10 to watch at Borderlines Film Festival 2025

Borderlines is the 16-day festival that brings an all-you-can-eat buffet of great cinema to Herefordshire, Shropshire, Malvern and the Welsh Borders each year. It’s a chance to catch up on many of the notable independent films of the past year, as well as an opportunity to preview many buzz titles that haven’t been released yet. There’s a rich seam of older films to enjoy too. Here are 10 that come with a rubber stamp of recommendation.

Athina Rachel Tsangari emerged from the Greek Weird Wave alongside Yorgos Lanthimos, but now brings us this enigmatic agrarian saga. It’s set in a medieval English village amid rumbles of progress and change, where three outsiders meet with superstition and prejudice. Caleb Landry Jones stars in the adaptation of Jim Crace’s celebrated novel.

French director Alain Guiraudie is best known for his brilliant cruising-ground thriller Stranger by the Lake (2013). Set in France’s rural south-west, this latest film is also steeped in a sense of homoerotic danger, as a man returns to his village roots for a funeral and comes to blows with his host’s son.

This inspired adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s acclaimed novel is the work of director RaMell Moss, who uses an innovative first-person camera technique to pull us intimately into the life of Elwood, a young Black boy in 1960s Florida who is sent to a reform school after an unjust conviction. 

The first Hollywood film by British director John Boorman is a classic – a fragmented, minimalistic neo-noir set in a sun-blazed Los Angeles and starring Lee Marvin as the man called Walker, who is doggedly seeking revenge against the gangsters who stole his money and left him for dead. 

One of last year’s best documentaries, this brilliantly original epic maps out a hidden history interweaving jazz music and American intervention in Africa during the Cold War. With all the thrill of a true-crime doc, it takes in a bewildering amount of historical detail, but it all slides down easily thanks to the toe-tapping music.

Among the most celebrated of all silent films, F.W. Murnau’s luminous romance centres on a rural husband and wife and the process of them falling back in love with each other during a trip to the big city after his head has been turned by an urban temptress. The German émigré director harnessed all of the resources of an expensive Hollywood studio production, filming many immortal sequences with his roving travelling shots.

The second feature from Danish-Palestinian director Mahdi Fleifel is a gripping and assured present-tense drama about two Palestinian men living in Athens but seeking fake passports to help get them to Germany. Deriving its humanity and immediacy from two terrific performances from Mahmoud Bakri and Aram Sabbah, it evolves into the kind of street-level thriller perfected by filmmaking brothers the Dardennes (in Belgium) and the Safdies (in the US).

Winning the top prize at Venice last autumn, this rustic Italian drama from Maura Delpero unfolds in a stunning Alpine setting during World War II, when a deserter arrives in the village and becomes involved with the eldest daughter of the local teacher. Delpero’s film has earned comparisons with Ermanno Olmi’s neorealist pastoral epic The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978).

Featuring among a small selection of 1950s Mexican melodramas screening in new restorations at Borderlines, Victims of Sin is a noirish tale of Mexico City’s red light district, where a nightclub performer risks her career in order to raise the baby she’s found abandoned in a bin. It’s one of the crowning collaborations between director Emilio Fernández and master-of-shadows cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa. 

The one and only film directed by Barbara Loden, Wanda made the top 50 in the recent Sight and Sound poll. It stars Loden herself as the eponymous Wanda, an illiterate and down-on-her-luck mother whom we first meet wandering around the imposing slag heaps of Pennsylvania mining country. Losing custody of her kids in a divorce settlement, she’s set adrift but soon falls in with an itinerant rogue, who involves her in his bank robberies. 

Borderlines Film Festival runs 28 February to 15 March.