present tangible proof of the increasingly uncertain nature of freedom. As pointed out by the festival’s artistic director Thierry Jobin: "the FIFF is used to projecting the voices of filmmakers who believe film to be an excellent vehicle for soft power, the film selection in this year’s edition takes that approach even further, telling primarily female resistance stories head-on".

Among these works are four European co-productions: Lo deseado by Argentinian director Darío Mascambroni, which is set to be presented in a world premiere and which depicts an intense father-daughter relationship as they travel to the heart of the Argentine mountains and their ancestral traditions; I, The Song [+see also:
film review
interview: Dechen Roder
film profile] by Bhutanese director Dechen Roder, which follows a female teacher whose world crumbles and which won Best Director in the Critics’ Picks section of Tallinn’s Black Nights Festival; The Legend of the Vagabond Queen of Lagos [+see also:
film review
interview: Akinmuyiwa Bisola, Okechukw…
film profile], a social thriller by Nigerian directors belonging to The Agbajowo Collective which was previously presented in Toronto’s Centrepiece section and which tells the story of a woman fighting to save her community, and the social satire Zafari [+see also:
film review
film profile] by Venezuela’s Mariana Rondón, previously presented in San Sebastián’s Horizontes Latinos line-up, which compares the life of a hippopotamus living in a zoo with that of a family fighting for survival. This year’s three feature film jury members are the great British photographer Derek Hudson, Nepalese actress and producer Asha Magrati and Swiss actress Anna Pieri Zuercher.

Other highlights from this 39th edition of the event include the presentation of Jérôme Paillard’s five favourite films, with Paillard formerly being a producer who turned Cannes’ Marché du Film into the most important film market in the world, and an encounter with the star authors of the Swiss detective movie genre Nicolas Feuz and Marc Voltenauer.

(Translated from French)