Following the previous screenings of Sol Negro (2019) and The Tsugua Diaries (2021), Maureen Fazendeiro returns to the festival with a full retrospective of her work, including Motu Maeva (2014) and the national premiere of Les Habitants (2025), after its international debut at Cinéma du Réel. Her filmmaking stands out for its hybrid approach, blending fiction, documentary, and experimental forms. Drawing on structures such as the letter, diary, cartography, or ethnography, Fazendeiro’s narratives often emerge from a juxtaposition of archival materials and new footage, oscillating between intimate reflection and social critique, while questioning how we view and retain collective and personal memory.

Women are frequently placed at the center of Fazendeiro’s films: from the voice of Delphine Seyrig in Sol Negro, to the self-reliant Sonja André in Motu Maeva, to the women of Les Habitants, who strive to mediate social tensions in a suburban Paris neighborhood. Her body of work affirms itself as a sensitive and politically aware practice, where formal experimentation is inseparable from a deep engagement with the world’s transformations.

Alongside this retrospective, Curtas also presents the work of Maryam Tafakory, one of the most compelling voices in contemporary Iranian cinema. Filmmaker and visual artist, Tafakory constructs her films as poetic and politically charged visual essays, addressing the constraints imposed on the female body and expressions of desire in post-revolutionary Iranian cinema. Using found footage, image layering, screen text, and repetition, works like Irani Bag (2020), Nazarbazi (2021), Mast-del (2023), and Razeh-del (2024) form a radical gesture of aesthetic resistance, creating a counter-cinema that invites viewers to read images critically and question what is hidden or erased.

Tafakory describes her work as an invitation to critical paranoia—to look not just at what is visible, but at what is missing, and to ask why. Her films are intimate yet subversive acts, where politics emerge from small gestures, forbidden touches, and what escapes the surveillance of normative vision.

By bringing together these two filmmakers, Curtas not only highlights the formal diversity of contemporary cinema but also celebrates its power to interrogate the world with sensitivity, intelligence, and boldness. This is a cinema of resistance and reinvention—woven from memories, silences, and gestures that open new paths for imagining the real.