The Festival will open with the film Akris: Fashion With a Heritage (2025) by Reiner Holzemer, one of the key figures in contemporary fashion cinema, to whom the Festival will pay tribute with a retrospective. Considered one of the most influential filmmakers in the genre, Holzemer has developed a distinctive career marked by an intimate, rigorous, and profoundly cinematic approach to the creators and creative processes that define haute couture. The film focuses on the Swiss brand, creatively led by Albert Kriemle and strongly influenced by the women in his family, exploring the balance between tradition, craftsmanship, and innovation.
The retrospective brings together five more films that exemplify this approach. Dries (2017) follows Dries Van Noten during a pivotal year in his career, offering a delicate and personal portrait that combines the designer’s professional side with his private world. With Margiela: In His Own Words (2019), the filmmaker tackles one of the most enigmatic figures in contemporary fashion. Drawing on Margiela’s direct testimony and a rich archive of material, the film constructs an exceptional narrative about anonymity, radicalism, and the desire to disappear behind one’s work. Thom Browne: The Man Who Tailors Dreams (2024) provides an immersion into the unique universe of a creator who has transformed classic tailoring with a radical and narrative vision. The film shows how his collections and runway shows become true exercises in fiction, where fashion, performance, and imagination merge into a single language.
Finally, two documentaries focus on major photographers, Juergen Teller and William Eggleston. In Juergen Teller (2011), Holzemer captures the iconic photographer of the Versace Heart series during photo sessions with Helena Bonham Carter in London, Vivienne Westwood in Africa, and Lily Cole and David Blaine in Suffolk. In William Eggleston: Photographer (2007), the filmmaker introduces the “father of color,” a key figure who transformed the everyday into a visual manifesto, turning the American South into images worthy of exhibition in art galleries.
