The Oldenburg International Film Festival has unveiled the first titles of its 32nd edition, highlighting a slate of world premieres and debuts with strong showings from Irish cinema and recent festival standouts from Cannes, Karlovy Vary, and Locarno.
Three new Irish productions anchor this year’s program. Jim Sheridan, a six-time Oscar nominee, teams with David Merriman on Re-Creation, which revisits the contested case of Ian Bailey, long linked to the 1996 murder of Sophie Toscan du Plantier. The film premiered at Tribeca and features Vicky Krieps and John Connors.
Connors also stars in Crazy Love, the debut feature by stage director Kevin Treacy and cinematographer Jason Byrne. The drama, about an unlikely romance in a psychiatric hospital, will have its world premiere at Oldenburg. Rounding out the Irish spotlight is Horseshoe from Edwin Mullane and Adam O’Keeffe, a family drama with supernatural elements that won Best Irish First Film at Galway.
Additional highlights include Ondřej Provazník’s Broken Voices, which premiered in Karlovy Vary; Vincent Grashaw’s Keep Quiet, which debuted in Locarno and features Lou Diamond Phillips; and The Girl in the Snow, Louise Hemon’s debut that screened in Cannes’ Critics’ Week. The festival will also screen Ben Leonberg’s Good Boy, which premiered at SXSW.
World premieres include Alejandro Castro Arias’ Harakiri, I Miss You, Guillaume Campanacci’s The Silent Sinner, Nancy Biniadaki’s Maysoon, Cris Tapia Marchiori’s Gunman, and Jérôme Vandewattyne’s Belgian satire Summer Hit Machine.
Oldenburg has also unveiled this year’s festival trailer. Directed by Edgar Pêra (Telegraphic Letters, Magnetick Pathways), and co-created with festival director Torsten Neumann, it reimagines H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds with an alien invasion set loose on the streets of the northern German city.
The short film will launch in cinemas nationwide in Germany on Aug. 21. You can check it out now below.