April 17, 2026

The Days of European Film programme continues, and the line-up still includes a number of titles heading in sharply different directions. From rap mystification and metal unrest through Camus’s existential chill to films that return our attention to nature, animals, the forest and quiet perception. Here are five possible moods, five persuasive reasons to head to the cinema.

California Schemin’ follows two Scottish lads who grasp one simple fact: in certain layers of culture, identity can be put on, recorded and sent into circulation. The film moves in the rhythm of rap, swagger and carefully measured embarrassment. More than a story of fraud, it is also a precise record of the desire to become someone else.

Wolves comes with dirt under its nails, guitars pushed to the edge, and relationships that fall apart with proper noise. The Swiss underground does not function here as a stylish label, but as a natural environment in which feelings are not explained, but crash into walls, bodies and amplifiers. Metal does not play in the background. It prods, cuts and drives the film forward.

François Ozon’s The Stranger turns to Camus without grand gestures and lets the strongest elements of the text do the work: distance, precision and the weight of a simple sentence. The result is not a reverential adaptation for the literary-minded, but a film that shows how little a classic needs in order to feel contemporary again. Some texts do not age. They simply wait, patiently, until their moment returns.

Hen takes seriously the life of a creature people have learned to see mainly through function, production and price per piece. The film does not feel like an effective morality tale, but rather like a slightly uncomfortable rearrangement of perspective. The question of a “better life” is played out in a space with cruel rules and a predetermined purpose. Despite its grotesque form, there is plenty here to think about.

Whisper of the Forest closes this arc in the quietest and deepest register. The forest is not merely image or decoration, but something that breathes, watches and endures. The animals are not ornaments of the landscape, and silence is not simply the gap between two events. The film slows the gaze, strips it of human impatience, and restores a feel for the subtle movements of a world that manages perfectly well without our commentary.

From rhythm and noise through chill to living silence: that, too, can be the shape of a festival’s closing stretch. The full screening schedule is available on the DEF website. Be there.