While in Switzerland to accept an award, fashion designer Lina is compelled to plunge, fully clothed, into freezing Lake Geneva. Returning home to Buenos Aires, she senses a profound interior transformation and feels suddenly distant from her daily life with her husband, young daughter, and busy career. Cast adrift, she attempts to move forward. Earning comparisons to Lucrecia Martel and Todd Haynes, Swiss-Argentinian director Milagros Mumenthaler’s sophisticated third film is a work of great psychological depth and compelling style, powerfully evocative of Lina’s inner world while remaining firmly grounded in tangible reality. (Sydney Film Festival 2026)

Football fans descend on Brussels for the 1985 European Cup Final between Juventus and Liverpool. Inside the stadium, the mayor of Brussels and his daughter/press attaché Marie brace for kick-off. Meanwhile, Liverpool fans begin to turn on Juventus fans, resulting in catastrophic casualties. The increasingly drunken mayor is no help in handling the crisis, and Marie has no choice but to step up. Multilingual, she aids in negotiations between police, game officials and politicians as they tackle the impossibly difficult question: cancel the match and risk further riots or let them play on? Teodora Ana Mihai’s third feature is a gripping insider view of terrible real-life tragedy. (Sydney Film Festival 2026)

In a seaside town in Cyprus, self-assured 11-year-old Iris spends her summer holidays scooting around with her bestie, filming TikTok dances and fending off boys. When she winds up in trouble with the law for stealing a boat, her absent dad Aris reluctantly resurfaces to bail her out. A chain-smoking drifter living in a shipyard, Aris resists Iris’s eager attempts at reconnection. That’s until he realises she could come in handy as a sidekick in his hairbrained get-rich schemes. Writer-director Aristidou’s Paper Moon-esque debut captures their fragile bond beautifully, with wonderfully lived-in performances and confident direction providing believability and nuance. (Sydney Film Festival 2026)

When little Arabella is forced to attend a glitzy gala in celebration of her novelist father, she has an epic meltdown – the enfant terrible wanted Taco King! She gets her way when her preoccupied parent, played by the unexpectedly Italian-fluent Chris Pine, sends her off to the taqueria with his driver. Unsupervised in the carpark, Arabella locks eyes with lost soul Holly who, in a fugue state, hallucinates that Arabella is her younger self. Seizing the moment, the fleeing fledgling makes a break for it with her confused kidnapper. Awarded the Best Actress prize at Venice, Italian It girl Benedetta Porcaroli stars as Arabella’s accidental smuggler in this runaway romp by sophomore Carolina Cavalli. (Sydney Film Festival 2026)

After the death of her father, French-Swedish filmmaker Angelica Ruffier returns to her childhood home in the French countryside; a cavernous house, thick with clutter, obligation and his lingering shadow. As she begins the exhausting work of sorting through a lifetime of belongings, she finds the teenage diaries that revive her secret crush on her history teacher, Mademoiselle B – a stylish sophisticate who resembled Louise Brooks. Where is Mademoiselle B now, she wonders... Should she try to reconnect? In this intimate autobiographical work, Ruffier folds documentary observation into staged reverie to explore grief, desire and queer awakening. Lauded by critics and audiences at IFFR and CPH:DOX. (Sydney Film Festival 2026)

Welcome to Romania on the chaotic cusp of the 2008 global financial crisis. Stela is a Timișoara textile worker who decides it’s now or never to act on her lifelong crush on Boban, an ageing Balkan crooner. Leaving her dreadful family and all inhibitions behind, Stela makes a beeline for Bucharest, where her dream of meeting Boban hinges on Vera Pop, a flashy-trashy demicelebrity and sex toy entrepreneur. Taking a cue from the cinema of Radu Jude, with whom writer-director Ivana Mladenović has previously collaborated, this frisky and fiercely intelligent farce about carnal desire and social dysfunction is described by its maker as “a story suspended between reality and a dream.” (Sydney Film Festival 2026)