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International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) has unveiled its “Cinema Regained” program for 2025, featuring 43 restored classics, documentaries, and film heritage explorations. The strand includes both contemporary works and pre-1970 restorations.

Key premieres include Mousso Fariman — the first film from Burkinabé director Drissa Touré (Haramuya) in 30 years, co-directed with Stéphane Mbanga — and The Lilac Wind of Paradjanov, a tribute to the late, legendary Soviet filmmaker Sergei Parajanov, from director Ali Khamraev. The film will screen in Rotterdam 38 years after Parajanov and co-director Dodo Abashidze’s The Legend of Suram Fortress premiered at IFFR in 1987, winning the prize for best innovative film.

The Cinema Regained program will also show a restored version of José Álvaro Morais’s The Jester, which was first screened at IFFR in 1988.

Other highlights include Lee Taewoong’s Korean Dream: The Nama-jinheung Mixtape, examining Korean Cold War history through archival footage; Khavn’s AI-driven Bomba Bernal, which pays homage...

Above: Soviet-export poster for Ashik Kerib. Design by “Lem.”On January 9 of this year, the legendary, often beleaguered and utterly sui generis filmmaker Sergei Parajanov would have turned 100 years old. Parajanov was born in Tbilisi, Georgia, in 1924 to Armenian parents, just seven years after the Russian Revolution. He died in Yerevan, Armenia, in 1990 at the age of 66, only a year before the dissolution of the Soviet Union. His life and career were very much defined by the strictures of the Ussr, including four years spent in a labor camp in the mid-’70s on trumped-up charges of crimes against the state, and numerous personal projects that were banned, censored, or shut down by Soviet film administrations.One of the world’s most exceptional filmmakers, Parajanov managed to make only eight feature films in his four-decade-long career. His first four socialist realist features were made at the Dovzhenko Film Studios in Kyiv and,...

AndreischAfter the staggering success of Shadows of The Forgotten Ancestors (1965), which won awards in London, New York, Mar Del Plata and Montreal, Sergei Parajanov was thrust onto the world stage as one of the most original filmmakers in the business. Depicting the conventions of the Hutsul people of the Carpathian mountains, it was a brave new step in Soviet filmmaking due to its restless camerawork, intense subjectivity, and ambiguous tone. The positive reception would inform his later work, a triumph of the local, celebrating ancient customs and dress in a visually dazzling fashion. To celebrate his legacy, Arsenal Kino in Berlin, supported by the Embassy of the Republic of Armenia, presented all eight of Parajanov’s feature films this fall, allowing audiences to see how the acclaimed filmmaker changed from studio-tied hack to inimitable auteur. When talking about Parajanov’s filmmaking and style, critics will invariably focus on his last four films—Forgotten Ancestors,...