Alejandro Alonso

France, Cuba | 2021 | 30 min

Raudel works at a boat scrap yard in western Cuba. With his colleagues, he lives inside the jagged metal and the smoke of the oil when it burns. He talks about spirits, about stories that await him somewhere. In his eyes hope is opposed to that space where the line that separates the living from the dead is almost invisible.

Awards
Audience Award International Competition, DocumentaMadrid 2021
Golden Dove Short Documentary Film, DOK Leipzig 2021

23 JAN, 19:00, COLONIAL ECOLOGIES

Malena Szlam

Canada, Chile, Argentina | 2018 | 16 min

Filmed in the Andean Mountains in the traditional lands of the Atacameño, Aymara, and Calchaquí-Diaguita in Chile and Argentina, ALTIPLANO takes place within a geological universe of ancestral salt flats, volcanic deserts, and coloured lakes. Fusing earth with sky, day with night, heartbeat with mountain, and mineral with iridescent cloud, ALTIPLANO reveals a vibrating landscape in which a bright blue sun threatens to eclipse a blood-red moon.

Awards
Best Experimental Short Film, Melbourne International Film Festival 2019

25 JAN, 21:00, HALLOWED BODIES

Ana Vaz

Brazil, France, Netherlands, Portugal | 2019 | 28 min

Apiyemiyekî? is a cinematographic portrait directed by Ana Vaz that takes as its starting point the archive of Egydio Schwade – House of Culture of Urubuí – found in his house in Presidente Figueiredo (Amazonas), where more than 3,000 drawings of the first literacy process of the Waimiri-Atroari, a native people of the Brazilian Amazon, are preserved. The drawings document and construct a collective visual memory of the learning process, of the way of seeing and thinking about the territory, bearing witness to a series of attacks suffered during the military dictatorship in Brazil.

23 JAN, 19:00, COLONIAL ECOLOGIES

Kiro Russo

Bolivia, France, Qatar, Switzerland | 2021 | 85 min

Bolivia, today.

After walking for a week, Elder and his miner companions arrive in La Paz to demand for the reinstatement of their job. Suddenly, Elder starts to feel sick…

With the help of the elderly Mamá Pancha, Elder and his friends find work in the market. But Elder’s condition worsens, he’s choking and struggling for breath…

Mamá Pancha sends him to Max – a witch doctor, hermit and clown – who may be able to bring the young man back to life.

Awards
Special Jury Prize, Venice Horizons, Venice Film Festival 2021
Grand Jury Prize, Athens Avant-garde Film Festival 2022

28 JAN, 19:00

Natalia Garayalde

Argentina | 2020 | 70 min

On November 3rd, 1995, the emblematic industry of my hometown, Rio Tercero Military Munitions Factory exploded. Thousands of shells were fired against the city that had produced them. I was 12 years old, and while I was trying to escape from the explosions, I recorded the devastation of my hometown with a video camera. Twenty years later I found those tapes. The threat of the industrial and military sector is still persistent at the present time.

Awards
Best Director Award, Argentinian Competition, 35° Mar del Plata Film Festival 2020
Special Jury Award, Burning Lights Competition, 52° Visions du Réel Int’l Film Festival 2021

25 JAN, 19:00

Juan Carlos Alom

Cuba | 2000 |15 min

Habana Solo is an ode to a city steeped in music. In it, several iconic Cuban musicians from diverse genres—jazz, fusion, and Cuban music in general—appear within an uninterrupted visual solo. The images are arranged in the same way the musicians improvise their pieces, embracing the immediacy of the photographic medium.

I spent nearly a year searching for connections between the city and each musical piece. I wanted to improvise with images as the musicians did with their music, conceiving the city as a source of visual inspiration.

27 JAN, 19:00, CHILDREN OF THE HURRICANE

Camilo Restrepo

Colombia, France | 2015 | 27 min

For over 70 years, Colombia has been confronted with internal armed conflict. Over the years, the outlines of the conflict have grown indistinct. A climate of generalized violence has gradually settled over society as a whole.

Violence and barbarity have worked themselves into every aspect of daily life, and fine traces of it mark the streets. Through a multitude of these traces, perhaps the narrative of this hazy war will finally take a firmer shape.

“Impression of a War” offers a vision of some of those deliberate, accidental, ostensible, fleeting or dissimulated marks. They are often signs of the struggle against oblivion, indifference and impunity.

Awards
Pardino d’ argento, Leopards of Tomorrow, 68° Locarno Film Festival 2015

26 JAN, 19:00, LESSONS OF H_STORY

Cristóbal León & Joaquín Cociña

Chile | 2024 | 70 min

Actress and psychologist Antonia Giesen embarks on a captivating project, deciding to film a script revealed by a voice within the mind of one of her patients. Seeking collaboration with the filmmaking duo León & Cociña, they discover that the script originates from the pen of the late and controversial Nazi poet Miguel Serrano. Together, they attempt to reconstruct Serrano’s life and his film. During filming, Antonia gets caught in a dizzying spiral, gradually losing her connection to reality.

Awards
Best Feature Film, New Alchemists Competition, Festival du Nouveau Cinéma 2024

22 JAN, 21:30

Otávio Almeida

Cuba | 2020 | 18 min

In Cuba, 60 years after the Revolution, two teenage brothers live their own dystopian universe. These boys who live with their father, a war veteran of the Angolan war. While they get involved in war games where innocence loses ground, their father’s ghosts take them away from reality, leading them to a future full of uncertainties.

27 JAN, 19:00, CHILDREN OF THE HURRICANE

Joana Pimenta & Adirley Queiros

Brazil, Portugal | 2022 | 153 min

“I was remembering the time… That I got wrapped up in some crazy shit with my sister Chitara. My sister made history in Sol Nascente. That was in 2019. I’d just got out of prison for drug charges. My sister asked me to be a part of this crazy scheme she was caught up in. She got a hold of a map of underground oil pipes. She got it and then… she bought a lot in Sol Nascente. The oil pipes ran right under her land. She started making a lot of money with that. Her, Andreia, China… They made a lot of money. So I started working with them. She took me to the lot, where she built a huge structure. Really huge, it was crazy, dope as hell. She taught me how it all worked… how to get the oil from underground, and turn it into gasoline, and all that shit…And she set up a deal with the motoboys, they would buy gasoline from her… she refined the gasoline there, and they bought it off her… Besides the motoboys, Chitara also had a spot at the P.Norte market a stand where she sold her gasoline. And a bunch of other shit. Chitara also got mixed up in politics. She made history… We had Sol Nascente on lock, we fucked things up. We really fucked things up.”

Léa tells the story of the Gasolineiras de Kebradas, as it echoes through the walls of Colmeia, the women’s prison of Brasilia, Federal District, Brazil.

Awards
Cinéma du Réel Award, International Competition, Cinéma du Réel 2022
Special Jury Prize, Athens Avant-garde Film Festival 2022

23 JAN, 21:15

Sofía Hansen

Chile, Spain | 2023 | 26 min

Archives of plants named by the first colonizers. Unarchiving a territory, uninventing a name. Muestrario begins with a process of learning about the relationship of plants in the native forest. Guided by the voices of the inhabitants of Hornopirén, in the south of Chile, we begin to glimpse what still subsists in this territory, soon to be devastated by industrial extractivism. In the search for ways on how to film, relate and inhabit this place, the forest returns and takes over the narrative. Not only do we observe it, but it also looks back at us.

25 JAN, 21:00, HALLOWED BODIES

Marta Rodríguez & Jorge Silva

Colombia | 1982 | 110 min

This extraordinary film attempts to reconcile two dissimilar approaches to storytelling: the documentary record and the staging of a myth. Filmed over a five-year period, it offers a firsthand look at the experiences of Andean Indigenous groups, ranging from submission to organization to the struggle for survival as cultures. These people have fought (and are still fighting today) for the recovery of their lands – a process they view as critical to their culture and history.

The film emphasizes the significance of this moment and what it means for them to see the past politically, and think about the present historically. This experimental approach, while artistic, preserves the context in which it is produced. It focuses on thought processes, and it attempts to show how the subconscious and the dialectic of a culture interact within their reality: devils and feudal lords or landowners, serfs and duels, analysis and poetry, organization and magic, and myth and ideology.

Awards
FIPRESCI Prize, Berlin International Film Festival, 1982

22 JAN, 19:00

Niles Atallah

France, Chile, Nertherlands, Germany, Qatar | 2017 | 90 min

In 1860, a French adventurer established a kingdom in an independent region of southern Chile, uniting the native Mapuche. The Chilean army’s response was devastating. At least, that’s one version of this true story. Or, was he a French spy? Banished? Died but somehow returned? In Rey, the tension between history and memory materialize in the degradation of image and sound. The film is an odyssey through a land of fantasies and dreams.

Awards
Special Jury Award, Tiger Competition, International Film Festival Rotterdam 2017

28 JAN, 21:15

Rodrigo Faustini

Brazil | 2024 | 4 min

Modulating attention between channels, like shifting through radio stations, one can reveal messages in noise. Found shells resonate, salt water blocks high frequency spectra.

24 JAN, 18:30, ECTOPLASMS

Miñuca Villaverde

USA, Cuba | 1973 | 22 min

The filmmaker visits her dying father, a Cuban exile in Texas, for the last time. When she leaves, nothing remains: neither the father nor the country where she was born. A farewell letter to all that was lost and a welcome to the future.

27 JAN, 19:00, CHILDREN OF THE HURRICANE

José Luis Aparicio Ferrera

Cuba | 2021 | 30 min

In a dystopian, alternative Cuba, Walfrido Larduet, a lonely electrical inspector, dreams of the Red Woman, whose image persists and becomes an obsession. Something tells him she is near. Over the course of a work day, Walfrido will follow her trail as he travels through the suburbs of an infested city.

27 JAN, 19:00, CHILDREN OF THE HURRICANE

Jerónimo Atehortúa

Colombia | 2025 | 23 min

A (Secret) Movie  is a film-collage that explores the anxieties of Colombian silent cinema. A brief history of the horses’ domestication and its connection with cinema. A man arrives on a horse to an estate in the country and is received by an old man that tells him ghost stories. A working woman becomes a victim of men’s and money’s violence. A bon vivant dandy runs over a boy who paints his face black, only to sell him to a businessman. Each story seems like the distorted mirror of the other. Theses stories, though unconnected, suggest that a secret lies in them, a truth that slides between the frames, always about to be revealed.

24 JAN, 18:30, ECTOPLASMS

Sara Gómez

Cuba | 1968 | 22 min

Una isla para Miguel is one of the “Island of Pines Trilogy” that Sara Gómez made in 1968. Gómez turned her camera from Havana to the Isle of Pines (later renamed  La isla de juventud/The Island of Youth by the Cuban government), where marginalized groups (young, female, black, poor) were not only to work for but also benefit from and, indeed, make the Revolution. In turn, these “pioneers of the future” would become the ageless face of the Revolution. Gómez made three documentaries there: En la otra isla, Una isla para Miguel, and Isla del tesoro. This site, a mid-1960s experiment in currency-free, communist living, was a world ruled by young people where women were central organizers, and it embodied many of the dreams and failures of the larger island’s experiments that came in the post-1968 gray years. Una isla para Miguel, offers a deep analysis of the reeducation process experienced by a group of teens who are called the “Vikings” due to their violent and rebellious behavior. Gómez’s voice-over explains that they had the morals of their neighborhoods, marginal environments where “being a man means being macho and being a friend.” The film moves away from the iconic or symbolic “ageless face” of the revolutionary “new man”, using cinema verite to develop intimacy with Miguel and his family and his friends—their sorrows and spirit, their poverty and hope. The Chucho Valdez soundtrack emphasizes the film’s counterpoints to the ideological flattening of disciplinary discourse and brings forward a complex and contradictory portrait of a crucial moment in Cuban history.

27 JAN, 19:00, CHILDREN OF THE HURRICANE

Raúl Perrone

Argentina | 2018 | 65 min

A lookalike of Pasolini has turned up in Ituizangó. First in a casting session where the postulants recite Dylan Thomas and then in walks through the center of the director’s home town surrounded by a gaggle of young men, sometimes accompanied by a poem by Verlaine for a soundtrack.

24 JAN, 18:30, ECTOPLASMS

Laura Huertas Millán

Colombia, France | 2012 | 20 min

With Aequador, Laura Huertas Millán continues her exploration of otherness, hybridity, and the foreign within nature. Aequador grafts 3D-modelled Eastern European architecture onto the Amazon rainforest. The CGI does not undermine documentary views of fields or forest but introduces doubt, creating a placeless, timeless utopia. Set in the Colombian Amazon yet unmoored in time and location, the film blurs topography and sound to explore the interplay of bodies, architecture, and nature in a world where the natural remains, or could remain, sovereign.

23 JAN, 19:00, COLONIAL ECOLOGIES

COLECTIVO LOS INGRÁVIDOS

Mexico | 2017 | 10 min

COYOLXAUHQUI recasts the mythical dismemberment of the Aztec Moon goddess Coyolxauhqui by her brother Huitzilopochtli, the deity of war, the Sun and human sacrifice. The film is a poem of perception, one that unveils how contemporary Mexican femicide is linked to a patriarchal history with roots in deeper cultural constructs.

25 JAN, 21:00, HALLOWED BODIES

Luis Ospina, Carlos Mayolo

Colombia | 1977 | 28 min

Filmed in Cali, Colombia, in a pseudo-documentary style, Vampires of Poverty by Carlos Mayolo and Luis Ospina denounces the aestheticization of poverty by Western culture. Through its biting black humor, the film delivers a sharp critique of artistic opportunism that exploits human suffering and feigned sensitivity for profit and recognition.

25 JAN, 21:00, HALLOWED BODIES

Luis Ospina

Colombia | 1982 | 90 min

Roberto Hurtado is suffering from a rare disease requiring massive blood transfusions from children or adolescents. He blackmails three employees to get the blood for him and they will resort to unscrupulous methods to get it. In the night raids trap their victims and subject them to sexual perversions before killing.

Awards
Prize of the International Critics’ Jury – Special Mention, Sitges – Catalonian International Film Festival 1983

26 JAN, 21:15

Pablo Martín Weber

Argentina | 2020 | 22 min

Pablo Martín Weber’s video essay forges a link between the creative abundance of computer imaging and artificial intelligence and the speculative cosmologies of Philip Henry Gosse, a 19th-century naturalist and advocate for science. Just as Gosse became obsessed with reconciling the geological record with the Biblical account of the Earth’s creation, Weber attempts to understand the digital image’s new world of infinitely malleable data.

24 JAN, 18:30, ECTOPLASMS

Mariano Llinás

Argentina | 2021 | 67min

Concierto para la Batalla de El Tala is a work with original music by Gabriel Chwojnik, written by Mariano Llinas, directed by Alejo Moguillansky, and performed by four musicians. A piece about the strange relationship between two characters during the civil wars that gave birth to a nation. An epic of passions on (and off) the battlefield, of the conflict between two possible homelands – that of the unitarios and the federales, that of Lamadrid and Quiroga: that of two men who want to become heroes. A peculiar epic about a country that seems to have learned nothing.

26 JAN, 19:00, LESSONS OF H_STORY

Nelson Carlo de los Santos

Dominican Republic, Argentina, Germany | 2017 | 106 min

Evangelical Christian Alberto Almonte works as a gardener for a wealthy family in the capital of the Dominican Republic, Santo Domingo, but must return to his village to bury his father and take part in the rituals. When it becomes clear that his father was murdered by a powerful man, Alberto’s family expects him to take revenge. Through its protagonist, Nelson De Los Santos Arias depicts, with an ethnographic and artistic attention to detail, a country where ancient rituals and established orders clash with moral and social change. The award-winning Cocote is largely shot on 35mm film, interspersed with video footage of riots and religious gatherings. With powerful visual contrasts and a pulsating soundtrack, the director explores the restless emotional landscape of his homeland, trapped in a spiral of corruption and violence, where class divisions and religious tensions inflame passions.

27 JAN, 21:45

Susana Barriga

Cuba | 2009 | 24 min

After spending the last 26 years imagining what her father is like, Susana sets out from Cuba to England to meet him for the first time. She tries to recall memories of his face, but all she has left are a few blurry frames she secretly filmed – and the desire to recreate the illusion she had before their meeting.

27 JAN, 19:00, CHILDREN OF THE HURRICANE

Juan Manuel Sepúlveda

Mexico | 2011 | 22 min

What lies beneath the soil of a war-torn village? In the orchard of Juana Lopez, in the 31 de Mayo community of Guatemala, the digging of a trench becomes a song of hope

25 JAN, 21:00, HALLOWED BODIES

Rafael Ramírez

Cuba | 2017 – 2025 | 138 min

24 JAN, 21:15