Stefan Pavlović's Towards where to breathe (2026) and Alice Diop's Towards Tenderness (2016) screen as a double bill that drifts to the limits of language, and the possibility of contact.

A voice drifts through water, air, and memory. Words are uttered, hesitate, and return again altered. A father swimming, whales rising for breath, a child suspended between floating and flying. Videotape images repeat, as if blocked from continuing. Searching for a way  through fractured language, as if to try to let the memories breathe.

Stefan Pavlović is a filmmaker based between the Netherlands and Bosnia and Herzegovina

The cruelties, hypocrisies and vulnerabilities of toxic masculinity come under the microscope in Towards Tenderness, Diop’s compassionate but clear-eyed study of four men living in the banlieues of Paris: Régis, Rachid, Patrick and Anis. Having gained her subjects’ trust well before embarking on the production, Diop elicits intimate and wide-ranging confessions over a microphone and pairs these voiceover ruminations with restaged footage from everyday life in which the swaggering behaviors and poses on display often run counter to the ideas being expressed verbally. The director is again an active participant during the interviews, guiding the men toward self-reckoning with questions that dare them to examine the root sources of their often misogynistic attitudes toward women and their anxieties around the giving and receiving of love. Far more than a gotcha-style exposé, Towards Tenderness digs deeply into four troubled psyches to reveal a broader portrait of the developmental challenges embedded within a low-income, immigrant-heavy milieu.

Alice Diop (b. 1979, Aulnay-sous-Bois, France) is a French filmmaker of Senegalese descent. After studying history and visual sociology, she trained in documentary filmmaking at La Fémis in Paris. Her work explores questions of identity, representation, and belonging, with particular attention to the lives and experiences of marginalized communities in contemporary French society. Her films include La Mort de Danton (2011), La Permanence (2016), Towards Tenderness (2016), which won the César Award for Best Short Film, and We (2021), which received the Best Film award in the Encounters section of the Berlin International Film Festival. Her first fiction feature, Saint Omer (2022), won the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival. Her recent work includes the short film Fragments for Venus (2025).

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