— Grand Prix, Cannes Film Festival, 2025

— Official Selection, Locarno Film Festival, 2025

— Audience Award, Munich Film Festival, 2025

— Jury Prize, Brussels Film Festival, 2025

After the death of their mother, sisters Nora and Agnes discover that the family home still belongs to their estranged father Gustav, a once-renowned filmmaker who abandoned them years ago. When he reappears, attempting to reconcile, he offers Nora, a stage actress, the lead role in his new film. After she refuses, Gustav casts a Hollywood star instead and begins preparations to shoot in the very house where generations of the family once lived.

In Sentimental Value, Joachim Trier continues his exploration of emotional inheritance, focusing on the delicate balance between the personal and the creative. The family home in suburban Oslo becomes a layered space—at once comforting and haunted by unspoken grief—serving as both metaphor and set for a film-within-the-film.

True to Trier’s style, emotions emerge quietly, never overstated. The film is suffused with melancholy and flashes of humor, carried by the charged interplay between Stellan Skarsgård’s bitter narcissism and Renate Reinsve’s stoic intensity. This is a story of generational confrontation, but also of hope—that even in silence, listening can begin.

— Festival curator Anna Datsiuk