First-time festival director Karina Libbey stepped up to the mic on Tuesday to unveil Dendy Cinemas’ third Capital Film Festival.

It’s a cracker line-up, touted by Libbey with good reason as “the best festival ever,” featuring Cannes and Sundance award winners, parties, Q&As and an industry panel.

Opening Night Gala will screen Prime Minister, a feel-good documentary portrait of NZ’s resolute former prime minister Jacinda Ardern, who admits at one point, “sometimes it can be hard to turn on the TV,” yet emerges more or less optimistic.

Also featured are Cannes Film Festival award winners It Was Just an Accident, Sirat, The Secret Agent, The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo and The President’s Cake.

A highlight will be the 2025 Palme d’Or winner from Cannes, Jafar Panahi’s revenge thriller It Was Just an Accident, in which Vahid becomes convinced that a traveller with a squeaky prosthetic leg who arrives at his auto-repair shop is the officer who tortured him in prison years ago.

The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo, a modern western-style queer tale set in a remote Chilean mining town during the AIDS era, while The Secret Agent is a Brazilian period political thriller by Kleber Mendonça Filho, the most awarded film at Cannes this year.

And The President’s Cake is about the search for ingredients to make a cake for Saddam Hussein’s birthday.

ACT talent is well represented, with a strong line-up of shorts from the 2024 Canberra Short Film Festival, including a Canberran-made comedy-horror, Snatchers, directed by Shelly Higgs, about the corpse trade, featuring Hannah Mackenzie as the manipulative “corpse” Jane Doe, who suddenly wakes up.

The festival will close with comedy-drama Rental Family, set in Japan, where actors are hired to become surrogate family members. Funny, moving and complex, the film shows cultures in collision, Libbey said.

Capital Film Festival, October 29-November 2.