By Noah Goldstein

Across two October weekends at the Brattle, the expanded 27-film series offers Boston audiences early looks at new work by Lee Chang-dong, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Martin McDonagh, Pedro Almodóvar, and more.

A scene from Lee Chang-dong’s  Possible Love. Photo: courtesy of IFFBoston

Many Boston-area cinephiles are eager to see the year’s biggest films before their official releases but are unwilling to travel to Cannes, Venice, or Toronto to do so. Luckily, the team at Independent Film Festival Boston, which runs a full spring program featuring work from students and big-name directors alike, has found a solution in Fall Focus, now a nearly two-week series (October 8 through November 4) that allows filmgoers to see the season’s buzziest pictures before they hit the big screen.

Now entering its twelfth edition, the series features 27 films across 12 days, matching last year’s total. After a 2024 slate of 14 films in five days, 2025 was the first year with two stretches at the Brattle, on opposite sides of October.

Even that was not enough, according to festival director Brian Tamm, who said the volume of strong films coming off the fall circuit keeps outpacing the schedule. “There’s more films that we could have shown,” he noted. “We probably could have done a third weekend, honestly.”

Where last April’s spring festival offered 40 features and 11 short programs, program director Nancy Campbell focuses Fall Focus on the year’s most discussed forthcoming narrative features. The festival has previously given Boston its first look at films that went on to strong awards seasons, with eventual Best Picture winner Moonlight serving as the opening-night selection in 2016 and Best Original Screenplay winner Anatomy of a Fall doing the same in 2023.

“We’re hoping that the spring festival is about discovery, and this festival is more just like a big buffet for cinephiles,” Campbell remarked.

The 2026 series opens Thursday, October 8, as Lee Chang-dong, whose Burning played Fall Focus in 2018, returns with Possible Love, his first feature in eight years. Described as a complex study of class inequality that emerges when two families’ lives intertwine, the Korean director’s work bowed at Venice to rave reviews and took the Grand Jury Prize, the festival’s second-highest honor.

Possible Love is one of eight films in this year’s selection also submitted to contend for the Academy Award for Best International Feature, and Lee is joined by a slew of reputable filmmakers from across the globe. Andrey Zvyagintsev (The Return) is another director making a long-awaited comeback as the Russian—now living and working in France after leaving his native country in 2021—enters his Cannes Grand Prix winner, Minotaur. The political thriller is Zvyagintsev’s first film since 2017’s Loveless and plays the Brattle on October 11.

Fatherland is another Cannes prizewinner playing in Harvard Square on the festival’s first weekend, October 10. The effort, which stars Sandra Hüller as Erika Mann, daughter of writer Thomas Mann, earned Paweł Pawlikowski, director of Ida, a share of the Best Director award last May. Fans of Hüller can return on October 11 to see the actress’s Berlinale Best Actress-winning performance in Markus Schleinzer’s 17th-century period drama, Rose.

The top award-winning performances at Cannes are likewise represented in this year’s program. A highlight of the second weekend is the October 31 screening of Lukas Dhont’s third feature, Coward, which brought a joint victory for stars Emmanuel Macchia—who made his acting debut in the film—and Valentin Campagne. Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto split the Best Actress award for All of a Sudden, a 197-minute drama from Drive My Car director Ryusuke Hamaguchi, which screens on October 10.

A scene from Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine. Photo: courtesy of IFFBoston

And Hamaguchi is not the only Japanese master on the October 10 schedule. Just hours after All of a Sudden, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Look Back adapts Tatsuki Fujimoto’s manga about the decade-spanning relationship between two young artists who come together over a love of drawing manga. Kore-eda is a filmmaker whose name has often appeared in the festival’s lineup since Still Walking took the Audience Award in 2009. “He’s a director that we’ve always loved and championed,” Campbell said. “So when we see that he’s got something coming out, we’re going to try to get that film.”

Closing out the October 10 slate is Jordan Firstman’s directorial debut, Club Kid, in which a club promoter is forced to begin caring for the 10-year-old son he never knew he had. The film drew an eight-figure bidding war after a storming world premiere in May, and while A24 plans a limited release in early November, festivalgoers can see it nearly a month early.

Firstman is a new voice, but old hands abound: 83-year-old Mike Leigh’s likely final film, Tender Loving Care, comes to the Brattle on October 11. The first stretch of the festival closes on October 13 with Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine, a dark comedy that places the The Banshees of Inisherin director at the head of an ensemble led by John Malkovich, who won the Volpi Cup for Best Actor at Venice for his depiction of a cancer-stricken CIA agent reckoning with his past during the 1973 Chilean coup. Steve Buscemi provides supporting work in both McDonagh’s film and Noah Segan’s Sundance breakout, The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, which stars John Turturro and screens Friday, October 9.

The second portion opens Thursday, October 29, with The Debut. Paul Giamatti stars opposite Julianne Moore in a work that finds director Jesse Eisenberg among the Fall Focus assortment for the second time in three years, after his sophomore directorial effort, A Real Pain, closed the 2024 edition.

Andrew Scott, a Fall Focus fixture after last year’s Blue Moon and Wake Up Dead Man, returns Monday, November 2, in Simon Stone’s Elsinore. The Irish actor has become a major talking point for his portrayal of the real-life actor Ian Charleson, who pushed through AIDS to star as Hamlet at London’s National Theatre. The next night brings Green Book director Peter Farrelly’s I Play Rocky, a dramatization of Sylvester Stallone’s fight to star in the lead role of his own script.

A scene from Diego Luna’s Ashes. Photo: courtesy of IFFBoston

Halloween is the second weekend’s busiest day, with five films running from late morning to late night. It opens with La Gradiva, the maiden directorial venture from Marine Atlan. The film examines the tensions that arise within a French high-school class as its students travel to Pompeii and has been one of the surprise hits at festival stops including Cannes Critics’ Week, Toronto, and New York. Actor-filmmaker Diego Luna is next in line with Ashes, an immigrant drama centering on a young woman who leaves Mexico with her younger brother to reunite with their mother in Madrid. Tamm praised the film as a “beautifully told story with some incredible performances,” noting that its appeal lies in its perspective: “We’re used to seeing immigrant stories in America. It’s fascinating to see what’s the same and what’s different about immigrant stories in Europe.” The American side of Tamm’s comparison will be on display the night before in Stephanie Ahn’s Bedford Park, which follows the life-changing collision of two Korean American souls.

The evening of the 31st begins with Sandra Wollner’s Everytime, winner of the top prize in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard competition. Coward follows, before Split Rock crosses the Atlantic to the Canadian Badlands to close the night. The film is described as an ecological horror movie with supernatural elements, a fitting choice for the late slot on the calendar’s spookiest night.

Split Rock surprisingly is not the only dig-centered title in the second stretch: on November 1, The Dreamed Adventure centers on nonprofessional actor Yana Radeva as an archaeologist who begins doing business with gangsters at the Turkish-Bulgarian border. Clarissa follows, a modern-day reimagining of Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway. It is festival’s sole African selection.

Though the directorial star power may be more highly concentrated in the festival’s first stretch, with internationally renowned names including McDonagh, Kore-eda, and Hamaguchi, the back half of the schedule boasts Pedro Almodóvar’s new film, Bitter Christmas, on November 1. (Arts Fuse review)

Household names also rule the festival’s closing-night selection, as Pedro Pascal stars in Michael Clayton writer-director Tony Gilroy’s latest, Behemoth! Pascal plays a concert cellist who returns home to Los Angeles to pursue a career in film scoring in the drama, which also features Olivia Wilde and Eva Victor.

Aaron Douglas, Jean Blackwell Hutson, Nathan Huggins, Richard Bruce Nugent, Eubie Blake and Irwin C. Miller in William Greaves and David Greaves’s Once Upon A Time In Harlem. Photo: William Greaves Productions.

“I hope that people don’t overlook the documentaries we’re showing because they’re documentaries,” Campbell said. Still, Once Upon a Time in Harlem, screening October 9, has star power of its own. The film is helmed by David Greaves, who unearths footage that his father William—of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm fame—shot at a 1972 cocktail party he threw for surviving figures of the Harlem Renaissance. “We’re looking back 50 years on this footage, and they themselves are looking back 50 years at the time of the Renaissance,” Tamm said. “So it’s this fascinating time capsule.” (Arts Fuse review) On October 30, Rehearsals for a Revolution finds actor-turned-documentarian Pegah Ahangarani using archival material to weave her own story into four decades of Iranian politics. (Arts Fuse review)

Animation gets two noon slots, one in each stretch. On October 11, Iron Boy, a hand-painted French film, arrives after a Special Jury Prize at Cannes. Tangles, screening November 1, adapts Sarah Leavitt’s graphic autobiography about coping with her mother’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis.

Tamm and his staff have discussed expanding further, but a crowded October calendar that includes the Boston Asian American Film Festival and Boston Palestine Film Festival may limit how far they can go. Still, Campbell says the goal is to keep surprising audiences: “We definitely try to make sure that we are challenging folks and having films that they may not have known about previously.”

Noah Goldstein is a student at Tufts University pursuing a dual degree in Film and Media Studies and Cognitive Brain Sciences. He covers the film and music beats for the Tufts Daily, as well as occasional sports coverage. He is originally from New York City.