10 recommended films for D'A 2025

BarcelonaBarcelona cinephiles are in luck: this Thursday sees the return of D'A, the art-house film festival that most clearly embraces risk-taking and the discovery of new voices. From March 27 to April 6, D'A will screen 121 titles, both feature and short, at its various venues: the CCCB, Mooby Aribau, Filmoteca de Catalunya, Zumzeig, and Casa Montjuïc. There will also be distinguished visitors: Bruno Dumont and Joanna Hogg will receive the D'A Award, and the Hungarian maestro Béla Tarr, the honorary D'A award.

It's already a tradition for D'A to screen the winning film at the Malaga Festival. While in previous editions it was 10,000 km, Summer 1993, Second prize either 20,000 species of bees, This year it is the turn of Deaf, brand new Bisnaga de Oro of the Andalusian festivalIn the film, deaf actress Míriam Garlo plays a deaf woman about to have a child with her hearing partner (Álvaro Cervantes). It's a naturalistic tale about the difficult fit of deaf people into a world designed with its back to their needs.

Leos Carax takes up the hybrid and fragmented essay style of Jean-Luc Godard in It's not me, which is both a tribute to the master of the Nouvelle Vague and, above all, an exciting and poetic self-portrait in which the author of Holy engines He reflects with lucidity and humor on his career, cinema, and his colleagues. Full of aphorisms, cinephile quotes, and provocations—he even throws a poisoned barb at Polanski—it's a celebration of cinema as a vehicle for artistic and personal expression.

It's not another movie about death. In The shroudsDavid Cronenberg sublimates the pain of losing his wife—she died in 2017—through a darkly strange comedy, in which a man has built a device that allows him to observe the decomposition of his wife's corpse in real time, as she is being consumed by cancer. The sordidness is there, yes, but also the tenderness, the humor, the intimacy, and the discomfort of situations like we've never seen on a big screen.

An Espanyol fan who has traveled to Utrecht to watch a match has a fit of rage and decides not to return to his hometown. From then on, without money or friends, life becomes a daily struggle in a cloudy and hostile Netherlands. Why did he do it? In his directorial debut, Gerard Oms, who was coach Mario Casas' interpretation, gives the actor one of the roles of his life, for which He has just received an award at the Malaga Festival.

The comedies ofEmmanuel Mouret They are an oasis of intelligence and refinement, far removed from the trends of modern algorithmic cinema, always filled with sensitive, amorous characters who chatter wildly about their emotions. The latest work by this Marseille-born Woody Allen reflects on adultery and the end of love, following the thread of deception and coincidence that intertwines the sentimental entanglements of three friends and a ghost.

In the third collaboration with Hong Sang-soo, Isabelle Huppert She is a teacher with a method for learning French as shocking as her attempts at flirting with her students. The great diva of French cinema strips down her glamour and adapts to Hong Sang-soo's improvised naturalism with a parody performance worthy of one of the Korean director's most openly comic films, whose D'A is screening another title this year: Near the torrent.

The life of the teenager Totone takes place in a loop A drunken man of parties, arguments, and hangovers until his father's death suddenly thrusts him into the adult world. But when the bills pile up, he and his little sister come up with a foolproof plan: to win the competition for the best cheese in the region. Holy Cow It is a rural tale that smells of manure, gasoline and fresh milk, a film with small ambitions that reaches the viewer's heart thanks to the charm of its characters.

One New Year's Eve, out partying with friends, a young actress is raped in the darkness of an apartment room. The extremely violent act is a life-threatening wound that doesn't heal with time, taking root in her relationships and her identity. Angela Cervantes, who has just been awarded the prize by the Malaga Festival for The fury, gives her all to give body and tears to the pain of an unbearable trauma in a film that explores the possible paths to healing.

During the American Civil War, a regiment is sent to patrol the western frontier, a wild and inhospitable territory. There, war is a state of mind, a wandering among wolves and corpses in a tense wait filmed with poetic inspiration by the Texas-based Italian director Roberto Minervini, who stars in this year's D'A retrospective.

Wang Bing examines the dark side of the Chinese economic miracle in Youth (Hard times), the second installment of a documentary trilogy set in Zhili, the world's leading children's clothing production center, where thousands of rural Chinese youth arrive each year to be exploited by the textile industry. D'A has already premiered the first part of the trilogy and will also screen the third this year. Youth (Homecoming), completing the work of one of the essential Chinese filmmakers of the 21st century.