● Eight international films debut in Spain join those already announced in the Meeting Point section, fiction films that offer an open dialogue with viewers
● For the first time, the ESCAC will award a prize for the best new director competing in Meeting Point section at the 70th edition
The viewer’s eye, the light projected on the screen, and the movement of cinematic images inspire the poster for the 70th edition of the Valladolid International Film Festival (SEMINCI). The result conveys vitality, chromatic vibration, and the illusion of depth.
“The creative approach adopted this year gives rise to refined compositions, with a geometric vocation and dynamic character, which envelop the festival in an atmosphere of contemporary sobriety without overshadowing the essential: its demanding and ambitious program,” explain the designers from the PobrelaVaca studio, Ana Mª Hernández and
Félix Rodríguez.
Their graphic proposal is in line with a strategy of continuity, with the aim of consolidating the Festival’s renewed visual identity, presented in 2024. The studio has developed four designs or versions based on the same idea to add visual richness to the SEMINCI image, creating a mutable identity that lays the foundations for the visual scheme of the coming
years. The designers have sought to give future poster creators greater freedom, while maintaining respect for the placement of fixed elements so as to preserve continuity with the Festival’s contemporary positioning.
New Meeting Point Award
The image for the 70th edition of SEMINCI, which will be held from October 24 to November 1, 2025, was unveiled today at an event held at Espacio SEMINCI. The presentation was attended by the mayor of Valladolid, Jesús Julio Carnero, and the councilor for Tourism, Events, and City Branding, Blanca Jiménez Cuadrillero. Eight more titles competing in the Meeting Point section were also unveiled at the event, all of which are premieres in Spain. This section brings together feature films that stand out for the narrative and stylistic richness used by filmmakers to reflect the contemporary world.
As a new feature in the 70th edition, the jury will also award the new ESCAC prize to the best director of a first or second film among the participants in Meeting Point. The filmmaker will receive the €5,000 prize promoted by the prestigious Catalonia Film and Audiovisual School (ESCAC) to fulfill one of its founding purposes: the search for and promotion of young talent, supporting new voices in contemporary cinema.
These eight feature films, together with those previously announced directed by Valéry Carnoy, Urška Djukić, Alexe Poukine, Joel Alfonso Vargas, Pauline Loquès, and Max Walker-Silverman, will compete in the 70th edition of SEMINCI for the Meeting Point Award, worth €30,000, and the Fundos Special Award, worth €10,000. In both cases, the prize money will be awarded to the company that registered the film in the festival.
Latest titles added to Meeting Point
The eight titles included in Meeting Point feature a wide variety of approaches, ranging from experimental westerns to socially conscious animation, demonstrating the wealth of perspectives that characterizes the Meeting Point section. Among them is the co-production I Only Rest In The Storm, by Pedro Pinho. This epic film, lasting over three hours, about a humanitarian worker in post-colonial Africa will arrive in Valladolid following its warm reception at its premiere in the Un Certain Regard section of the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, where its star Cleo Diára won the award for best actress. Pinho had already attracted attention at the 2017 Directors’ Fortnight with his award-winning musical about unemployment, The Nothing Factory. His second feature film now consolidates him as a unique voice in contemporary Portuguese cinema.
Like Pinho, Italians Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis aspire with Heads or Tails? a western revisited with John C. Reilly as Buffalo Bill, to maintain their reputation as one of the most original voices in contemporary Italian auteur cinema. While their previous works Il solengo (2015) and The Tale of King Crab (2021) demonstrated a particular experimental approach and visual aesthetic through a mixture of reality and fiction, in this revisited western they now offer a journey through the different formats of the genre from their own perspective, based on a plot that mixes romance and adventure.
The young director Farnoosh Samadi, on the other hand, adapts to the realistic cinema model with which Iranian cinema is identified in order to go beyond the margins in content with her courageous contribution to queer cinema. Between Dreams and Hope takes as its starting point the little-known legal window open in Iran for transgender people, which allows them to achieve official gender reassignment after their operation if they complete procedures such as obtaining parental permission, to contrast the open-mindedness of Iranian youth with the restrictive violence of the conservative older generations,
supported by the ruling regime. Samadi already premiered her first feature film (180º Rule) at SEMINCI in 2020 and won the Golden Spike in the Official International Short Film Section in 2017 with Gaze.
The division between social classes is, in the case of German filmmaker Julian Radlmaier, the theme around which Phantoms of July, presented at Locarno, revolves. The film explores the alchemy of encounter in the context of growing hostility towards refugees and immigrants with a more lyrical style than the satirical Marxist approach found in previous works such as Self-Criticism of a Bourgeois Dog, winner of the German Film Critics’ Award for Best Debut in 2017, or Bloodsucker (2021), Special Jury Prize at the Moscow Film Festival.
Like Radlmaier, Portugal’s Joâo Rosas has not participated in SEMINCI until now. In his feature film directorial debut, The Luminous Life, audiences will discover an ironic and subversive romantic comedy, with nuances of Eric Rohmer, which presents Lisbon as another character. Rosas has already dedicated a documentary to the Portuguese capital, Death of a City (2022), focusing on the transformation of Lisbon’s Bairro Alto neighborhood.
In contrast to the brightness of the Portuguese film, fellow debutant Bálint Dániel Sós opts for black and white to construct the moral drama about guilt and lies within the family in Growing Down, presented at the Berlinale. Its complex narrative, emotional intensity, and delicate staging have been praised by critics during its international festival tour.
The family, specifically the decision to become parents, is also the focus of the protagonists of A Sad and Beautiful World, by Lebanese filmmaker Cyril Aris, renowned director of short films and the documentary Dancing on the Edge of Volcano. Aris turns the concern of the generation now reaching adulthood regarding parenthood in a world ravaged by war and an uncertain future into a romantic drama, starring Mounia Akl (Costa Brava, Lebanon).
The Meeting Point selection also includes an animated film for adults by Félix Dufour-Laperrière, one of the most prominent contemporary filmmakers working in traditional animation (winner of the Contrachamps Jury Prize at Annecy 2021 for Archipel). The French-Canadian film Death Does Not Exist explores, with the unique visual language that the director has deployed in his three previous works, a story that intertwines environmentalist demands with reflections on loyalty and commitment, reflecting the personal cost of revolution.
New titles in Meeting Point
A Sad and Beautiful World. Cyril Aris (Lebanon, United States, Germany, Saudi Arabia, 2025)
The love story of Nino and Yasmina, united by a magnetic attraction, spans three decades of passion, disappointment, and hope. When faced with the difficult choice between love and survival, they must decide whether to build a family and forge a path to happiness in Lebanon, despite the tragedies ravaging the country.
Between Dreams and Hope, Farnoosh Samadi (Iran, 2025)
Azad (Fereshteh Hosseini), a trans man, and his partner Nora (Sadaf Asgari) live happily in love in an accepting environment in bustling Tehran. But when Azad takes steps toward physical transition, he needs permission from his estranged father to legally marry. The couple travels to Azad’s hometown, and he disappears after an argument. When Nora tries to find him, she faces a lack of cooperation from the family and local authorities.
Death Does Not Exist. Félix Dufour-Laperrière (Canada, France, 2025)
After a failed violent protest at a millionaire’s mansion, Hélène abandons her group of young activists and flees to the forest. Her friend and accomplice Manon returns to torment her about her values. Hélène must reconsider her convictions, isolated in nature, where unknown causes are disrupting the natural order of things.
Growing Down. Bálint Dániel Sós (Hungary, 2025)
Sándor, a widower and father of two, faces a moral dilemma when he becomes the sole witness to a serious car accident caused by his younger son that has left his daughter seriously injured. He must choose between accepting the consequences of telling the truth or lying to prevent his son from ending up in a juvenile detention center.
Heads or Tails? Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis (Italy, United States, 2025)
In the early 20th century, ‘Buffalo Bill’s Wild West’ show arrives in Italy, spreading the myth of the American frontier and sparking the imagination of Rosa, a young woman trapped in a suffocating marriage to a powerful and violent landowner. When a rodeo competition between American cowboys and Italian butteri ends in tragedy, Rosa flees with Santino, the daring local rider who defeated the Americans. But in a world where justice is sold to the highest bidder, Buffalo Bill joins the hunt for Santino, offering a reward for his head.
I Only Rest in the Storm. Pedro Pinho (Portugal, France, Brazil, Romania, 2025)
Sergio travels to a West African metropolis to work as an environmental engineer on the construction of a road that will link the desert and the jungle. There he strikes up a close, albeit somewhat unbalanced, relationship with two city dwellers, Diara and Gui. He soon discovers that an Italian engineer, who had been assigned the same mission as him a few months earlier, has mysteriously disappeared.
Phantoms of July. Julian Radlmaier (Germany, 2025)
Ursula and Neda, a heartbroken waitress from Eastern Germany and an Iranian YouTuber with a broken arm, feel trapped and alone in their precarious lives. One summer afternoon, Ursula falls in love with mysterious music, while Neda is convinced she has recognized an old friend from Tehran in a municipal cleaning service worker. The winding paths of chance bring them together on an unexpected ghost hunt in the mountains.
The Luminous Life. Joâo Rosas (Portugal, France, 2025)
It’s springtime in Lisbon and Nicolau turns 24, but he doesn’t celebrate. He lives with his parents, a prisoner of his dream of becoming a musician, which never materializes, and trapped in the idealized image of an ex-girlfriend who left him a year ago and never returned. He feels unable to move forward and build a life of his own until one day he discovers that his mother is as dissatisfied with her life as he is. So he takes control of his life and, with her, his dreams and hope in love return.