Frontlight explores the realities of today

Several films offer immediate responses to critical current events, while others take time to reflect, examining the social realities and challenges shaping people’s lives. The Big Boom! by Gabriel Tejedor explores a Bulgarian arms manufacturer in Kazanlak rife with contradictions and simmering tension, where the machine guns and rockets are destined for Ukraine while many of its employees are pro-Putin. In No Man’s Air by Peter Delpeut and Gerco de Ruijter, a pilot recalls the last flight to Nicosia Airport in July 1974, as a Turkish invasion of Cyprus loomed. 

Afsaneh Salari’s Tehran, Under the Skin enters Tehran’s cosmetic clinics to explore the pressures behind Iran’s widespread culture of cosmetic surgery in pursuit of physical perfection, in a conservative society that seeks to control women’s beauty. In Jenin & the Nakba Between Us, Serene Husni returns to her parents’ hometown in the occupied West Bank, weaving family archive and conversations with residents into a portrait of a place shaped by displacement, occupation, and memory.