KK International Film Festival 2025, Night 4
The Kota Kinabalu International Film Festival is turning 16!
This year's festival invites you to experience films that explore, provoke, and connect. Unlike mainstream blockbusters, these films are driven by ideas, not profits, and they go deeper.
The screenings offer a powerful mix of stories from 11 countries, including family tensions, cultural memory, migration, deafness, and exploding dryers.
KKIFF 2025 promises to be a festival full of imagination, reflection, and discovery.
All screenings start at the scheduled times. Please arrive at least 20 minutes before the start.
Film Line-up
Bajau Laut - the sea is our home
Their stilt houses are burnt down, their boats destroyed: indigenous people like the sea nomads in Malaysia are denied citizenship and passports as they are disenfranchised as stateless people. But centuries of history and the graves of their ancestors on the Malaysian islands are proof of their roots.
As stateless people, the children of the sea nomads are not allowed to attend state schools, so artists and activists have founded schools in the stilt villages. But the students are repeatedly arrested and harassed.
The trailer spotlights the fate of the sea nomad village Tetagan, which got totally erased by authorities June 2024.
Forms Of Forgetting
Five years after the death of his grandmother, Joaquin returns to their old, abandoned, soon to be torn down house. As he gathers the remaining belongings to move out, he notices the camcorder that he inherited from his grandmother was missing.
Headhunters Of Borneo / Kopfjäger von Borneo
This digitally-restored film comes with English subtitles. Kopfjäger von Borneo (Headhunters Of Borneo) is an early ethnographic feature film shot in the 1930s in Indonesia. It is a half-fictional documentary. The story is based on an old local legend, enacted by natives, and involves a love story between a young woman and a young man of incompatible social classes. It's Romeo and Juliet set among the Iban in the 1930s!
Organiser of this event
How to get to this event?
City Cineplex
2nd Floor, City Mall Shopping Centre, Jalan Lintas, 88300 Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Malaysia.