This year's Human section centers on one defining keyword — challenge — and unfolds the many worlds the screen can hold in two distinct strands.

First, four films await audiences, each taking on its own challenge on and off the screen. Some capture the challenges of their protagonists: a documentary that portrays, with touches of magical realism, the struggle of a fourteen-year-old girl in Guinea, Africa, who dreams of joining the circus; and a fiction film about a promising young runner in an unjust society who listens to the voice of his conscience and forces his own way through a path that seems closed. Others carry the challenges of their makers: a film in which an actor stepped up as a creative producer to follow a man's pursuit of the truth behind his wife's death, and a work that adopts documentary methods to probe the ethical dilemma facing a film crew at the gates of a juvenile reformatory on the verge of closure — all bearing the fierce questioning and daring of young filmmakers.

The second strand turns to the master who laid the groundwork for such challenges: Abbas Kiarostami. Throughout his life, he crossed the boundaries between media, dissolving the wall between fiction and documentary to look deeply into the world. Ten, a feature that drew natural performances from non-professional actors in the freedom of digital filmmaking, could only have been born because of Orderly or Disorderly, a bold experiment placing order and disorder side by side. What Kiarostami learned during his years at Kanoon — seeing the world at a child's eye level, working with non-professional actors, and turning the small incidents of everyday life into stories — can be traced in the three early shorts presented this year: The Bread and Alley, The Chorus, and Orderly or Disorderly. No, which gracefully sidesteps that approach, distills a child's firm declaration of self through close-ups and off-screen sound. From his first challenge to his final farewell, his cinema keeps company with one space: the alley. The exploration that began in the small alley of his debut, The Bread and Alley, carries on to his late short Take Me Home, drifting freely down the stairways and alleys of southern Italy. This year's Kiarostami selection is a letter from a philosopher of the road — one who held a tender gaze toward children close to his heart, who captured the many lives of human beings on screen, and who always left their interpretation to the audience.

― Jinna Lee, Programmer​