With film fests cancelled and postponed for the foreseeable future, Cineuropa is proud to present you a couple of festival darlings that toured the circuit in pre-pandemic times, and are just now celebrating their digital release. Brought to you in partnership with eyelet (read news), these titles can be watched directly through our pages. Sit down, and happy streaming.

Birds (Or How To Be One) [+lire aussi :
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Hailing from the 2020 International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), where it unveiled just a few months back, Birds (Or How To Be One) unspools as a meditation on our desire for freedom. The pitch? A nine-step guide on how to become a bird. Based on Aristophanes’s 5th century BC comedy The Birds - and on a present-day theatre production thereof - Babis Makridis’s third feature is an experimental, wildly imaginative film dancing between documentary and fiction until the distinction hardly matters. Actors - among them Christos Loulis, as seen in Costa-Gavras’s 2019 Adults in the Room [+lire aussi :
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Loveling

Another Rotterdam entry (where it bowed in 2018 after celebrating its world premiere in Sundance that same year, the first in a long series of festival stops), Loveling is a heartrending tale of a family threatened by a looming separation. It follows Irene, a mother of four living with husband and children just outside Rio de Janeiro, as she grapples with her oldest son’s departure. A talented handball player, he’s just been recruited by a professional team in Germany, and given three weeks to bid farewell to family and friends. Director Gustavo Pizzi teams up with his wife, co-writer and star Karine Teles, to craft Irene as an indelible character in what unspools as a detail-rich and deeply intimate project. It’s a farewell song to a family enjoying what are likely to be their last few days together, a portrait that feels both personal and universal.

Interested in watching more indie films and festival titles you may have missed? Then take a peek at our biweekly Watch on Cineuropa column, where we showcase eyelet films we’ve reviewed, all available for you to enjoy on our own website.