The Oldenburg Film Festival has unveiled its first wave of selections for this year’s edition, with a slate of world premieres and a selection of some of the weirder titles from Cannes and Locarno.
The lineup includes new work from established festival regulars Edgar Pêra, Michael Polish and Bertrand Mandico, continuing Oldenburg’s focus on unconventional voices in independent cinema.
Mandico’s Roma Elastica, a France-Italy co-production starring Marion Cotillard and Noémie Merlant, a midnight screening in Cannes this year, will have its German premiere in Oldenburg. Inspired in equal parts by Italian giallo horror flicks and American slasher flicks, the behind-the-scenes psychodrama stars Cotillard as a deathly ill scream queen shooting a sci-fi art film in Rome in 1982 who starts to go out of her mind.
Polish’s new film, Kill Me Now, will have its world premiere in Oldenburg. Jacqueline Singer, who also wrote the screenplay, stars as a novelist under deadline pressure to finish a Hollywood thriller who comes to believe her life is mirroring the story she is writing. Mena Suvari, Mario Van Peebles and Keith Carradine co-star.
Pêra’s Asphalt Guerilla comes to Oldenburg from Locarno. The experimental docu-drama blends fiction with historical fact, tracing a bank robbery by a amateur guerrilla cell in Portugal in the 1970s and the director’s own failed attempt, in the 1990s, to adapt their revolutionary story for the screen.
Another Locarno title, Bruton, from director Vincent Grashaw, will have its German premiere at Oldenburg. The drama, based on the true story of Jacksonville small-time criminal Bryan Bruton, stars Theo Rossi. This will be Grashaw’s third appearance at Oldenburg, after Bang Bang and last year’s Keep Quiet, which won the festival’s Spirit of Cinema Award.
This year’s Oldenburg world premieres include Matthew Osubor’s debut feature Big Daddy’s Flowers. Made under the mentorship of indie legend Alexandre Rockwell (In the Soup, Four Rooms) and shot in Osubor’s hometown of Providence, Rhode Island, the genre efforts follows a flower delivery driver drawn into the world of a mysterious crime boss.
Along with Polish’s Kill Me Know, world premieres at Oldenburg 2026 will include Boris Mojsovski’s Foreign Tongue, a Canadian feature about the immigrant experience, starring Kimberly Sue Murray; Mylissa Fitzsimmons’ Mackenzie, the story of an 11-year-old girl in the Utah desert who dreams of running away to California to meet 1980s teen idol Mackenzie Astin; and You Won’t Believe What Happened Before, a political thriller set in North Macedonia from debut director Srdjan Janicijevic.
Oldenburg’s 2026 lineup also includes Marjorie Conrad’s film essay The Joyless Economy, a Cannes Directors’ Fortnight premiere, which traces the biography of an unnamed woman through her personal video collection; and the dark comedy Superbuhei, from German director Josef Brandl, which features a cameo from Klaus Meine, frontman of ’80s German rockers the Scorpions.
Oldenburg on Monday dropped its official trailer for its 33rd edition. The trailer (see below) is a tongue-in-cheek tribute to John Carpenter’s 1974 debut feature, the low-budget sci-fi satire Dark Star. In the video, titled “2026: An Oldenburg Odyssey,” Oldenburg festival director and co-founder Torsten Neumann spoofs the film’s legendary video diary scenes, jokingly comparing the doomed mission of the Dark Star crew to the festival’s decades-long attempt to attract attention from the media and earn the respect of the international film community.
The 33rd Oldenburg International Film Festival runs Sept. 16-20.
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