Raindance 2026: A Free Daughter of Free Kyrgyzstan

It has been 35 years since Kyrgyzstan declared its independence from the USSR, but while women's rights in the landlocked central Asian nation may have improved in an official sense, there is considerable disparity between the law and everyday life.  The country has legal statutes against discrimination and domestic violence, yet many Kyrgyz women still face abuse, unequal treatment, and barriers to justice.  Activists and local organisations continue to push for stronger enforcement, greater awareness, and better protection for women and girls, especially those in vulnerable communities outside of the capital, Bishkek.

This struggle is at the heart of Leigh Iacobucci's documentary A Free Daughter of Free Kyrgyzstan.  Having already screened at several other festivals—including Den Haag's Movies that Matter— the film is among the selections for this year's Raindance Film Festival, where it screens on Saturday and Monday.  Iacobucci's film focuses on Kyrgyz singer-songwriter Zere Asylbek, better known by the mononym Zere, as she fights for gender equality.  It's a candid portrait that follows Zere in a variety of situations: recording new music, at home with her family, and partaking in protests quashed by the authorities.

Zere is charismatic and personable, and it's easy to see why so many Kyrgyz women have become fans of both her and her music.  It's hard not to be impressed by the singer's activism, and she remains steadfast in the face of every adversity—which ranges from online trolling to death threats.  With a runtime of just over an hour, the deft A Free Daughter of Free Kyrgyzstan is both an intimate portrayal of a fearless artist and an absorbing snapshot of post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan; its depiction of life after communism recalls another impressive title showing at Raindance 2026: the Czechia-set Summer School, 2001.

Darren Arnold

Images: Festival Scope

Raindance 2026: Life for Beginners

Polish vampire legends occupy a wonderfully eerie corner of Slavic folklore, where the boundary between the living and the dead is porous and often unsettling.  In rural tales, the upiór or wąpierz is not the suave, louche aristocrat of Western fiction but a restless villager who returns from the grave, driven by hunger, unfinished business, or sheer spite.  These beings are said to rise swollen and ruddy, their bodies filled with the blood they've stolen, and wander the night until discovered and ritually subdued.  Each story feels raw and rooted in the soil—half cautionary tale, half communal attempt to explain the unexplainable.

What makes Polish vampire lore so distinctive is its blend of the supernatural with the everyday: a neighbour who died suddenly, a relative buried improperly, a stranger who behaved oddly at the market.  This combining of the fantastic with the quotidian is very much in evidence in Paweł Podolski's feature debut Life for Beginners (Polish: Życie dla początkujących), which screens on Friday and Monday at the Raindance Film Festival.  Podolski sets his film in a retirement home, where vampire Monia (Magdalena Maścianica) works the night shift, during which she's able to procure blood from the elderly residents.

This arrangement—which happens to take place under the cover of darkness, neatly avoiding the perils of daylight—works well for Monia, who gets enough sustenance from the blood she carefully obtains.  But this status quo is disrupted when her secret is discovered by Czarek (Michał Sikorski), a gauche young man who frequents the old folks' home to visit his bolshy grandmother (Małgorzata Rożniatowska).  There's another problem for Monia in the form of her fellow sanguivore Mirek (Bartłomiej Kotschedoff), who's grown tired of this eternal life business; as his creator, she's the only one who can end his relentless suffering.

As one might reasonably expect from such a setup, there is an incipient romance between Monia and Czarek, who not only have to wrestle with the vampire-human dynamic but must also contend with the antics of Mirek, who is far more reckless than Monia when it comes to slaking his thirst.  It's all very watchable, and although Podolski deals in familiar horror tropes, he brings a light comic touch to the proceedings that serves the actors well.  Maścianica—who bears a passing resemblance to Jessie Buckley—is the standout performer in a brisk 75 minutes that stands as a sturdy example of low-to-no-budget filmmaking.

Darren Arnold

Images: Aurora Films

Emilia Pérez (Jacques Audiard, 2024)

Jacques Audiard’s incredible run from Read My Lips through The Sisters Brothers cemented his place as one of the true modern greats, and he had much to risk when he stepped out of his comfort zone to make the latter—his first film in English.  His prior work was always highly nuanced, and filmmakers working in another tongue often lose the subtleties of that language.  Happily, Audiard delivered the goods with The Sisters Brothers—a sublime western starring Joaquin Phoenix and John C. Reilly that can proudly sit alongside his contemporary classics Dheepan, Rust and Bone, The Beat That My Heart Skipped and A Prophet.  Audiard finally dropped the ball with his next effort, the Céline Sciamma–penned Paris, 13th District—but in all fairness, he was long overdue a bad film.

Following that misstep, Audiard once again worked outside his native language with Emilia Pérez, a film whose initial release—a brief theatrical run before it landed on Netflix, who had won a fierce bidding war for the rights—was met with great enthusiasm until controversy surrounding its star, Karla Sofía Gascón, severely damaged its status as an Oscar frontrunner (only two of its 13 nominations resulted in wins).  Audiard’s film is one that will be remembered for all the wrong reasons, few of which have anything to do with its content.  Indeed, if you saw the film before the backlash began, chances are you found something to admire in this truly audacious—if highly flawed—piece of filmmaking, one whose spectacular downfall saw it unwillingly dragged into the heart of the culture wars.

Emilia Pérez is undoubtedly the most outlandish of Audiard’s films.  It’s a musical that centres on the title character (Gascón), a Mexican former cartel leader who starts a new life after undergoing gender reassignment surgery arranged by lawyer Rita (Zoe Saldaña).  The onetime kingpin’s wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) has no idea what happened to her husband, who is desperate to reunite with their children and resurfaces as a woman claiming to be a distant cousin of the man Jessi married.  Jessi doesn’t recognise Emilia, and, assuming her husband is gone for good, sets about reconnecting with her former lover Gustavo (Édgar Ramírez).  Predictably, Jessi’s plans to set up home with Gustavo and the children do not sit well with Emilia, who returns to the world of violence she had vowed to leave behind.

It’s all even more preposterous than it sounds, but Audiard and his co-writers, Thomas Bidegain and Léa Mysius, somehow create a strangely compelling film from such an absurd outline.  All of this is captured, quite magnificently, by Paris, 13th District cinematographer Paul Guilhaume, who also lensed his partner Mysius’ outstanding The Five Devils.  Guilhaume’s work here helps immerse us in sun-drenched Mexico—though, remarkably, the film was actually shot on a Paris soundstage.  Yet this handsomely mounted spectacle is far easier to admire than to enjoy, and its visceral impact is greatly diminished by the small screens on which most will view it.  A swing and a miss from Jacques Audiard, then, but the pariah that is Emilia Pérez is never anything less than fascinating.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI