BEAST announces full programme for its 9th edition
BEAST IFF returns to Porto from 3 to 7 June and announces its full programme. Competitive sections and special programmes, both within and beyond cinema, form the core of this year’s edition under the theme “HOME”.
The official competition of BEAST 2026 brings together 27 short films from different regions of Central and Eastern Europe, divided across the festival’s four competitive categories: EASTWAVE (fiction), EAST DOC (documentary), experimentalEAST (experimental) and ANIMAEAST (animation).
The opening film of this year’s edition will be Love is Not an Orange (2022) by Otilia Babara. Built from family archives, the documentary follows the relationship between Moldovan mothers who emigrated after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the children who remained in the country, revealing an intimate story about separation, care and distance. As a double bill under the section title PLACE HOLDER, the festival will also present the latest work by Tudor Cristian Jurgiu, On Our Own (2026), which premiered earlier this year at the Berlin International Film Festival.
The special section CHARLI GOES TO WARSZAWA presents Erupcja (2025) by Pete Ohs, starring Charli XCX and Lena Góra. Set in Warsaw, the film follows the reunion of two friends whose relationship seems marked by a persistent coincidence: whenever they meet, a volcano erupts somewhere in the world. Between poetry, desire, emotional instability and relationships suspended in time, Erupcja constructs a narrative in which romantic passions emerge as seismic forces capable of transforming and destabilising everyday life.
BEAST continues its long-standing collaborative practice through the FESTIVAL VISIT section, welcoming ŻUBROFFKA International Short Film Festival as this year’s guest festival. The collaboration unfolds across two programmes: EASTWARD WINDOW and FILM PODLASIE ATTACK PORTO – special brunch mix.
The festival also continues the AMARO KINO – ROMANI SHORT FILMS section, developed in collaboration with ERIAC. Bringing together documentary and fiction works, the programme focuses on stories and perspectives from the contemporary Roma community, creating space for narratives about identity, marginalisation and belonging.
The 2026 programme also includes a series of special sessions dedicated to experimental cinema, animation, audiovisual archives, and the relationships between urban space, memory and technology. In collaboration with the Academic Film Center, BEAST presents MEETING AT THE KINO KLUB, a programme paying tribute to the tradition of Kino Klubs in former Socialist Yugoslavia and to the role of Belgrade’s Academic Film Center as a space for cinematic experimentation since 1958. The programme brings together works by women filmmakers from different generations, spanning filmed diaries, personal archives and audiovisual essays.
Within the VIDEO ESSAYS section, Grounds for Speculation by Czech artist Oskar Helcel, winner of the Jindřich Chalupecký Award in 2024, reflects on the privatisation of public space, gentrification and late capitalism in the contemporary city. Through performative video essays marked by humour and political critique, the work connects the urban transformations of Prague and Porto.
The festival also presents EAST-TOONS, a programme dedicated to animated series and childhood television imaginaries from Eastern Europe. Revisiting visual worlds, characters and languages that shaped different generations, the programme explores television as an affective space of collective memory, nostalgia and imagined notions of “home”.
As part of the Eastern European Film Festival Network (EEFFN), BEAST presents Perla by Alexandra Makarová, winner of the EEFFN 2026 Award. The film follows a dissident artist in 1980s Vienna whose life is transformed by the unexpected return of her former partner, triggering a journey back to Czechoslovakia marked by memory, risk and family reconstruction.
BEAST 2026’s parallel programme expands the festival beyond cinema, bringing together initiatives dedicated to listening, performance and the creation of meeting spaces between independent artistic communities. In collaboration with Rádio Quântica and several community radio stations from Central and Eastern Europe, including IDA Radio, Tīrkultūra, Mutant Radio, Radio Vilnius, Lahmacun Radio, Cashmere Radio, Black Rhino and Radio Kapital, the festival will host special broadcasts on 6 and 7 June, alongside a conversation at the Café-Bar of Batalha Centro de Cinema focused on independent curation and cultural production.
The programme also includes the performance night My Dislocated Flesh at Central Eléctrica. Curated by MOFO Collective and featuring performances by Boji Ro & Sasha Malyuk, Dim, Maria Lemberk, 2rana_3crana, Calgon and Marie Dior, the event is organised in solidarity with the Ukrainian NGO Insight and the LGBTQIA+ community in Ukraine.
