The 31st Geneva International Film Festival Begins

By Chiara Cavaletto

The Geneva International Film Festival (GIFF) began this past Friday, October 31st, and will continue through November 9th, 2025. This annual event has been running for 31 years, highlighting both traditional storytelling and innovative digital productions. It offers an extensive program, bringing together cinema, television, and digital arts. The festival features film releases, series premieres, live performances, and interactive installations. 

The festival’s film lineup is divided into three categories: in competition, out of competition, and tributes to guests of honor. This year’s Film and Beyond Award will be presented to acclaimed British director Stephen Frears, with a retrospective of his works highlighting his influence across film and television. The festival will also host Alan Ball, known for his work on American Beauty and Six Feet Under. He will present two of his recent projects. In addition, a special program dedicated to Dutch Creativity, the trade mission of the Dutch creative sector, will explore the Netherlands’ contribution to contemporary visual culture. In 2025, Dutch works have had a major impact at several festivals worldwide, and GIFF will highlight this through a selection that showcases the country’s innovation in technology, storytelling, and visual art.

The feature film competition comprises ten titles, each premiering in Switzerland. Audiences will encounter everything from a college professor’s murder plot to a comedic child kidnapping.

Included in the lineup is The Chronology of Water, Kristen Stewart’s feature debut as a director, which is based on a novel by the same title. Premiering at Cannes earlier this year, the film has received attention for its reflective portrayal of identity, trauma, and change within the main character’s life. 

The Things You Kill is noteworthy for its exploration of fraught topics like revenge, personal loss, and grief through the narrative of a college professor. It is an international co-production between Canada, Turkey, Poland, and France. A censorship dispute also arose when Iranian authorities sought to alter its content. The Things You Kill was selected as Canada’s pick for the Academy Awards.

The series selection will include the premieres of Tabloid, a Taiwanese production about investigative journalism and celebrity culture, and Just Act Normal, which looks into family dynamics in the wake of loss. All of the shows will be released both onsite and online, with the final episodes being released after the onsite premiere.

The annual Future is Sensible competition, one of the festival’s interactive installations, features eight works from around the world which center  themes of ecological, social, and technological foresight. One of the pieces is Break the Silence, a documentary which highlights the environmental situation in Ukraine. GIFF describes Break the Silence as contributing to the documentation of ecological sacrifices “in the face of humanity’s destructive madness.” 

Beyond the competitions, forty-two  additional works covering several different styles and genres will also be screened at the festival. Interactive exhibitions and panels round out the festival’s offerings. This year’s edition of the festival will blend premieres, retrospectives, guest talks and installations for an experience that highlights the relationship between cinema, storytelling, and our world.

The 2025 Geneva International Film Festival continues the legacy of previous years through its dynamic blending of premieres, retrospectives, guest talks, and installations. Not tethered solely to the past, this newest iteration engages the present and future through the intersections of cinema, storytelling, and our world. GIFF once more welcomes all attendees to encounter Geneva as an epicenter of art and international perspectives.