MINT launches Cinephilia Encounters, a parallel strand dedicated to explore and celebrate the transnational cultures of cinephilia. The 2026 theme, Amorous Exile and the Gaze, centers on the European premiere of Films to Die For (2025), presented alongside Riddles of the Sphinx (1977) and Tango Berlin (1997) as a triple bill that moves across generations, geographies, and cinematic traditions.

Films to Die For traces the circulation and inheritance of film history among filmmakers, revealing cinematic bonds that extend beyond national borders. Taking Wim Wenders’s The State of Things as its starting point, the film approaches cinephilia as a historical relation, one that is continuously written and revised, and brings Laura Mulvey’s theoretical and creative practice into this dialogue, reopening ways of looking long shaped by male-dominated cinematic experience.

Co-directed by Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen and presented in partnership with the BFI, Riddles of the Sphinx stands as a key example of cinephilia as a critical practice. Drawing on feminist and psychoanalytic perspectives, the film reorganises cinematic form and structures of spectatorship, turning the act of looking itself into an object of reflection. Completing the constellation, the newly restored short Tango Berlin, presented with the Film Heritage Project at the University of Television and Film Munich and receiving its UK premiere, features Wim Wenders in person and offers a light, self-reflexive coda to this cinephilic lineage. In its act of looking back, moments of chance encounter quietly surface, offering a concrete and lived sense of cinephilia.