The best European films of the past year. 20. Cinematik IFF presents its main competition section

This year the International Film Festival Cinematik in Piešt’any celebrates its 20th birthday. The jubilee edition will also offer its main festival competition Meeting Point Europe. According to the organisers, the visitors can look forward to an extraordinary edition this year. The history of Cinematik is remarkable – it lasted a total of 117 festival days and presented 2,057 films.

“The 20th anniversary edition of Cinematik will offer audiences its highest quality main competition to date, Meeting Point Europe. Since the very first edition, it has been presenting the most important European films of the year,” announces Peter Konečný, a member of the Cinematik IFF programme team. “Ten exceptional films and eight exclusive Slovak premieres in total. Audiences can look forward to cinema from Norway, Georgia, Germany, France, Spain and the Netherlands.”

Meeting Point Europe is an arena for quality, new European cinema, which often comes to Piešt’any with awards from prestigious international festivals. “The main competition of Cinematik is also a great showcase of award-winning films from Cannes, Venice, Berlinale, Karlovy Vary or San Sebastian. This fact also defines the competition section as thematically and qualitatively rich, and at the same time it opens up an extraordinary opportunity for the audience to see the key film works of the year,” says Peter Konečný, who introduces the selection of the competition section.

In addition to the filmmaking artistry of the talented female filmmakers, Meeting Point Europe also puts strong themes to the fore, which tend to resonate with viewers long after the screenings are over. Georgian director Dea Kulumbegashvili’s drama April (2024) is a great example of this. Honored with the Grand Jury Prize at last year’s Venice Film Festival, the film tells the story of a young doctor who helps women terminate their unwanted pregnancies despite the illegality of abortion in the conservative country.

A different but no less relevant look at femininity and its pitfalls is provided by The Ugly Stepsister (Den Stygge Stesøsteren, 2025), a horror comedy by Norwegian filmmaker Emilie Blichfeldt. It shows the extremes to which individuals can be pushed by a society in which physical beauty equals success.

The black-and-white comedy drama Three Days of Fish  (Drie dagen vis, 2024; dir. Peter Hoogendoorn) holds up a mirror to the reality of family relationships for a change. In it, we follow a three-day reunion between a father and his adult son, which successfully avoids the clichéd idyll and confirms that the best family visits are the short ones. The film flashed across the festival programmes in Rotterdam, São Paulo and Karlovy Vary, where its lead actor Ton Kas won the Crystal Globe for his performance.

The winner of the Golden Bear at the Berlinale, the Norwegian film Sex Love Venice (2024, dir. Dag Johan Haugerud), will also appear in the main competition of Cinematik. Its protagonist is a teenage girl who faces the unwanted revelation of her first, platonic love – for her teacher. The German festival hit Sound of Falling (In die Sonne schauen, 2025) is a remarkable chronicle of the fates of four generations of women on a remote farm in East Germany. The director Mascha Schilinski raises themes of generational trauma and patriarchy, and was awarded the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival for her ambitious treatment of the film.

The romantic comedy genre will also be represented in this year’s Meeting Point Europe competition. Jane Austen Wrecked My Life (Jane Austen a gâché ma vie, 2024) by Italian-French director Laura Piani follows the journey of a lonely librarian who tries to write her way out of her self-destructive longing for love.

Love (Kjærlighet, 2024; Norway, dir. Dag Johan Haugerud) is also an interesting look at love and intimacy – a lightly provocative love story of four characters who reject traditional relationship models and seek their own, authentic path. The Spanish-French drama Sirât (2025; dir. Oliver Laxe) is in turn an invitation to the hypnotic world of illegal rave parties in the Moroccan desert, where the protagonist comes in search of his missing daughter. This original, spellbindingly raw film was one of the biggest surprises of the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Jury Prize, but it also caught the attention of audience at the Karlovy Vary IFF, for example.

The drama Afternoons of Solitude  (Tardes de Soledad, 2024) also promises a powerful and gritty experience. Spanish filmmaker Albert Serra captures a dynamic portrait of a star bullfighter and his duel with a wild bull. Winner of three prestigious awards at the San Sebastián IFF, it brings poetics side by side with the ferocity of traditional duels between man and beast. The German-Swedish-Colombian drama with comedic elements, A Poet (Un Poeta, 2025; dir. Simón Mesa Soto), rounds out the competition’s top ten in the Meeting Point Europe section. Winner of the Un Certain Regard jury prize at the Cannes IFF, the film tells the story of a failed aging poet who must face his own demons while mentoring a talented teenage girl.

“The selection of the best European titles of the last year was made by a large international jury of fourteen critics who work with the festival throughout the year,” says Peter Konečný, who explains the background of the competition. “This is a unique, such a concentrated selection of European cinema in Slovakia. Just come to the festival and you have a cinematic experience for several months in advance, as most of the films from the programme will not be released in regular cinemas. And this doesn’t only apply to the main competition section. This year’s Cinematik will show a total of around a hundred top films from more than thirty countries,” adds Konečný.

The twentieth edition of the Cinematik International Film Festival will take place from 10 to 15 September 2025. In addition to the main competition of feature films, it will also be the venue for the Cinematik.doc competition of domestic documentary films, as well as a number of non-competitive shows and side events.
“I consider it a major success that Cinematik, thanks to the extraordinary concept of the main competition, has become one of the most important film festivals in the domestic as well as in the international environment, and that we have managed to build perhaps the best audience base,” adds the artistic director Vladimír Štric.