At the European Film Festival in South Africa, stories that defy borders

The boundaries that are often associated with family, are creatively dissected in four of the films. 

When the conservative father in the Cannes 2025 Jury prize winner, Sirāt, becomes a co-traveller with ravers in search for his daughter, the question as to who is family is poignantly asked in different ways. 

The ravers, on their way through the remote desert to a festival near Mauritania, are outsiders to the world the father knows, but their shared bond of rejection and loss, creates a bond akin to family. 

In A Perfectly Normal Family, the constellation of the nuclear family is reimagined when the dad chooses gender-affirming surgery; and it’s the youngest daughter’s point of view which mirrors the discrimination, prejudice and stigmatisation often experienced by trans people. 

Despite being a physically strong soccer player, she finds herself in a hostile environment being the butt of cutting comments after dad becomes mom. Kaya Toft Loholt, who performs the role of the 11-year-old Emma, plays it with enormous control, like one imagines a pre-teen whose whole world has been upended by a decision in which she had no agency or say.

Unicorns

In Unicorns, Ben Hardy, who has featured in Bohemian Rhapsody, The Voyeurs, and The Conjuring: Last Rites, plays a single father mechanic living in Essex. He unexpectedly falls in love with Aysha, a South Asian drag queen, and together with his young son, they may become a new family. 

The directors are Sally El Hosaini and James Krishna Floyd; while Trudie Styler is one of the producers of this award-winning film which reminds us of what it takes to transform and cross borders, whether physical, mental or spiritual. 

Joey Moser of Awards Daily said this in his review, “Unicorns is unlike anything you’ve ever seen, because we have never thought of honouring a drag love story in such a balanced way.”

Brussels, the gritty capital of the European Union, is the background to and the place of Real Faces where an authentic friendship develops between two unlikely people: Julia who is a casting director, and the introverted Eliott, who is a microbiologist. 

Dutch, French and English weave through the film, reflecting a multi-cultural environment where almost half of the residents were born in another country. Real Faces is a slow but intentional study on what it means to have a human connection.

Fuori (Outside)

Human connection, which in many instances is more meaningful than blood family, happens in prison for controversial feminist writer, Goliarda Sapienza, in Fuori. 

Fuori, which means “outside” in Italian, was written and directed by Mario Martone. In the film, prison becomes the place where Goliarda forms improbable but lasting intimate friendships with other inmates after she was jailed for a crazy and unforeseen incident.

Festival favourite German filmmaker, Christian Petzold, directed Miroirs No.3, which brings together a young accident victim who may have lost her memory and a stranger, a woman who has lost her daughter. One immediately thinks about lost and found, and whether the stranger has found a young woman who can become her daughter. The stranger invites her alienated husband and son to complete the sometimes uncomfortable and unnerving family constellation. 

In a haunting manner, Petzold makes us wonder about who is family, and whether we can substitute the dead with the living in order to maintain the semblance of family, even though it is based on a fantasy.

Under the Volcano (Pod Wulkanem)

Polish director Damian Kocur uses non-professional actors and incorporates their real-life experiences to portray Roman and his teenage daughter, Sofia, young son Fedir, and Nastya, his wife, in Under the Volcano.

This blended Ukrainian family is still in the phase of Roman’s kids adjusting to their father’s new wife when their holiday in Tenerife draws to a close and they must return home from an all-inclusive holiday in the middle of the Atlantic. However, the invasion of Ukraine by Russia ensures that they are stuck in holiday paradise with pre-existing tensions; and instead of Tenerife’s natural beauty bringing them closer together as a family, they begin to drift off into their own orbits. 

The Portuguese film about the fantasy and horror of economic migrancy, Great Yarmouth: Provisional Figures, is set in the English coastal town. The time is just before the striking of the Brexit clock, and workers go in large numbers from Portugal to work in a turkey factory in the once-cheerful Great Yarmouth. 

The vanished sheen of the formerly popular seaside resort town is the surreal backdrop for the fast-vanishing dreams of a better life entertained by the Portuguese women and men. 

Portuguese Tanya has worked the system to become the handler of the Portuguese workers, who call her “Mother”, yet there is nothing maternal about her relationships with them. She personifies Simone de Beauvoir’s quote, “the oppressor would not be so strong if he did not have accomplices among the oppressed”. 

Film buffs will spot how the contemporary European films scheduled for the festival are made and produced across national borders, thereby reflecting the realities of Europe and its place in the world now. 

Take your heart and mind on a cinematic road trip, without any borders. DM

The European Film Festival is in cinemas in Johannesburg and Cape Town, and online until 19 October 2025.

Each title screens only once in each Johannesburg and Cape Town. A limited number of films will be available for a window period of online screenings. For details of all films, screenings and bookings, click here.

Odette Geldenhuys is a board member of the Encounters South African International Documentary Festival and wrote this article in her personal capacity.