ZINEBI – Festival Internacional de Cine Documental y Cortometraje de Bilbao, organizado por el Ayuntamiento de Bilbao, iniciará su 66ª edición el viernes 8 de noviembre con la gala de inauguración, que se celebrará en el Teatro Arriaga a partir de las 19:30 horas con una gala dirigida por La Dramática Errante (Ane Pikaza y María Goiricelaya).
Turn your love into a weapon. This film reads Soviet revolutionary and sexual activist Alexandra Kollontai’s writings on female sexuality and emancipation, on the abolition of the family and the need to “change hearts and minds”. This reading traces a complex web of connections between 20th century European Marxist feminism and 21st century Latin American transfeminisms, and between the melancholic gaze of disenchantment and the furious, tender, and imperious demand that the Revolution, finally, fulfil its promise.
From 2011 to 2013, tubas were stolen from Los Angeles high schools. This is not a story about thieves or missing tubas.Instead, it asks what it means to listen.
I told him I was a filmmaker... and nothing has changed. Amid these landscapes traipses the soul, at times certain, at others uncertain of its own existence, while the body is and is and is and has no place of its own.
During a hunting day in rural Spain, a father struggles to accept that his adult son is moving abroad, dealing with the feelings of being left alone.
In the violent streets of Mexico City, Joel leads a double life fixing car engines by day and getting his hands dirty by night. Now, he must repair the toughest machine of all: his own shattered existence.
A woman's ability to give birth to marine creatures is exploited for commercial purposes.
A girl wakes up alone in the dark and surreal night, triggering fragmented memories of neglect by her caregivers.
An essayistic journey through the ethnography and landscapes of the Region of Murcia. These places are in the process of disappearing due to the increasing and abundant agricultural exploitation. Water has marked the territory and the culture of the area, and with its disappearance, the memories of four characters fade away.
A girl wanders through an abandoned train station. She walks the corridors of her school, disconnected from the place, while trying to write an impossible speech. A memory flies over the station frozen in time.
In 1980, Montxo Armendáriz filmed a choral portrait of the last charcoal burners who made traditional charcoal in the mountains of Navarre. With a low budget, a team of four people and an accurate editing, both on the image and on the sound, Armendáriz found the subject of the film that would make him famous a few years later: Tasio.
A spatial exploration of Miami, and the endless pursuit of the American Dream in an era of immigrant mass mobilization, the absurd dominance of wealth and border securocracy. Much like the people it is about, the film is suspended in that stasis between arriving and finding belonging, moving associatively through observational vignettes in contemporary Miami, juxtaposed with a disruptive collection of video and sound archives that range as far back as the 1930’s, revealing an obsession with American individualism.
A young woman is stuck in the hold queue of a telephone hotline. A surreal episodic short film about the absurdities of urban life and the frustration of a paralysing standstill.
Qi, a six-year-old girl, lives with her mother's original family all year round since her father works in the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone in China and rarely visits home. On a hot day at noon, at the end of the 20th century, she watched as the grown-ups' figures flickered and vanished before her eyes like shadows.
Devastated by heartbreak, Prem, the charismatic radio jockey of a renowned love advice program seeks solace in the rugged mountains, grappling with his own emotional turmoil. Amidst his personal quest for answers, the desperate calls from the audience seeking love advice echo through the serene wilderness.
A team of scientists explore the vanished island of Testerep off the Belgian coast. Traditional excavations are combined with advanced technologies, like computer simulations and sound wave analyses to trace the coastal evolution over 5,000 years. As researchers decode the mysteries, they contemplate the symbiotic relationship between humans, technology, and our temporal landscape, bridging the gaps between the past, present, and the ever-evolving role of technology in shaping our understanding of the world.
He does not remember much from that time. Things have faded, like the color of a painting after too much light. The only thing that bothers him is this music. It keeps popping up… He thinks he forget what it meant. All he knows, for sure, is that he cannot get it out of his head.
Winner of the Golden Lion, the film is an epic story about artist and activist Nan Goldin, told through her groundbreaking photography and rare footage of her fight to hold the Sackler family accountable for the overdose crisis. The film interweaves Goldin’s past and present, the deeply personal and urgently political, from her organization P.A.I.N.’s direct actions at renowned art institutions to Goldin’s photography of her friends and peers through her epic The Ballad of Sexual Dependency and her 1989, NEA-censored AIDS exhibition, Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing.
The employee comes to the factory every day. He is the only person who is qualified to do his particular job. It is precise, mundane, and repetitive work. Every morning he goes through the same drill, starting up each machine. Today, though, he has made a decision...
Chennu committed his first crime when he was 15 years old: being a street kid. And he entered hell: Pademba Road. The adult prison in Freetown. In hell, Mr. Sillah is in charge, and there is no hope. Chennu got out after four years. Now he wants to go back.
A blind man accidentally loses his guide-dog. Alone in the dark in a big city, he discovers that his strength lies in recognising his own vulnerability.
Begoña is an old woman and a virgin. Convinced that death is close at hand, she decides to hire a male prostitute, Daniel, to satisfy her curiosity about sex, which everyone says is beautiful and marvellous. However, this will not be an easy task for Daniel.
After a period of time without seeing his mother, Angel Mari decides to bite the bullet and go and visit her at the nursing home to which she has been admitted. He does not like seeing how his mother has disappeared under the skin of a senile old woman who does not recognise her own children.
Moritats are old folk songs about crimes and are typical of Central Europe. Zela Trovke is a moritat from Slovakia which the Holland Baroque Society has recovered to include in its Barbaric Beauty programme. Maite Larburu, the orchestra’s violinist, unveils the song’s hidden secrets.
Portrait of Mexico City. Centre of chaos. Anonymous characters crosses each other self-absorbed in their daily life and existence. She, in movement; he, in paralysis. Both living in the past evading the present. They inhabit the realm of cycles trying to free themselves from attachment and suffering. Movement and paralysis intertwine in a city trapped in the cycles of earthly and recurrent existence.
Seeking to explore his newfound power to perceive beyond the strictures of time, Cambodian migrant Jit travels to Phimai, Thailand, believed to be the site of the epic conflict between prince Prajit, his beloved Orapim and Phommathat the King. In this temple town, Jit meets Pim and Tat, a young couple drifting apart, and together, the trio find themselves reprising the love triangle of legend.
Kinshasa and its inhabitants are in darkness. They wait and struggle to get access to light. Between hope, disappointment and religious faith, Tongo Saa is a subtle and fragmented portrait of a population that, despite the challenges, is sublimated by the beauty of Kinshasa's nights.
Christine Angot, a novelist, returns to Strasbourg with a camera as part of her literary tour. There she met her father when she was thirteen and spent a holiday with him. It was then when he started to rape her. He passed away a long time ago, but her family still lives at the same place. She decides to knock on their door.
Euxebi’s father was killed during the war. In her youth, Euxebi suffered Francoist repression and, to this day, despite the fact that the dictatorship ended long ago, she has not had the chance to recover the memory of her father. After many years, when they finally open the grave where her father is, Euxebi puts a picture next to his bones.
Mature women speak about their marriage, their “first time”, their intimate relationship with sexuality. In the repetition of these ancestral rituals, the director questions her own absence of marriage, of children, and thereby, a chain of mother-daughter relationships that is extinguishing.
It is a coming-of-age tale where youth grapple with their first profound loss. Filmmaker Yi-Shan’s best friends Chun and Yueh were trapped in a Nepal cave for 47 days. Chun died three days before Yueh's rescue, prompting Yi-Shan to take up the camera and retrace her friends’ footsteps in Nepal. When Yi-Shan reaches the cave, what awaits her there?
Farah, an Iranian woman is forced to migrate to her private planet to be free. She buys other people's memories in form of Super 8 and 8mm films and records and archives her own, to create an alternative history of Iran.
After an unprecedented social uprising, Chile chooses to write a New Constitution. A colorful assembly will be in charge of writing down the dreams of dignity and social justice of an entire people. What could go wrong?
Two siblings distanced by age find each other through stolen objects and a literary project.
A group of adolescent victims of sex trafficking live temporarily in a shelter in Ecuador hidden in a beautiful forest. Accustomed to a night schedule, the girls spend the day sleeping. Fourteen-year-old Abigail visits a room full of babies, the result of the abuse they have suffered; hers is 5 months old and she carries it as if it were a doll. Small details reveal what they have gone through, invisible but present.
Álex is blocked. He tries to understand his place in the world, his masculinity, his role in caring, the origin of the noises in his grandfather's dreams. Lucia has been blind since birth. She guides Alex.He works as a film audio describer for visually impaired people. His grandfather is over a hundred years old and for months a noise has been disturbing his dreams. He can no longer tell the difference between dream and reality. Lucía helps Alex by showing him how she perceives, how she dreams, how she feels. Alex needs to feel.
With the help of workers and former neighbors, we dig up the layers of memory that have accumulated in the Church of San Miguel in Jaén. We explored how this ancient church has served as a parish, residential block, and workplace, looking into the past to understand the present.
When her estranged father dies, Nadia is forced to revisit the past and the reasons that made him abandon her as a child in pursuit of his own dreams. She leaves Cairo, a city under aggressive construction, to empty her father’s home in Helwan, an industrial wasteland. This is an exploration of grief and loss of places as we know them through the story of a daughter's inability to mourn her father's death, with nothing connecting her to the memory of him but a frail mango tree.
In Russia’s most secretive region, there are many mysteries. Abandoned buildings and an empty landscape hold memories of a strange object built under Stalin’s order. Since then, odd things started happening. Locals found a weird creature called “The Alien from the Urals,” now having its own monument. But, what’s the secret of this creature? Why are people scared to talk about it? And why are villages disappearing?
In this animated miniature on a single sheet, the drawing comes to life before our eyes telling the escape of a wild boar, but of the ways in which people occupy the places that used to belong to nature. Drawn from memories of a walk in the Belgian Ardennes. This film was drawn and animated alone on a single sheet of paper as a performance.
In the early 1960s, a missionary priest disappears in a West African port city as the country prepares for independence. A young officer arrives from France, charged with finding the missing man.His investigation comes up against the sarcasm of the departing colonists, the mistrust of the African nuns and the indifference of the fishermen in the pirogues. Faced with the silence of one and all, the young officer finally leaves the blinding light of the port for the muggy darkness of the forest, where day and night merge.
Ruth was a teenager when her mother passed down her medallion, etched with a golden portrait of Nefertiti. Not only was this medallion an artefact, it was an emblem of her mother’s inconceivable plight; captured in middle school by the Derg communist military regime and raised in a prison camp for years. This story follows her early memories of the Derg Genocide and how she first became in possession of the medallion upon her escape.
A family of four and their dog arrive at a seaside hotel in Kui Buri, Thailand. What appears to be an ordinary vacation turns into a series of interactions that betray an unspoken tension in their relationships. The next day, complexities unfold in a cave housing buddha statues.
Helicopter footage examines the desert, surveying ancient natural formations and human interventions. Dynamite changes the face of the land. Farmers work their fields. Children play hide-and-seek. Employing archival footage, Undr constructs an eerie narrative of calculated incursion. We cannot help but recall that Palestine remains a land subjected to aerial surveillance that seeks to appropriate the landscape. (Nicholas Davies, IFFR)
This animated-documentary film recounts the memories of a childhood in Split in the 1980s. These are stories retold after Sunday lunch when everyone is in a good mood, stories filled with emotions we can easily relate to. But above all, the film is a moving tribute to the love of a grandpa and grandma who did their best to keep their granddaughter smiling.
Between lines and shapes, hands touch; they explore and experience each other, like wishing to break the boundaries of their own skin.
Having lost the council aid that allowed them to keep their rehearsal venue, the women’s choir that Rita belongs to is about to fold up. Now the group must decide whether or not to accept sponsorship by one of the companies causing the most pollution in the valley.
The Housewives’ Quarter. The Insomniacs’ District. The Bandstand of the Unknown Mother. The Underpass of the Single Women. Our walls pay tribute to those we love.
June finds her first summer job: taking care of Constance, a sensitive little girl who suffers from a lack of affection. The child soon learns to trust her and June gets her hopes up thinking that maybe she can be her nanny for the whole year. However, just as her bond with the child grows stronger, she discovers how harsh class differences can be and what rejection can feel like.
In 1952, Anita Conti, France's first female oceanographer, embarked on a trawler to share the hard life of Atlantic cod fishermen, alone with her camera and sixty men for six months. Using her 16mm film rushes and photographs, the film reveals her scientific and yet tender gaze for the workers of the sea. This pioneering woman foresaw the need to protect the oceans.This film explores the modernity of her struggle, as well as the hazy, rhythmic beauty of her writing and photography.
A film team visits the roads and villages of northern Spain during the summer. They are following in the steps of the clandestine group Cantacronache which, in the summer of 1961, during Franco's dictatorship, went around collecting popular resistance songs. Through the prism of oral recollections and sound files recorded in 1961, the two journeys enter into a dialogue mapping the emotional and political geography of a territory in which the wounds of the past are still unhealed.
The session will be accompanied by Amorante's live performance of one of the songs in the film, and other songs from the Elgoibar musician's repertoire, where tradition and modernity go magically hand in hand.
In 2006, as Israeli shells relentlessly rain down on Beirut, Sariah (13), her older sister Nayla and their mother take refuge in the mountains, making sure not to mention the war raging in Lebanon. Sharp tensions between the three women soon resurface, and the rivalry between the two sisters escalates when Nayla's boyfriend pays her a visit
Deep in Hellfest gigantic metal festival, music gradually takes possession of metalheads.
Under a scorching sun, Charlie is bored out of her mind and dreams of going to the seaside. But she's forced to guard a seedy motel with her cousin Jess, who's slumped in her deckchair. The two teenagers don't get along and bicker at every opportunity. On the radio, the monotone voice of a collapsology researcher predicts the imminent end of the world.
Twelve-year-old Jakes runs through the woods, he is lost. Along his way he will come across Amaia, a 27-year-old who offers him shelter at her place. This unexpected union will lead Jakes to face his fears.
Algorithmic typhoons turn images into zombie-like entities, human-flesh eating creatures enslaved by society. However, these images do not seek to rebel; they simply long to dream of eternal life in a disposable world. This is an essay on resurrection and impending doom.
A small community has entered a state of collapse due to an environmental crisis and is adapting as best as it can to the new reality. The privileged residents live a hedonistic life based on carpe diem, while the others struggle to survive without any other alternative. What is yet to come? If there is nothing left, can anything save us?
An attempt to map a fraught relationship through the use of intricately coded pictographs and schematic abstractions applied onto glazed ceramic tiles and quilted cyanotype fabric. The aesthetics of architectural language are used to reconstruct memories of my family's domestic spaces in the hope to uncover logic to a broken home.
If the right place and time is chosen, a bag of stew can become a terrorist threat.
Guided by a voice that narrates the journey of a woman through the Kurdish mountains, the images delve from the poetic into the political issues inherent to the Kurdish territory as a result of a warlike past and a turbulent present. The materiality of the Super 8 camera and the beauty of distant landscapes immerse us in an almost dreamlike odyssey in which the dark burden that lies behind the bucolic landscapes is slowly revealed.
As every summer, tomato day arrives. Nella and her family reunite to celebrate the family tradition at their summer holiday home in Italy.
A little girl finds toys under a Christmas tree. Suddenly, a toy soldier puts hand under the skirt of a doll. A series of events afterwards show the little girl the true vision of the adult world.
Buenos Aires, 2019. A museum security guard has a premonition of a theft. When consulting with her pendulum, she foresees a sudden climb in the dollar’s value. An unexpected dismissal and the ensuing severance package leads her to connect with a currency exchange house employee.
Esti returns to Oiartzun after spending six years living in Sweden. Even though she had promised herself not to come back, financial instability and job insecurity force her to return. She realises that the town remains unchanged, and Esti is unwilling to adapt.
Alice is 27 years old today. Even though she is suffocating a bit, she still lives with her parents and tends to live in her dreams to escape her dreary everyday life. After a psychedelic party on a factory roof, she has a serious drunken bike accident.
This film sheds a limelight on the very characters that normally remain in the background of video games: NPCs. They are non-player characters that populate the digital world as extras to create the appearance of normality. A laundress, a stable boy, a street sweeper and a carpenter are observed with ethnographic precision. They are Sisyphus machines, whose labour routines, activity patterns as well as bugs and malfunctions paint a vivid analogy for work under capitalism.
An unflinching chronicle of Americans at war with each other, offering an unprecedented look at right—wing activists as they search for purpose and power—with dire consequences.
Film between reality and excess. A hybrid work mixing autobiography and fiction, in the style of literary autofiction, about one of the most singular characters of the Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ): Jacques Lanctôt. This film chronicles the life of a man who returns to a place that welcomed and sheltered him during his exile in the 1970s: the eighth-floor room of the Hotel Nacional in Cuba.
It is a coming-of-age tale where youth grapple with their first profound loss. Filmmaker Yi-Shan’s best friends Chun and Yueh were trapped in a Nepal cave for 47 days. Chun died three days before Yueh's rescue, prompting Yi-Shan to take up the camera and retrace her friends’ footsteps in Nepal. When Yi-Shan reaches the cave, what awaits her there?
On board a ferry, passengers cross a river from one riverbank to the other. Some of the travelers wrap themselves in silence and observe the unfamiliar fellow travelers or contemplate the scenery. Some others chat, perhaps to liven up the voyage and speed up time. The journey on the waters seems to expand, the destination shore is postponed, the magnitude of space is blurred. Motion itself is perhaps the only certainty.
In the north of Colombia, a group of queer activists use extravagant performative actions to denounce the disastrous exploitation by the country's largest coal mine.
Sun starved teenagers take on a dreamy trip to the Balearic islands in the pursuit of light and warmth. They must absorb it and be a vessel in order to transport it back to their heavy clouded kingdom.
A dead body has appeared in the Arga river. No one has missed him or reported his disappearance. Although it seems like it will be another normal working day for the detective Ana Miravalles, she will experience for the first time the disadvantages of working in her own town. In fact, she suspects that his daughter Eukene might know something. From that moment on, Ana will have to make a decision.
The discovery of some unpublished recordings leads Juan Carlos Pérez, leader of the iconic band Itoiz, to ponder the dissolution of the band at the height of their success, after having adopted a more accessible pop style which he now disowns. Juan Carlos begins a cathartic journey to the essence of the band, reliving their beginnings in the 70s as a progressive rock group in Mutriku, in an attempt to reconcile with the past.
He develops and imagines a world in a darkroom. His daughter weaves a dialogue about latent, invented images, about the ways of resisting and navigating the darkness. This film explores how the intimate and political weight of images can open spaces to reflect upon them as acts of resistance, either because they are made despite the horror of their context or because they offer an imaginary vanishing point that might just set us free.
A dead body has appeared in the Arga river. No one has missed him or reported his disappearance. Although it seems like it will be another normal working day for the detective Ana Miravalles, she will experience for the first time the disadvantages of working in her own town. In fact, she suspects that his daughter Eukene might know something. From that moment on, Ana will have to make a decision.
Adolescence is a difficult time. Just days before the regional championship, Judoca suffers a racist attack and has a crisis. In order to compete, she must work on self-control and self-esteem.
Mikel writes a last poem to his mother. Elizabeth prepares her suitcase for one last trip with José. Ainhoa keeps a frame without photos in a box. Three stories united by grief that try to complete each other.
Science is capable of predicting the path of a wave from its origin to its end. But the complex relationships that humans have established with nature escape its reflection. At the moment the surfer and the wave meet, the explainable becomes inexplicable, and science can no longer decipher that passion.
Samuel's soul finds itself in a digital world he does not know. A strange voice from the sky seems to show him the way home.
Every morning the lands of Xiberoa bloom singing. Strength of tradition and territory of creativity. Where time rests and freedom breathes. As beautiful as it is violent, as narrow as it is varied. The protagonists of the show Xiberoa Kantuz Loraturik know very well what it means to use their heritage as a tool and build intergenerational bridges. This is a look at a creative process and the emotions of a country.
In the theatre of the Cold War, astronauts lost in the Darien Gap are besieged by their deepest fears when surprised by an indigenous person. Did they think they were going to be decapitated, or eaten by a wild cannibal? A deconstruction of film and propaganda archives from tropical survival training challenges the colonial narrative inscribed in the conquest of space.
Portrait of Mexico City. Centre of chaos. Anonymous characters crosses each other self-absorbed in their daily life and existence. She, in movement; he, in paralysis. Both living in the past evading the present. They inhabit the realm of cycles trying to free themselves from attachment and suffering. Movement and paralysis intertwine in a city trapped in the cycles of earthly and recurrent existence.
He develops and imagines a world in a darkroom. His daughter weaves a dialogue about latent, invented images, about the ways of resisting and navigating the darkness. This short film explores how the intimate and political weight of images can open spaces to reflect upon them as acts of resistance, either because they are made despite the horror of their context or because they offer an imaginary vanishing point that might just set us free.
The shop manager of a floating bordershop-container in the Baltic Sea, casts off the chains to shore to save the universe of love she and her employees have created inside.
Bureaucratic systems and cultural traditions have always tried to tell me “who I am”, while today's AI industry, capable of creating “magic”, is destroying it through homogenization.
The only memory left to Morî from his father is the audio recording of the story he told him. Morî listens to this tale from time to time. One day, a new teacher comes to school. When Mori sees the teacher, he thinks he is his father. Morî's insistence on this issue turns into an emotional bond between him and his teacher.
People working backstage, during a theatre play.—Alles gut? —Alles gut? They act according to time. —Alright. They wait for the right time to act. Moin! The accident happens.
A social satire told in five acts delves into our society, its behaviors and flaws. The narrative conveyed through light and attractive visuals serves as a cautionary tale about the potential consequences if we fail to eliminate foolish behaviors, lack of empathy and a lack of responsibility.
In gaming's online realm, sleep becomes an art. Streamers blend dreams, gamers doze mid-game, revealing life's quirky essence. ASMR experts craft a soundscape and a game designer imparts characters a tool: time-sensibility. Sleep, digital engagement and games turn sleep into poetic online tales.
In 1967, in the midst of Franco's dictatorship, a group of seminarians thirsty for freedom founded the group Enarak. They played pop, rock and psychedelia, styles that were foreign to the society of the time, and all of it entirely in Basque. After hundreds of concerts, they mysteriously disappeared in 1971. Fifty years later, the singer's son, Beñat, sets out to find traces of the group, immersing himself in a film labyrinth that mixes ornithology, collage and eccentric research.
In 1979, the Virgin of Zikuñaga disappeared, leaving its inhabitants without her iconic image. A gap in the niche; a collective void. This is a film about gaps. My father, the filmmaker Juanmi Gutiérrez, passed away some years ago. Now, from a distance, I return to his films in an exercise of personal memory through the image, or rather, through its absence. Can the lack of an image be as strong as its presence? And in that case, what do we do with this emptiness?
Sound and image stare each other in the face as Oksana Karpovych contrasts quiet compositions of everyday life of Ukrainians since the full-scale invasion with intercepted phone conversations between Russian soldiers and their families.
Emakume helduek beren ezkonbizitzaz hitz egiten dute, "lehen aldiaz", sexualitatearekin duten harreman intimoaz. Antzinako erritu horiek errepikatzean, zuzendariak zalantzan jartzen du ezkontzarik eta seme-alabarik ez izatea, eta, horrekin batera iraungitzen den ama-alaben arteko harreman-kate bat.
Documentary film about bullfighting based on the portrait of the bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey and his cuadrilla.
In 1952, Anita Conti, France's first female oceanographer, embarked on a trawler to share the hard life of Atlantic cod fishermen, alone with her camera and sixty men for six months. Using her 16mm film rushes and photographs, the film reveals her scientific and yet tender gaze for the workers of the sea. This pioneering woman foresaw the need to protect the oceans.This film explores the modernity of her struggle, as well as the hazy, rhythmic beauty of her writing and photography.
Turn your love into a weapon. This film reads Soviet revolutionary and sexual activist Alexandra Kollontai’s writings on female sexuality and emancipation, on the abolition of the family and the need to “change hearts and minds”. This reading traces a complex web of connections between 20th century European Marxist feminism and 21st century Latin American transfeminisms, and between the melancholic gaze of disenchantment and the furious, tender, and imperious demand that the Revolution, finally, fulfil its promise.
After his death, Fernando Ruiz Vergara left dozens of film sketches that he was never able to make. The Andalusian filmmaker had only directed one documentary, Rocío, heartbreaking and fascinating, cursed after its judicial censorship in the early years of democracy in Spain. Since then, his projects have remained latent in imagination and desire. In this film, we fabulate with those dreamed projects to bring them to the cinema from the present, as a gesture of resistance.
Sound and image stare each other in the face as Oksana Karpovych contrasts quiet compositions of everyday life of Ukrainians since the full-scale invasion with intercepted phone conversations between Russian soldiers and their families.
In 1980, the Spanish Basque Battalion group kidnapped and made Jose Miguel Etxeberria disappear. His brother Eneko was 15 then and has been searching for his body for 44 years. A police mercenary has given information that locates the body in an oak grove near the French town of Mont-de-Marsan. Eneko? Could it be true? This documentary raises questions as: How long would you look for the body of a family member? When is the hope lost?
Reality and imagination blend in a journey back to the director's childhood when she returns to the last place where she was with her father: the house in Campolivar.
The fungus Microsphaerella dearnessi, which affects the insigne pine variety, has stained the forests of the Basque Country brown, even infecting the painted forest of Oma, the artwork of the Basque artist Agustin Ibarrola. This work belongs to the Land Art movement, which is mainly characterised by its ephemeral nature. Within this movement, artists leave their works on display at the mercy of weather conditions and other elements beyond human control.
Elderly Amaia has Alzheimer's and can no longer recognize Nerea, her daughter. From her point of view, reality is distorted and being in a closed space makes the relationship between them unbearable.
A female worker at a closing stone factory, who had an undisclosed relationship with the supervisor and a passion for poetry, discovered a poster for a poetry sharing event in her usual old bookstore. From then on, waves of poetic inspiration surged through her heart at random moments, leading her to make an extraordinary choice to defend her poetry and spiritual freedom.
This short film talks about bodies that move, walk, swim, advance. Bodies that support other bodies, communicate, organise themselves. Complex movements that inscribe in the bodies the obstacles, the borders, the farewells, the walls, the family, the hopes, the arrival.
The change of place, the journey; as power, as possibility, as future.
In a dystopian world, a girl breaks her ceramic pot which holds a secret within. Its breaking opens portals to a parallel universe and the girl enters a time of transformation in which the creation of a new world is finally possible.
Echoed in a memory-laden house are daily conversations between a mother and her two sons, all seemingly asleep. This autobiographical short, in a hybrid form, chronicles a personal memory from director Le Ngoc Duy's adolescence using set design and reenactment to reconstruct his childhood home and featuring his mother’s voice as part of the cast.
Anxious teenager Ūla is taken on an unexpected adventure during her swimming practise, through which she grows-up and learns to see her body anew.
An essayistic documentary about human responsibility over the gifts of nature. Filmed at the old nuclear power plant Lubmin and the dwindling fisher villages nearby.
A wise birdwoman sends three birds to guide a girl into the dark unknown landscapes of her inner world.
Two actors meet at an audition for a film. When both are cast, a relationships starts to bloom through their characters. But our best intentions in fiction, do not always work out in reality. But, does it matter? Or is it more important to try?
The forest is full of spiritual and subconscious experiences, and art is the best vehicle to represent them so they can be understood and embraced. People often believe that remembering is simply looking back, whereas Ibarrola believed just the opposite, that it is marching forward.
Filmmaker Laura Poitras and journalist Glenn Greenwald’s encounter with Edward Snowden in Hong Kong as he hands over classified documents providing evidence of mass indiscriminate and illegal invasions of privacy by the National Security Agency (NSA).This documentary places you in the room with Poitras, Greenwald, and Snowden as they attempt to manage the media storm raging outside, forced to make quick decisions that will impact their lives and all of those around them.
Bernardo and Esperanza met in Bilbao in 1978, when both were students at university in the midst of the turbulent political circumstances of the time. They had an on-off relationship—brimming with passionate encounters and inexplicable misunderstandings—until in 2001, during a trip to Havana to visit the aunt and cousin she had never met, the two forever went their different ways.
Kinshasa and its inhabitants are in darkness. They wait and struggle to get access to light. Between hope, disappointment and religious faith, Tongo Saa is a subtle and fragmented portrait of a population that, despite the challenges, is sublimated by the beauty of Kinshasa's nights.
Seeking to explore his newfound power to perceive beyond the strictures of time, Cambodian migrant Jit travels to Phimai, Thailand, believed to be the site of the epic conflict between prince Prajit, his beloved Orapim and Phommathat the King. In this temple town, Jit meets Pim and Tat, a young couple drifting apart, and together, the trio find themselves reprising the love triangle of legend.
Lorea's reference points are her mother and her grandmother. Through these two generations she observes the bond that women have experienced around motherhood. Now it is up to her to decide whether or not to become a mother herself and to look for answers to pending questions.
Prequel to the popular story Mateo Txistu: Basque Country, late 19th century. In a small village, parish priest Mateo disappears without trace. As locals tattle, the Archbishopric sends two priests to get to the bottom of the occurrence.
Non-fiction short film about the fragility of memory and the places that human beings create to safeguard it. People disappear, like the buildings they lived in, the places where they worked and were happy. Those faces and those lives were once part of the written memory, a memory that will disappear because nothing is forever. What the water brings, the water takes away.
Spark, an eight-year-old kid, walks peacefully through a devastated post-apocalyptic street when a tiny light reveals an old projector. Thanks to his discovery, Spark will see a moving image for the first time.
By focusing on the peripheral or hidden details of some paintings in the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, a female narrator relates several stories linked to the social, economic and psychological conditions of the artists, both past and present.
Kana, a tender creature who travels through the desires of the young, helps a friend with a problem by delving into her subconscious, where nothing is as it seems.
After 9 years in deep space, the Kepler space telescope is running out of fuel and about to turn off. Haley, a 12-year-old kid saddened by the news, goes to the field to bid farewell to Kepler.
The Saitua Iribar family gathers for dinner on Christmas Eve. Elizabete, mother and grandmother of those present does not remember where she is and all she wants to do is go to sleep.
Rita and Berta are thieves. In an old red car, they travel the backroads in search of the adrenaline they can't find in their daily lives. But every high comes with a low. Berta needs a change, and she has made a big decision—one that might break the bond between her and Rita.
Seven-year-old Billie is driving a wounded man home in the middle of the night. By the morning he's unable to move, and she's sure something is stuck inside him that needs to come out.
It´s getting cold. The houses look empty. The wind shakes the trees. The meeting is in the forest. It´s always there.
Can Marguerite Duras cure us of madness? Can that woman who is soul-muted be crazy? This film, through analog casting, explores the representations of madness in silent films of the 20s and 30s.
Two brothers meet again and are forced to fight a duel in a definitive game of chess.
Mikel works in his father’s company. When the firm decides to sell up and lay off the workforce, Mikel tries to take a stand in favour of his co-workers. His intentions are good, but the workers decide to conceal their sabotage plan from him.
Mario, a scientist conducting experiments at an advanced food research center alongside his colleague Karla, turns to his boss Juana when the new environmental policies for employees become unbearable.
This short film tries to highlight those simple pleasures that are peculiar to each person, but which to a large extent, coincide. Situations and acts that go unnoticed, those that one does not put on the list when telling another person what they have done to their advantage that day. Things that are exhausted in themselves and that do not lead to great arguments when one reflects on them, on why they are pleasurable, but which nevertheless seem to hide some wisdom, something profound that is only revealed in their mere execution.
In the theatre of the Cold War, astronauts lost in the Darien Gap are besieged by their deepest fears when surprised by an indigenous person. Did they think they were going to be decapitated, or eaten by a wild cannibal? A deconstruction of film and propaganda archives from tropical survival training challenges the colonial narrative inscribed in the conquest of space.
Farah, an Iranian woman is forced to migrate to her private planet to be free. She buys other people's memories in form of Super 8 and 8mm films and records and archives her own, to create an alternative history of Iran.
The discovery of some unpublished recordings leads Juan Carlos Pérez, leader of the iconic band Itoiz, to ponder the dissolution of the band at the height of their success, after having adopted a more accessible pop style which he now disowns. Juan Carlos begins a cathartic journey to the essence of the band, reliving their beginnings in the 70s as a progressive rock group in Mutriku, in an attempt to reconcile with the past.
After his death, Fernando Ruiz Vergara left dozens of film sketches that he was never able to make. The Andalusian filmmaker had only directed one documentary, Rocío, heartbreaking and fascinating, cursed after its judicial censorship in the early years of democracy in Spain. Since then, his projects have remained latent in imagination and desire. In this film, we fabulate with those dreamed projects to bring them to the cinema from the present, as a gesture of resistance.
Marta is a twelve-year-old girl who suffers bullying at school. It seems that she is going to celebrate her birthday until someone very special pops up to prevent her from falling apart: her Fairy Godmother. The fairy godmother's strategy is to invite Marta to meet her future selves so that she sees that her current worries will be solved. But each of the Martas bring their own worries from the future. The fairy godmother will have to use her wits to cheer up the girl's birthday so that, all together, they discover the importance of always having hope.
Matixa, 22, lives with her parents. Her bedroom and her stability are in disarray: the situation is explosive. Helped by her friend Leire, she looks for support outside the family. Convinced that cutting ties with her mother will make her freer, she decides to leave home.
If the right place and time is chosen, a bag of stew can become a terrorist threat.
As every summer, tomato day arrives. Nella and her family reunite to celebrate the family tradition at their summer holiday home in Italy.
Ane and Andrea have sex and an enormous thirst and, while outside life continues, they want to go on, they don't want to stop until they are together once and for all. They kiss and screw to the limits of their energy, until outside care has to come to the rescue.
An unflinching chronicle of Americans at war with each other, offering an unprecedented look at right—wing activists as they search for purpose and power—with dire consequences.
Mikel, a married man, a pharmacist in a small town on the Basque coast, and a leftist militant, will see his life practically conditioned by his homosexuality. He will take time to accept this, and somehow, it will lead him inexorably to a tragic end.
Tasio works as a charcoal burner since he was 14 years old, in a small village in Navarre. Life changes, but mountains stand always there: abrupt and beautiful. Mountains are his playground during childhood, but they are also the place in which he finds food for his family. This is a period of rural exodus, but, Tasio prefers the solitude in his mountains to safeguard his freedom.
