My coverage of the Raindance Film Festival, London's home of independent and world cinema. Honest, long-form reviews of films from the programme, written from press screeners.
Raindance Film Festival
There is a particular kind of documentary that sets out to change how you see a group of people, and Fabric belongs to it. Directed by Anabelle Marshall, this short documentary goes inside Espero Atelier, a Paris social enterprise that trains refugees in the exacting craft of haute couture tailoring
Raindance Film Festival
There is a strain of Iranian cinema that loves to point the camera at itself, to sit an actor in a chair, ask them to perform, and watch the truth leak out around the edges of the fiction. Mehrnoush Alia's debut feature 1001 Frames belongs firmly to that
Raindance Film Festival
Nuri Cihan Özdoğan's debut feature Dead Dogs Don't Bite takes its premise more or less straight from the headlines. After China stopped accepting the world's plastic waste in 2018, Turkey became one of the biggest destinations for Europe's discarded rubbish, and the
Raindance Film Festival
There is a particular kind of Iranian film that takes something tiny, a debt, a misunderstanding, a single object, and stacks an almost unbearable amount of pressure on top of it. My Daughter's Hair, the first feature from director Hesam Farahmand, belongs firmly to that tradition, and it
Raindance Film Festival
Some films matter as much for what they represent as for what is on the screen. Summer School, 2001, the feature debut from director Dužan Duong, is billed as the first Viet-Czech production, a film made by and about the Vietnamese community that has lived and worked in the
Raindance Film Festival
Japanese genre cinema has rarely been shy of a wild premise, and Nameless, the 2026 thriller from director Hideo Jojo, arrives with one of the wildest in some time. It had its European premiere at the Raindance Film Festival 2026. The best of these high-concept thrillers understand that a
Raindance Film Festival
Some films arrive quietly and stay with you. Silent Rebellion, the French-language drama from director Marie-Elsa Sgualdo, is one of them. Known in French as À bras-le-corps, it is a Belgian, French and Swiss co-production and Sgualdo's feature debut, and it has been
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