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.
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.
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.
Documentary film about bullfighting based on the portrait of the bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey and his cuadrilla.
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.
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.
