Lumière Open Air Film Festival 2025

Young teen Sophie and her 30-year-old father Calum go on holiday to a Turkish resort where they swim, play pool, soak up the sun and laze around. In intimate closeups, we see Calum and Sophie applying cream on each other’s bodies, practicing self-defence techniques or filming one another with a camcorder.

Charlotte Wells’ autobiographical first feature Aftersun is a tender, deeply felt portrait of this fleeting period, framed through Sophie’s fragmented recollections as an adult. The genuine warmth between father and daughter is punctuated by small frictions that lend their relationship a trace of melancholy.

Set in an anonymous tourist resort, Aftersun concretizes memories with specific details of gestures and moods. This attention to intimate details gives the film the atmosphere of lazy summer afternoons far from home in the company of a loved one.

Aftersun premiered at the Critics’ Week in Cannes and became the biggest discovery of the festival. The film was voted best film of 2022 by both film website Indiewire and British film magazine Sight & Sound.

Pre-show: short film Motherfocking Art + talk Marloes IJpelaar
Marloes IJpelaar, 2025, 9 min.

Theatre collective Club Lam ventures into film for the first time. In Motherfocking Art, we follow three women in a decaying artists' colony where rules blur, roles shift, and art becomes their last means of survival. Armed with cameras, costumes, and their own bodies, they dismantle the myth of the muse – choosing instead to become the artwork themselves.

In collaboration with Club Lam.

Driver (Ryan Gosling, in an iconic scorpion bomber jacket) falls in love with his neighbour Irene (Carey Mulligan), a young mother who is dragged into the underworld exploits of her husband, ex-convict Standard. When one of Standard’s jobs goes horribly wrong, Driver has to do what he does best to save Irene and her infant son: drive like a maniac.

With Drive, Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn delivers a brilliantly stylised pulp film, with a heavy dose of violence, suspense, the searing neon lights of Los Angeles and, of course, the delicious sound of engine roars and screeching car tyres. Ryan Gosling portrays a classic, stoic Hollywood hero in the tradition of Clint Eastwood. The film is supported by an atmospheric score featuring minimalist electronic music by Cliff Martinez and ethereal synthesiser music by Chromatics.

Pre-show: Short film Feathers on Lips + talk with Youngjoo Cho
Youngjoo Cho & Min Kyoung Lee, 10 min 30 sec

Feathers on Lips, co-directed with choreographer Min Kyoung Lee, features four female performers. Women’s bodies have long been central to art history, and continue to be consumed in various forms across media. This work explores the nuances created through contact between the female body and other bodies. It aims to capture the intimate moments we often encounter in everyday life — and to reflect on how society frames, ignores, or glosses over these experiences.

In 1971-72 New York, John Lennon and Yoko Ono took a unique approach to making the world a better place. They spent 18 months in an apartment in Greenwich Village meeting with kindred spirits and watching lots of TV – which Lennon called ‘a window on the world.’

Their apartment was recreated for this documentary, so it feels like we are sitting next to Lennon and Ono watching TV, fast forwarding around the world in that era. The newsflashes – dominated by the Vietnam war – and clips from talk shows, commercials and films bring the turbulent 1970s very close to home. Unique are the couple’s previously unseen home videos, and phone calls presented as contemporary WhatsApp conversations.

The ultimate outcome of all this TV watching was the successful benefit concert One to One, for children with physical and learning disabilities. The two shows on 30 August 1972 would be Lennon’s only full-length concerts between the last Beatles concert in 1966 and his death in 1980. The beautiful 16mm film footage from these concerts was restored and remastered with remixed audio overseen by Sean Ono Lennon. (source: www.idfa.nl, adapted)

On the hottest day of the summer, pizza-delivery guy Mookie makes his rounds while navigating the racially charged tensions that inform every daily interaction in the neighbourhood. When local agitator Buggin’ Out starts an argument with Mookie’s Italian employer Sal, the community’s delicate balance threatens to tip over into chaos.

Released at the end of a decade that had seen ever-deepening divisions between races and cultures, writer-director-star Lee’s angry and artful cinematic rallying cry is as potent, relevant, and important now as it was in 1989. It may also have left the world with the greatest rap song in history, Public Enemy’s Fight The Power, commissioned by Lee specifically for the film. (source: www.tiff.net)

Pre-show: Video Viewmaster Projects + talk by Bart van der Boom

As part of the upcoming video art exhibition PROTEST, Viewmaster Projects presents the stunning, cinematic video Choi Gor (2019) by Kacey Wong, an activist artist who fled Hong Kong. This one-take homage to the classic western hero draws the viewer into a daily event that cinematically illustrates the tense relationship between the people of Hong Kong and the riot police.

Curator Bart van der Boom from Viewmaster Projects will also give a short preview of what else PROTEST has in store.

After graduation, Benjamin Braddock finds himself lost and uncertain about his future. At a party celebrating his achievement, he is seduced by the enigmatic and significantly older Mrs. Robinson.

What begins as a secret affair quickly unravels when Benjamin falls in love with her daughter Elaine. Thus he becomes entangled in a web of lies and desires, unfolding against the backdrop of the rapidly changing social landscape of 1960s America.

The Graduate is a timeless classic that blends tragedy and comedy to explore themes of insecurity, rebellion and alienation in a new generation. The film marked Dustin Hoffman's breakthrough role and emerged at a pivotal moment in Hollywood history. Alongside influential films such as Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider, and Midnight Cowboy, The Graduate marks the transition to the New Hollywood era – a period defined by greater artistic freedom for filmmakers. The film received seven Oscar nominations and won the Academy Award for Best Director.

Pre-show: CineSud Summer Nights

What can you capture in sixty seconds? Summer Nights is an initiative by CineSud and Lumière that challenges filmmakers to create an ultra-short film inspired by the sultry, dreamy – or stifling – atmosphere of summer evenings, perfectly suited as a pre-feature for the Lumière Open Air Film Festival. Four selected filmmakers each received a production budget – provided by CineSud – along with professional support where needed to bring their films to life. The result: four distinctive miniatures that capture the essence of summer in just one minute.

This evening, we’ll be screening the short pre-feature films Nothing Sticks (Rozemarijn Elisa) and ChatGPT: Hot Girl Summer (Yuki Nakamura & Felice Peeters).

Animation is often associated with children's and family films, but movies like Waltz With Bashir (about the Lebanese Civil War) and Persepolis (about a young girl growing up during the Islamic Revolution in Iran) demonstrate that animated films can also tackle complex themes for adult audiences. One of the best examples is the Japanese animation film Grave Of The Fireflies, a war drama whose impact has been compared to Schindler's List by some film critics. The film depicts the devastating effects of war on innocent children. Grave Of The Fireflies is set against the backdrop of the bombing of Kobe in March 1945. Fourteen-year-old Seito and his four-year-old sister Setsuko lost their mother in the bombing; their father was killed while serving in the Japanese navy. The children are therefore left to fend for themselves in famine-stricken Japan.

Pre-show: Q&A Celine Daemen

Celine Daemen graduated in 2018 from the directing course at the Maastricht Academy of Performing Arts, after which she founded Studio Nergens. With her groundbreaking virtual reality operas, she quickly gained national and international recognition. These innovative performances invite audiences to explore beautiful musical scenes while wearing a VR headset. In 2023, her impressive work Songs For A Passerby was awarded Best Immersive Experience at the prestigious Venice Biennale. Her appearance at the Lumière Open Air Film Festival brings things full circle: years ago, someone at a Lumière festival asked her, “Isn’t VR something for you?” The rest, as they say, is history. Ahead of Grave of the Fireflies, there will be a short interview with Celine, along with a teaser and stills from her work.