Three Ways of Returning

Three Ways of Returning comprises three filmmakers’ reflections on the themes of home, exile and relation. Guo leads us into the lively seascape of contemporary China, presenting snapshots of local fishermen’s lives from her radically changed home village, under threat from the globalised corporate maritime industries. Zimmerman employs a disquieting and startlingly intimate lens to look back into their childhood and adolescent years in Germany, and the challenging intergenerational violence that persists. Akbari brings us into the intimacy of her family, exiled from Iran, and reveals the profound complexity of personal and political aspects of migrant life in Canada. These three short films together create a richly textured exploration of home and belonging of lives in various forms of exile, and the strategies of surviving and thriving that accompany this displacement.

World prmiere at IFFR:

Feminist Focus programme and Cinema Regained selections revealed for IFFR 2026

Our final IFFR 2026 Focus programme will celebrate the 60th anniversary of the National Organisation for Women (NOW)’s founding – a major moment in the history of the Civil Rights movement as well as Second Wave Feminism. Additionally, we’ve unveiled our first selections for Cinema Regained, IFFR’s realm for rethinking film history, which will once again present recent restorations and works that offer new perspectives on cinema’s past.

The Future Is NOW Focus programme will explore women’s cinema from different periods, confronting early hopes with later developments – with a combination of classic works and world premieres. The selections will spotlight authors, countries, and practices which have historically been underexplored, with a special emphasis on animation. Subjects including education, communities, and histories will be covered as part of the offering, alongside sex, religion and cinema itself.

The programme will be anchored by premieres, including: Three Ways of Returning

(2026) an omnibus project by IFFR-known auteurs Xiaolu Guo, Andrea Luka Zimmerman and Mania Akbari, which offers three autobiographical essays in alienation and the search for belonging; and Josephine Ahnelt’s Wellen wende (2026), a conversational documentary comparing several women’s postpartum experiences, alongside discussions on similar subjects already had in classics like Kathleen Shannon, Irene Angelico and Anne Henderson’s short Challenge for Change: “… and They Lived Happily Ever After”(1975). Additionally, the line-up will feature Caroline Leaf and Veronika Soul’s Interview (1979) and Ulrike Putzer and Matthias van Baaren’s Casting tapes (2020), two of several essays on what it means to be a woman in a filmmaking environment defined by men.

• https://iffr.com/en/blog-the-future-is-n...
• https://iffr.com/en/iffr/2026/films/thre...
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfkJkNIy...