Lukas Valenta Rinner

In modern-day Transylvania, vampire hunts and labor strikes collide with sci-fi twists, romance, and AI-crafted tales, as multiple storylines blend folklore, classic horror, and contemporary elements into a fresh take on Dracula's legend.

A journey through the real history and the tales of a region in southern Portugal and a portrait of the people who have lived there, weaving together accounts of rural workers and field notes of archaeologists, amateur footage and scientific drawings, legends, poems, and songs.

Under the hot Greek sun, animators at an all-inclusive island resort prepare for the busy tourist season. Kalia is the group leader. Paper decorations, glossy costumes and dance shows fill the stage. As summer intensifies and the work pressure builds up, their nights become violent and Kalia's struggle is revealed in the darkness. But when the spotlights turn on again, the show must go on.

Two dancers move through an empty apartment and stretch out in the available space. From the window, you can see they are in Vienna’s Alterlaa housing project, a satellite city. Life feels opaque next to the strange beauty of the concrete walls and the green terraces; it is sufocating to live in pre-designed happiness. An elderly woman drags herself through the complex, trying to leave her life behind. In a place that houses 9000 people, you can find absolutely everything. That’s the fun of it but also the misery.

Twelve year old Juana goes to a British school in the outskirts of Buenos Aires, where she fails both socially and academically. A week away from the exams that will determine her future in the institution, she is surrounded by the same routine; going to class and trying to pull her social life back together, with useless attempts in between. Juana goes through these strange days apparently feeling indifferent towards the situation.

A housemaid, working in an exclusive gated community in the outskirts of Buenos Aires, embarks on a journey of sexual and mental liberation in a nudist swinger-club boarding the high security walls.

In the company of housewives, professionals and a retired tennis instructor, Hernán is part of a middle-class community that is preparing for the eventual arrival of the end of the world at a holiday resort in the marshy Tigre delta.

Ramira returns to the Misiones rainforest from where she ran away after the birth of her son. Her efforts to rebuild the bond with her mother and her son, who does not recognize her as his mother, are complicated. Her family questions her abandonment of the child and fights with her over the deceased father's inheritance. The child struggles between two mothers, while Ramira seeks to find a sense of reinsertion in the middle of a labyrinth of hybrid languages and customs.

A rapturous crime fable set in the Dominican Republic, Nelson Carlo De Los Santos Arias’ COCOTE follows Alberto, a kind-hearted gardener returning home to attend his father’s funeral. When he discovers that a powerful local figure is responsible for his father’s death, Alberto realizes that he’s been summoned by his family to avenge the murder. It’s an unthinkable act — especially for him, an Evangelical Christian. But as pressure mounts, he sees few ways out. Questions of faith, tradition and honor course through this electrifying film, which, seemingly at the speed of thought itself, jumps between film formats, colors, and aspect ratios, radically envisioning a community torn asunder by senseless violence.

A cat wandering among the pastures, the sparks that emerge among the red embers of a fire, a man walking under the shadow of high trees in the middle of a forest, a distant fire, the ghostly figure of firemen at night: these are some of the minimal postcards that make up the enormous beauty of the Manantiales mountains, in the outskirts of Córdoba, Argentina.

Against a green-screen backdrop, a group of children and adults ask themselves questions about their gender. In a natural space freed from normativity, the possibilities of rewriting the scripts of their lives become infinite. Acclaimed director Manuel Abramovich and his performers invite us into a dazzling new reality of desires and possible futures.