The legendary Academy Award® nominated auteur is known for being a master storyteller across film, opera, theatre and music, with his most recent film Elvis (2022) becoming the second-highest grossing musical biopic of all time globally. Luhrmann’s critically acclaimed filmography includes double Academy Award® -winning The Great Gatsby (2013), Strictly Ballroom (1992), Romeo + Juliet (1996), double Academy Award® -winning Moulin Rouge (2001) and sweeping period epic Australia (2008).

In the cancer department of the children`s hospital, two boys named Isa and Ali, who dream of becoming football players, plan to achieve their dreams before Ali`s last serious operation. It should be away from the eyes of doctors and nurses.

Two boys are brought up in a sadistic neighbourhood of Rio de Janeiro. Later, they adopt diverse professional paths, with one of them becoming a photographer and the other boy becoming a drug dealer.

A Romeo and Juliet story of star-crossed lovers is infused with urgency by the fact that it is based not on Shakespeare’s play, but on a real-life incident that took place just 30 years ago. Indian Canadian Jassi (Pavia Sidhu) aged 19, visiting family in the Punjab, falls in love with Mithu, an illiterate rickshaw driver. Their romance is touchingly chaste but Jassi’s determination to bring her unsuitable love to Canada appals her mother; if she had known she could do this, she says, she would have strangled Jassi at birth. Restrained in its delivery and surprisingly very funny, especially dealing with Indian bureaucracy, Dear Jassi nevertheless delivers a culminating gut punch that is both heartfelt and a dramatic coup.

Zaffan goes to a strict girls’ school in rural Malaysia, where her youthful high spirits – dancing and climbing trees in the rainforest – mark her out as a rebel. At 12, she is also the first girl in her class to reach puberty, meaning that her body changes in ways regarded as shameful. When girls start to collapse around her with inexplicable fainting fits, she is identified by teachers as a dark spirit who has cursed the school. Little do they know that she does have a secret self – one with a tail and teeth. Drawing on the playfully scary spirit of old-school Asian monster movies as well as traditional myths, Tiger Stripes is raw, joyful and buoyed by great performances from its young rookie cast.

It is winter in remote Anatolia, the mountainous Kurdish region of Turkey, where elderly matriarch Keke is seriously ill. Her son Ali arrives from Germany to support her, bringing his daughter Hazal with him. For her, this is a journey into unknown territory. Hazal is only 21 and has never taken much interest in her family’s Alevi-Kurdish roots, but she is moved and curious when she learns her grandmother has asked to be buried with an old suitcase. Learning the story of the suitcase, she understands more of her family’s tragedy, of the violence, abuse, and displacement they have suffered at state hands, but also about the true strength, courage, and endurance of this dying woman.