Pajarracos

Al Nervión is a documentary essay that moves between the present and the past of the Nervión estuary. Shot on Hi8, its anachronistic imagery blurs time and creates a landscape where shipyards, cranes, and factories in transformation engage with migratory narratives that traverse the memory of the territory. The film reflects on deindustrialization, gentrification, and labor precarization, building a sensory and critical experience in which the industrial past pulses through the bodies and the city inhabited today.

Wood is the material of the future. Architect Oihane Ruiz and landscape designer Ane Barrutia travel through forests and industries to explore the Basque people’s relationship with the land and its historical transformation. Berdea addresses the decline of radiata pine due to brown band disease, the sector’s productive dilemma, and the tensions between sustainability, economy, and the rural world. A portrait of a territory that must decide what forest it wants for tomorrow.

A group of students revolutionises their school as they take charge of their own education. In a secondary school in Galicia, Comando Igualdade emerges: a self-managed feminist group aiming to educate (themselves) and mediate in cases of gender/sex-based violence. When a film crew approaches the group to show what they are doing, a creative-educational dialogue on image/perspective unfolds. During the film, spanning several school years, the group will alter the way they see things (see themselves), face growing resistance to their existence, and eventually weaken. But they will succeed in telling their story, and will call on their future audience for a shared cinematic responsibility.

Álvaro Gómez Pidal, a young filmmaker from Madrid, discovers that his great-uncle Manolo, a Spanish diplomat, was assassinated in Jerusalem in 1948 by Zionist militias. When invited to a short film festival in Tel Aviv, his host, a Palestinian holding Israeli citizenship, becomes his gateway to understanding both Israeli and Palestinian realities. Through years of investigation, Álvaro uncovers crucial testimonies and documents about Manolo's death. He finds himself in Jerusalem as violence erupts on October 7, 2023, witnessing firsthand how his great-uncle's murder resonates with Gaza's devastation.

A young Dominican-Mexican filmmaker turns her life and her body in Barcelona into a video essay on beauty standards. While visiting the Dominican Republic for her brother’s graduation, her family of doctors grants her access to clinics and operating rooms, and her intimate project transforms into a documentary about the absurd aesthetics industry. Between clinical observation and personal confession, she explores her identity, her fears, and a sometimes morbid fascination with bodily intervention.

It is said that we hear with our eyes, that when we are unable to identify the origin of a sound with our sight, our sense of alert is activated. In 1729, two brothers from Idiazabal were sentenced to exile for playing a forbidden instrument, the eltzegorra, a clay pot made of cat fur with a rope hanging from it.
In the trial, documented in a manuscript from that year, witnesses recall the events, making special mention of the description of sound and its effects. Now, through the staging of the trial, the film explores the evocative power of sound and the fear of the unknown.

On the sandy isthmus that forms the shortest border in the world, an 80-meter blue rope separates Spain from Morocco, Europe from Africa. On one side is the Rock of Vélez de la Gomera, fortified and occupied by the Spanish army since five centuries ago. On the other side is the Moroccan fishing village of Badis, where time seems to stand still. The arrival of a Spanish filmmaker, unable to access the rock despite his nationality, awakens memories and gazes from four generations of neighbours. The symbolism of this place's geography converges with its politics, reality seems to surpass fiction.

A graduate in Audiovisual Communication from the University of Murcia and specialised in Documentary Film at Madrid’s ECAM, he is a film programmer and script supervisor whose work has been screened at festivals such as Curtocircuito, IBAFF, Alcances, Márgenes, FICC, FID Marseille, Novos Cinemas, FrontDoc and Caminhos do Cinema Português. He formed part of FID Campus, and is currently working on his first feature film, Nuestra piel levantada, selected for Extremlab, Cinema Pendent, DCP Cantabria, Málaga Talent, Márgenes Work and Arché. Deeply committed to non-standard cinema in the Region of Murcia, he has been part of the IBAFF curatorial team since 2023.