El oficio de la luz

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.

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?

Málaga filmmakers Concha Barquero and Alejandro Alvarado will be presenting their latest documentary Caja de resistencia (2024) at ZINEBI Networking, and will also be talking about the films left unfinished by Andalusian director Fernando Ruiz Vergara, whose seminal Rocío (1980) was censored, and banned in the State following a ruling by Spain's Supreme Court. They recreated this story in their film Descartes (2021), which took the Spanish Cinema Grand Prix at the International Festival of Documentary and Short Film of Bilbao, ZINEBI. At this event they discuss the attempted resistance of Ruiz Vergara in the self-imposed challenge of the filmmakers behind Pepe el andaluz (2012): to make a film with what was left of a filmography nipped in the bud by censorship.

Presentation of the project to be located at Punta Zorrotza, with a space of 100,000 square metres for film shoots with digital sets, postproduction areas, outdoor scenes, dressing rooms, storage facilities and offices.

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.

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.