Raindance 2026: Summer School, 2001

Vietnamese traders have become an important part of everyday commerce in Czechia.  Their businesses, ranging from small neighbourhood shops to busy market stalls and wholesale centres, reflect a migration history that began during the socialist era and evolved after the country's political transition in 1989.  Over time, these traders helped shape a distinctive commercial network that is now familiar in towns and cities across the country.  Prague’s SAPA complex—colloquially referred to as "Little Hanoi"—is the best-known example, serving as both a marketplace and a cultural hub for the Vietnamese community.

Dužan Duong's Summer School, 2001—which screens today and on Monday at the Raindance Film Festival—centres on a family of Cheb-based Vietnamese market traders whose dynamic is radically altered when the eldest son, 17-year-old Kien (Bui Thể Duong), returns to Czechia after a decade in Vietnam.  It's not entirely clear why Kien was sent away, but there is notable tension between him and his father, Zung (Doan Hoang Anh), who has been tasked with duping his fellow stallholders into selling their pitches so the site can be redeveloped.  Kien also constantly clashes with his feisty younger brother, Tai (To Tien Tai).

Kien and Tai attend the summer school of the title—Tai is an excellent student, while Kien is reacquainting himself with the Czech language after so many years away—where they meet someone who will make a significant impact on both of their lives.  The story unfolds, Rashomon-style, via the perspectives of Kien, Tai, and Zung, each of whom offers their own version of the same events.  This is engrossing stuff, and Duong, drawing on his own childhood memories, confidently steers a film that manages to be both a coming-of-age tale and a vivid depiction of the Vietnamese diaspora's experiences in post-communist Czechia.

Darren Arnold

Images: Festival Scope

Raindance 2026: Serena / Stairs

Screenlife films, such as Unfriended and its sequel, take the digital clutter of modern life—message bubbles, tab‑hopping, notification pings—and turn it into a stage where intimacy and anxiety unfold in real time.  By confining the action to screens we stare at every day, the form exposes how people curate themselves, how relationships fracture or deepen through pixels, and how the smallest digital gesture can feel seismic.  What seems at first like a technical constraint becomes a narrative engine: the drama lives in what characters choose to reveal, what they hide in other windows, and how their devices quietly betray them.

At their best, screenlife stories capture something uncannily true about contemporary existence, where our online selves are both our masks and our mirrors.  Serena, which screens today and on Thursday at the Raindance Film Festival, is the latest effort in a movement that was admirably pioneered by Timur Bekmambetov but perfected by Rob Savage with his terrific films Host and Dashcam.  Serena sees broke musician Chris (Steven Strait) enlist as a beta tester for an AI chatbot played by Andi Matichak, hitherto best known for her role as Laurie Strode's granddaughter in David Gordon Green's Halloween trilogy.

For this gig, Chris—who is about to become a father—has negotiated an inflated fee of $3000, which might just help him stave off eviction.  What seems like a simple task—ask the bot 100 pre-planned questions—soon goes off-piste as the AI, who has adopted the name Serena, helps Chris generate serious money by predicting football results.  But things take a much darker turn when Serena assumes complete control of Chris' computer and confronts him with some terrible revelations.  The acting, writing, and directing are all strong here, and the taut, suspenseful Serena can sit proudly alongside the best entries in the subgenre.

The Raindance shorts programme Radical Agendas also screens today, and among the eight titles on offer here is Riley Donigan's impressive Stairs.  This sly allegorical tale centres on Ally (Betsey Brown), a New York bride-to-be who has a minor trip on a flight of stairs and subsequently develops a fetish for such tumbles.  With each fall, Ally's injuries worsen, but her search for gratification locks her into a cycle of trying to outdo the previous mishap.  Events reach critical mass at a pre-wedding photo shoot in Central Park, and Stairs' portrayal of hopeless addiction gives way to full-blown body horror as it dares us to keep watching.

Darren Arnold

Images: Cinequest / Festival Scope

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