Films in competition — XXIV Edition
The Official Selection of the XXIV edition of the B.A. Film Festival represents the beating heart of the event: a journey through the most significant voices of contemporary Italian and international cinema.
Each selected film carries a unique vision of the world, a distinctive cinematic language and a story capable of questioning and moving. From debuts to works by established directors, the Official Selection of BAFF 2026 invites the audience to discover the cinema of tomorrow.
The best of contemporary Italian cinema competing for the BAFF Grand Prize
by Margherita Spampinato
Nico, a modern and rebellious child, spends the summer with a strict and religious Sicilian aunt. Clashes and mistrust will give way to a deep bond, capable of changing them both.
Presented in competition at Locarno 2025 — CINÉ+ Special Jury Prize and Pardo for Best Performance to Aurora Quattrocchi.
by Alberto Palmiero
Alberto, a young aspiring director in Rome, returns to his hometown after years of failed attempts. Through unexpected encounters and a confrontation with his own past, he will realise that his life could become the material for the film he has always tried to make.
Winner of the Poste Italiane Best First Film Award at the Rome Film Festival 2025.
by Loris Giuseppe Nese
In the 1990s, a boy grows up amid family secrets and the premature death of the men in his family. As an adult, he will discover the weight of his surname in the city and, through cinema, will begin to confront the past and rebuild his own identity.
Official selection Venice Days – Venice 2025. Andrea Pazienza Award and Libero Bizzarri Award.
by Federico Cammarata and Filippo Foscarini
On the edge of a forest at the eastern border of Europe, a clan of Afghan smugglers lives in wait for people to ferry across the frontier. Between sleepless nights and improvised fires, the community lives suspended between survival, solidarity and danger.
Official selection International Critics' Week – Venice 2025.
by Valentina Bertani and Nicole Bertani
It is 1997, Linda is an eight-year-old girl who leaves Switzerland to move to Italy with her mother. She will form a special bond with her peers Azzurra and Marta; together they will learn to defend their freedom in a world dominated by adults.
In competition at Locarno 2025 — Special Mention of the Youth Jury.
Works from around the world selected for the BAFF International Prize
by Julian Glander
A teenager in suburban Florida desperately scrambles to earn $5,000 in this dreamy and surreal animated coming-of-age story.
A sort of E.T. in the age of platform capitalism, suspended between surrealism and disenchantment in a suburban Florida as abstract and garish as a video game.
by Simon Glassman
Set in the fictitious Westridge County in Alberta, two restaurants vie for dominance, giving rise to cults, sinkholes and other apocalyptic consequences.
A tribute to old cable TV depicting a bizarre feud between two restaurants in an increasingly delirious and horrific tour de force told entirely through television commercials.
by Isabel Pagliai
Lost in her fears and fantasies, a woman writes in a notebook that a young man finds on a train. Together they find themselves in the heart of a nocturnal forest where dreams come to life.
A paradoxical documentation of Louise's inner world, a stream of consciousness set between light and shadow, a chronicle of two solitudes meeting between the lines of a diary.
by Racornelia Ezell
A home video captures the Christmas Eve of 1997 of a family in Mexico City, revealing how love and intimacy can conceal control and abuse behind a surface of warmth and tradition.
A merciless excavation into the everyday horror of the family institution carried out through the language of amateur film. Hypnotic intensity between the flickering image of an old analogue camcorder and the crescendo of dramatic tension.
The film closing the XXIV Edition of the B.A. Film Festival
by Mike Cheslik
An apple cider salesman facing an apocalyptic winter must reinvent himself as a beaver trapper in this wild black-and-white slapstick comedy paying tribute to silent cinema and classic cartoons.
The films selected for the schools programme of the XXIV edition of the B.A. Film Festival.
Orfeo, a solitary and visionary pianist, lives in a world suspended between reality and dream. After meeting the enigmatic Eura, his life takes a dreamlike turn when she disappears and he enters an afterlife made of imaginary creatures and mysteries. The film is an adaptation of Dino Buzzati's Poema a fumetti, which reinterprets the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in a modern and poetic key.
Nico, an eleven-year-old glued to his smartphone and social media, resents being cut off from technology. He spends a summer in Sicily with his aunt Gela, a woman very different from him. Initially hostile and suspicious, their cohabitation gradually leads to the discovery of a deep bond and an encounter between generational worlds and opposite ways of living.
Alberto, a young disappointed director in crisis, decides to return to his hometown after years spent in Rome trying to make a film. Back in the provinces among old friends, new experiences and personal reflections, he discovers that giving up can turn into an opportunity for rediscovery and growth.
Irene, who has moved to Rimini to care for her adult autistic brother Omar, embarks with him on an "intensive course in becoming adults." Through daily challenges and intimate moments, the film explores normality and diversity, showing how autism does not define a person in all their complexity.
A selection of films from previous editions of the B.A. Film Festival
Best First Film
