New additions

April arrivals: 34 new titles including three Norwegian films and a complete Chantal Akerman retrospective

S
Sofia Reinholt
April 1, 2026 · 6 min read

April is our largest month so far in 2026 — 34 new titles across features, documentaries, and short films. Here's the full list with brief notes, ordered loosely by how strongly we recommend each.

The headliners

Chantal Akerman retrospective (14 titles). We're embarrassed it took us this long. We had three Akerman films already — Jeanne Dielman, News from Home, Toute une nuit — and we've been in rights discussions with the Akerman Foundation for eighteen months. The agreement covers fourteen additional titles, including Je tu il elle (1974), Les Rendez-vous d'Anna (1978), D'Est (1993), and La Captive (2000). Curator's notes are being written now; we're staggering the releases over April and May to give each film the attention it deserves rather than dropping everything at once.

If you've only seen Jeanne Dielman, start with Les Rendez-vous d'Anna. It's more accessible as a second Akerman, and the formal relationship between the two films is one of the more interesting formal arguments in European cinema of the 1970s.

Norwegian trilogy (3 films). Three features from Norwegian director Kari Bremnes-Olsen (not to be confused with the singer of the same name). We acquired all three simultaneously after our Scandinavian curator Kristoffer Lindqvist spent a week watching her complete output. Vintersol (2018), Ikke nå (2020), and Det er nok (2023). They're not formally a trilogy — Bremnes-Olsen didn't conceive them as one — but they share a preoccupation with women in late middle age navigating institutional and domestic constraint that makes watching them in sequence revelatory. Start with Det er nok; it's the best, and watching the earlier two after it reframes them productively.

Features

  • Zwischenraum (DE/AT, 2020, 2h11m) — A German-Austrian co-production about a logistics worker in Salzburg who begins corresponding with a prisoner. Formally austere in a way that earns the austerity. Dagmara's pick of the month.
  • Maasvlakte (NL, 2021, 1h37m) — Documentary. The port of Rotterdam as subject and as argument. Christoph Bauer, who made this, has been on our radar for two years; the rights situation was complicated by a dispute between his production company and the distributor. Resolved now.
  • Skogens Röst (SE/FI, 2022, 1h49m) — Swedish-Finnish documentary on rewilding in Lapland. Part of the landscape-as-subject cluster Maarten mentioned in his acquisition note.
  • Het Derde Seizoen (NL, 2019, 1h58m) — A late addition. We'd seen this at IFFR 2020 and liked it but let the rights window lapse. The director contacted us directly in January; we moved quickly.

German New Wave corrections

We've had a gap in our coverage of the New German Cinema (Neuer Deutscher Film) of the late 1960s–70s that several members have pointed out, correctly, in the forum. The issue was partly rights and partly, honestly, gaps in our own curatorial attention. This month we add four titles that begin to address it:

  • Der amerikanische Soldat — Fassbinder, 1970. We had The Marriage of Maria Braun and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul; this is the missing early Fassbinder, the gangster film that shows the formal experimentation before the melodramas.
  • Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes — Herzog, 1972. Yes, we didn't have this. Please don't write in about it again.
  • Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum — Schlöndorff/von Trotta, 1975.
  • Stroszek — Herzog, 1977. The one that David Bowie called the greatest film he'd ever seen, which is not our reason for adding it but does not count against it.

Short films

Eight short films, all from 2023–2025 festival circuits. The standout is Vloed by Rotterdam-based director Amara Osei (14 minutes, NL, 2024) — about flood memory and coastal infrastructure, shot entirely on the Zeeland coast in winter. It's the best short we've added in eighteen months. Curator's note is already written.

What's leaving

Three titles leave the library this month: two due to rights expiry (we're in renewal discussions on one of them), one by our own editorial decision. We don't name departing titles in advance as a policy, but you'll see them flagged in the library with a "leaving soon" indicator during their final week.