Sede vacante! The highest chair in the Vatican has become vacant, and Cardinal Dean Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) is now tasked with presiding over the conclave to find a new pope.

Centuries-old rituals and haggling over the presidency of a global corporation worth billions - this mixture made Robert Harris' political thriller satire "Conclave" a bestseller in 2016. In the film adaptation, Edward Berger tightens the tension even further by turning the holy church into an ominous cult and Isabella Rossellini into the mostly silent pivot between all the revered figures.

Edward Berger
Austrian-Swiss director Edward Berger, born in Wolfsburg in 1970, made a name for himself with four Oscars in 2022 for his remake of "Nothing New in the West". Insiders already noticed his youth drama "Jack", which he co-wrote with his wife Nele Mueller-Stöfen, in competition at the Berlinale in 2014. Since 2001, Berger has been responsible for episodes of the crime series "Tatort", "Schimanski", "Bloch" and "Polizeiruf 110", and from 2015 for episodes of the series "Deutschland 83", "The Terror", "Patrick Melrose" and "Your Honour".

An ambitious doctor and a drug baron who undergoes gender reassignment surgery are the protagonists of this unusual musical. However, "Emilia Pérez" only becomes a true tragedy when Emilia (Karla Sofía Gascón) begins to long for her children. However, they believe that their father was killed in a raid.
Spanish actress Karla Sofía Gascón is the first transgender woman in the history of the Cannes Film Festival to be honoured with the Actress Award, and with her the concentrated power of the entire female ensemble.

Jacques Audiard
Born in Paris in 1952, Jacques Audiard takes obvious pleasure in directing films of all genres, be it thriller ("When Men Fall", 1994), romance ("Where the Sun Rises in Paris", 2021), family drama ("Life: A Lie", 1996), prison drama ("A Prophet", 2009), western ("The Sisters Brother", 2018) or the refugee tragedy "Demons and Miracles", which won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2015. Audiard has now even created his own genre with the tragicomic transgender gangster musical "Emilia Pérez".

The air raids that Nazi Germany flew against Great Britain between September 1940 and May 1941 were called the Blitz by the British. More than 40,000 people lost their lives and around 2 million homes were destroyed. The feature film "Blitz", written and directed by Steve McQueen ("12 Years a Slave", Best Film Oscar 2014), not only tells the story of a child who is lost in the chaos of the air raids. It is also an impressively vivid visualisation of the terrible impact that the violence of war has on civilians. With Saoirse Ronan as the London-based mother, "Blitz" is also a gripping drama.

Finding, collecting and using things is a thing of the past. In the video game "Phoenix Springs", the player points and clicks on things that contain ideas, conversations and information. Some of them help the journalist Iris to find her long-lost brother, while others lead to a dead end, which is no less interesting. In terms of style, the designers from the British-French art collective Calligram Studio have stuck to the neo-noir of the 80s in terms of words, sound and two-dimensional comic drawings.