Here are the second batch of nominated films:

Justa

In 2017, devastating wildfires struck Portugal. Forests were burned, and many children and adults lost their lives. Some lost their lives in the village, while others were trapped on the road. Communications were cut off, and there was nowhere in the villages to take shelter. Rather than documenting the moment the fires broke out in 2017, the film focuses on life after the wildfire. The film follows a group of people who have lost their loved ones, recording how they learn to live again after losing everything.

Teresa Villaverde

Teresa Villaverde is a Portuguese screenwriter, director, and producer, born in Lisbon in 1966. Her artistic career began in the drama group at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon, where she participated as a co-writer and co-director in stage productions. Her films have won numerous prestigious awards and have become the focus of retrospectives and academic research worldwide—including at the Centre Pompidou (France, 2019) and the Serralves Foundation (Portugal, 2019). Film festivals and film archives in Italy, Spain, Croatia, Switzerland, South Korea, and Portugal have also held retrospectives of her works. She is often invited to teach in Portugal and abroad. Her works have been shortlisted for top international film festivals such as Cannes Film Festival, Venice Film Festival, and Berlin International Film Festival.

London

Bobby drives back and forth on the highway connecting Vienna and Salzburg. To save money on gas, he often gives rides to strangers and chats with them along the way. Their conversations revolve around work, family, and immigration; and each new passenger's story reveals another side of Bobby's own life. As mountains and forests race past outside the window, a quiet yet far-reaching political portrait of contemporary Europe gradually emerges—neither fiction, nor a complete documentary.

Sebastian Brameshuber

Sebastian Brameshuber, born in 1981, studied stage and film design at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and later studied film at the National Studio of Contemporary Art in France. Since 2004, his works have been screened and awarded at major film festivals such as Berlin International Film Festival, Vienna International Film Festival, Cinéma du Réel International Documentary Film Festival, Marseille International Film Festival, International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema, Sarajevo Film Festival and BFI London Film Festival. In 2019, his film Movements of a Nearby Mountain won the Grand Prix Cinéma du Réel. Retrospectives of his works have also been held by the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna and Anthology Film Archives in New York.

Our Girls

For many years, the two couples shared a perfect vacation home in the Alps, spending wonderful times together every summer. However, when their teenage daughters become involved in a tragic accident, this long-standing friendship is pushed to an unprecedented and unimaginable breaking point. In trying to piece together the truth and save their children, the two families are forced to confront long-buried tensions and disturbing truths. Every layer of composure is stripped away, and they begin to question everything they once believed without doubt about themselves as spouses, parents, and friends. When it comes to saving their own children, is there still a bottom line that cannot be crossed, or can they really resort to any means?

Mike Van Diem

Mike Van Diem, born in 1959, is a Dutch screenwriter, director, and script supervisor. A graduate of the Netherlands Film Academy, his graduation film, Alaska, not only won the Student Academy Awards for Best Feature Film, but also earned him the Golden Bull Award for Best Short Film at the Netherlands Film Festival. He wrote the script for several episodes of the TV series Pleidooi and his first feature film Karakter adapted from Ferdinand Bordewijk's 1938 novel Karakter, earned him numerous international honors, including the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. In the years that followed, he built an outstanding career directing commercials. He returned to feature filmmaking with The Surprise in 2015, and Tulipani: Love, Honor and a Bicycle premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2017.

Two People in One Life and a Dog

The film tells the story of an elderly intellectual couple living in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Both lived through World War II in childhood. Now, with their children having moved abroad, the two depend on each other for companionship, though their loneliness is hard to conceal. The film portrays their wisdom, optimism, calmness, patience, and generosity, as well as their pure love for one another and for life itself. These qualities have become increasingly rare in today's world, especially among the younger generations. For that very reason, the two elderly people, and the warmth of their home, draw those who are lonely at heart and longing for comfort.

Andrei Zaitsev