Rotterdam film festival
A set of shorts by film-makers from Afghanistan, Iran, Ukraine, Syria and Somalia are shocking, funny and mysterious in equal measure

With considerable chutzpah and elan, and in her capacity as producer and UNHCR Goodwill ambassador, Cate Blanchett has achieved a geopolitical film-making coup. In concert with festival authorities in Rotterdam, she has secured cash and commissioned short films on the subject of displacement from five directors – including Mohammad Rasoulof, now in exile from his native Iran due to his pro-democracy activism, in effect making his first public statement since the recent massacres and apparently expressing his fears that he may never go home again.

The films are far from solemnly earnest – this is an anthology of five brilliant miniature artworks. By turns shocking, funny, confessional and deeply mysterious, this is a tremendous collection; the constituent films of which benefit in some enigmatic way from being shown together. What Ealing Studios’s Dead of Night did for scariness, these films may have done for 21st-century exile.

Sundance film festival: the story of the Marion County Record and the forces that tried to destroy it is expanded for a charming, and concerning, look at freedom of the press

On 11 August 2023, police officers executed a search warrant on the offices of the Marion County Record, a small, family-owned paper in central Kansas. Local law enforcement seized the computers, cell phones and reporting materials from all staff, as well as from the homes of one city council member and paper co-owner Eric Meyer, without incident – though they met the impassioned resistance of Meyer’s 98-year-old mother Joan, the paper’s other co-owner, who threw her walker to the ground and declared the raid “Nazi stuff”.

“This is illegal,” Eric Meyers warns the officers, as seen in a new documentary on the episode. “You’re going to be on national news tonight.”