2025 Festival Internacional de Cine Cámara Lúcida

<p>This beautiful and heart-wrenching story about family, transmission and self-acceptance shows how Treacher Collins Syndrome, a genetic disorder, has prevented Ricardo from pronouncing his own name. His life is one in which he grew up struggling to find his voice &ndash; both literally and figuratively. Through Ricardo&rsquo;s personal journey, from learning how to live with his condition to undergoing multiple surgeries, which in turn led to questions about his own identity, The Broken R is a reminder of how filmmaking can not only be a perfect tool for documenting life, but can be an essential aid in exploring and accepting who we are.</p>

<p>A journey through the poetic universe of Chilean writer Alicia Morel (1921-2017). After her death and the demolition of her house, a parallel and unknown writing that accompanied the author throughout her life emerges. Interwoven with her well-known work in children's literature, this archive reveals its contradictions through a critical look at women's writing and the 20th-century literary canon. An allegory runs throughout the film: Alicia's desk, with its tense surfaces and dark depths.</p>

<p>A room, a Virgin Mary, toothpaste ads, bikinis, the Ecuador-Peru war, Venezuelan soap operas, late-night news, the devil and the sun &mdash; a child innocently discovers cinema. A feverish video mix reflects on Ecuadorian identity at the turn of the century. A mother and her son use the same video tapes to record themselves in parallel timelines, overlapping different impressions of the world. Images from the 1990s reveal to us a world still failing to solve the same old problems.</p>

<p>The mourning for a father and the absences, intertwined with what remains. Letters, written by birds that used to visit the filmmaker when she was a child, now reveal secrets to her son, whom she watches grow up.</p>

<p>The war was rarely discussed in the Witteveen family, not even their grandmother, who had lived through it, ever mentioned it. That changed when one of her grandchildren came across an antique Liberation War skirt that had belonged to his grandmother, carefully preserved for 73 years. His discovery, through his aunt, sparked a deep curiosity about the history behind the garment and sparked his interest in Dutch history, having grown up in Ecuador. Delving into archives and talking with his relatives, he began a search for answers. What began as a simple discovery soon transformed into a personal journey that traced his grandmother&#39;s experiences during the war, while also leading him to reflect on his own freedom, identity, and the importance of commemoration.</p>

<p>At 36, director Ana Cristina Ben&iacute;tez faces a haunting diagnosis of advanced breast cancer, one that upends her life and transforms her identity. Alongside her family and partner, she embarks on a raw and unfiltered healing journey that goes beyond repairing her body to delicately care for her soul. Told with poetic precision, this unsparing first-person narrative is intertwined with archival footage shot on a camera her father sent home after immigrating to the United States, asking the family to film themselves so he could glimpse their lives from afar. A celebration of vulnerability and resilience, MAMA explores what it means to reconnect&mdash;with oneself, one&#39;s ancestors, and one&#39;s past&mdash;in the midst of a life-altering transformation.</p>

<p>A family in Ecuador proudly tells of their German ancestor, the explorer Theodor Wolf. Streets, volcanoes and an island bear his name. However, 100 years after his death, a new version of his history is shaking the family&#39;s identity. Was Wolf really the hero he is remembered as? A great-great-grandson sets out in search of clues. Gradually, a new image of the family idol emerges, and in its shadow that of a great-great-grandmother about whom silence still prevails to this day. A film about the bright and dark sides of a family, a man and a colonial past that continues to have an impact.</p>

<p>This film essay unites the particular and the universal in a conversation with a landscape framed through a window from a single vantage point. It draws on the intimate, the historical, the political, and the aesthetic to reveal the complex processes that have shaped the landscape over time, while simultaneously deconstructing the gaze that contemplates it.</p>

<p>Under the imposing snow-capped mountains of Utah, a Mexican family lives with the uncertainty of a loved one&#39;s disappearance. Through carefully crafted shots, Say Goodbye reveals the loneliness and silence tainting the daily routine of Rosa, Sol, and Javier, as the void becomes a constant presence. An achingly powerful and relevant film.</p>

<p>From a dream, Christian invites Nancy, his grandmother, to discover herself in the moor, unaware of the warnings the wind may reveal to them.</p>

<p>The Chilean artist and filmmaker Mart&iacute;n Baus assembles a political object that can be found below and to the left, in the same place where Latin America is located (if we place Europe in the centre of the map). Guerrilla radio broadcasts, voices from Godard&rsquo;s first film or photographs of the Ecuadorian tropical forest compose his resistant found footage, a cocktail of old sounds and slogans that reverberates in contemporary times.</p>

<p><span style="color:#34495e">Cosmographies is a hybrid film that draws from modes of speculative fiction, observational and poetic documentary, activism, and Indigiqueer approaches. Māori astrobiologist Xu&ecirc; Noon (played by Australian/Māori artist Victoria Hunt) finds solace in Mars in 2051 as a leader from the Aotearoa Space Agency on an international scientific mission, following the discovery of dormant microorganisms by the NASA Mars Sample Return Mission in 2039. Xu&ecirc; wanders across this sentient planet and reflects on the newly found lifeforms as she grows plants in a glasshouse. Through the spirit of an ancient taniwha, she slipstreams in spacetime to the Atacama Desert and to Aotearoa. In Atacama the film engages with numerous ongoing life-and-death struggles for land and water justice led by Indigenous communities, activists, and scientists in this old, vital yet scarred desert. Through interviews and conversations, the film depicts centuries old and ongoing forms of social injustice and ecological degradation to weave a critical allegory against the renewed commercial impulse of a new space age rampaging in the 2020&rsquo;s. Xu&ecirc; is not returning to Earth. She reads fragments from a diary she has titled Cosmographies. As she contemplates her own death on Mars (becoming stardust) Xu&ecirc; slipstreams one final time to visit her younger self in Rotorua, Aotearoa, during a cold August night in 2003, when Earth and Mars were at their closest in 60,000 years. The film brings a message urging us to support land and water defenders in the Atacama desert and to rethink the cosmos not as a frontier to conquer, but as a delicate ecology to which our planet is intimately and ancestrally connected.&nbsp;</span></p> <p><span style="color:#34495e">Produced in consultation with Toconao Indigenous Lickanantay Community, Salar de Atacama, Chile.</span></p>

<p>Amid the landscapes of Ecuador and Peru, &#39;Huaquero&#39; reconstructs the fragmented memories of ex-looters of pre-Hispanic artifacts, blending documentary and fiction to reveal the tensions between ancestral knowledge, heritage crime, and colonial wounds that persist in these lands.</p>

<p>Emerging from the shadows of the rubber trade, the lost stories of Omarino and Aredomi are revealed. A journey through Amazonian archives connects research, speculation and the filmmaker&rsquo;s own family history, invocating a dialogue between living and dead.</p>

<p>In Venezuelan Guayana, large gold reserves lie beneath &ldquo;moriche&rdquo; palms, attracting multitudes of miners from across the region. A fictional narrator travels from far-flung mines in the jungle to the banks of the Orinoco River, trying to understand the uncertain fortune of the informal miner immersed in the anxious quest for treasure. His reflections combine illustrations and photochemical paintings to draw a map of the extraction and commercialization of gold, object and symbol through which he questions where value resides.</p>

<p>As the blue sky meets the surrounding seas, the native-turned-archeologist Hassan Al-Failakawy returns to his abandoned island of Failaka, off the coast of Kuwait, after decades of displacement.</p>

<p>Thousands of years ago, cinema germinated on the slope of a mountain in Peru. The signal of its movement is sustained in the volcanic stone that was once its skin, which changes and transforms without stopping.</p>

<p>In 1945, the Okinawa caves offered the population shelter from the bombs and the US troops&rsquo; arrival. Kaori Oda&rsquo;s film works in different visual layers, superimposing oral memory culture over historical wounds. The past casts shadows over the present.</p>

<p>The landscape painter Ant&ocirc;nio Parreiras enters the world of the dead. Wandering through darkness, forests and cities, he reunites with old friends, questions his art, and reflects on the history and future of a devastated country.</p>

<p>Set in the harsh yet beautiful landscape of Bosnia and Herzegovina,&nbsp;<em>At the Door of the House Who Will Come Knocking</em>&nbsp;reveals inner, intangible realms through the patient observation of the natural world. The film follows an elderly man living in isolation, weaving together a tapestry of dreamlike visuals as it records the routines of his daily life. Surrounding mountains, a burning stove and animal companions offer solace and warmth. Told through a blend of slow, observational footage and evocative reenactments, Novaković&#39;s film is a poetic meditation on solitude, loneliness and aging, and a rumination on both the impermanence and transience of life at large. Ultimately, as each exquisite detail of this world slowly unfurls, the film offers a unique portrait of the nature of human existence.</p>

<p>Written, directed and edited by Julian Castronovo, Debut, or, Objects of the Field of Debris as Currently Catalogued could easily become a cult item for those fascinated by detective stories, cinematic experimentation and research strategies. It begins when the narrator comes into possession of the belongings of a filmmaker and starts reconstructing his movements: the story of a search. Through clever work with different narrative levels, Castronovo&rsquo;s debut feature manages to be both an oblique self-portrait (with a good dose of playfulness and delicious wit), and a speculative fiction about Fawn Ma (a Chinese art forger and performance artist).</p>

<p>On the brink of death, a girl plunges into a delirium that glimpses the intertwined lives of a pianist and a dancer. / An exploration of the fragility of existence and the search for artistic expression in a universe of blurred boundaries.</p>

<p>In the 1990s, Chinese-Canadian artist Lloyd Wong began a video work about his living with HIV. It remained unfinished. Thirty years after his death, filmmaker Lesley Loksi Chan discovers and edits the material.</p>

<p>A Kafkaesque courtroom drama set in 19th-century Liverpool, recounting the trial of a corpse with neither name nor past. Dozens have gathered for the absurd ceremony &mdash; and perhaps to deliver justice.</p>

<p>L&#39; Acqua Xe Morta / The Water Is Dead presents a surreal triptych of narratives that chart the stasis of humanity on the brink of ecological and psychological collapse. A woman unable to sleep, a sinkhole in the road, and a flooded hospital intertwine as the body of the city collides with a wave. Between folklore, mortality, and sleep, L&#39; Acqua Xe Morta is the suspended moment before the disintegration of body, mind, and civilization.</p>

<p>In Zachary Epcar&rsquo;s Sinking Feeling, human bodies and voices are counterposed with the shimmering abstractions, ambient fizzle, and rigid linearity of corporate architecture. A disquieting glimpse into a post-post-modernity of dread and torpor, Sinking Feeling peels back the surfaces of these Ballardian non-places to release pent-up fluids, a stifled longing, a hidden radiance.</p>

<p>A salute, a slap, a clenched fist and a tender caress, le mirage des mains ultra r&eacute;alistes explores the masculine through the gestures and expressions of men&rsquo;s hands. Like the intricately layered images created with analogue film and video material, the overt and covert symbolism of masculine hands is parsed through and assembled back together to reveal the hidden intricacies of male bonds.</p>

<p>Letters from the Ceresco community trace the fragility of harmony, the dream of life in association, and the frictions that give way to fracture. Members of the phalanx drift apart, lingering in private corners, suspended in speculative time.</p>

<p>Night after night, two travellers cross paths at a university library. The library&#39;s symmetry, rhythms and recurrences form a fantastic geography for their stories and adventures. &mdash;Audrey Lam</p>

<p>In an Ecuadorian border town, Carmela, a fearless Afro-Ecuadorian, offers food and shelter to Venezuelan migrants arriving on foot. Her home is a hub for a constant flow of people she supports through cross-border trades with Colombia &ndash; frequently by unconventional means. When events unexpectedly impact her, Carmen&rsquo;s resilience is tested, but her bravery in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds, combined with an unwillingness to let those in need down, are a testament to her strength and goodness. Strikingly captured in black and white, Esteban Coloma and Luis Herrera&rsquo;s film captures a world defined by hardship and hope. It&rsquo;s a vivid, unforgettable portrait of solidarity in a world where the line between right and wrong is not always clear.</p>

<p><span dir="auto"><span dir="auto">El tiempo separa: una carta de un hijo a su madre, un lugar que solo existe en los recuerdos, una herida en la geograf&iacute;a de un peque&ntilde;o pa&iacute;s.</span></span></p> <p>Film Organizations: Sierra Tropical Cine, Inventiva Films</p> <p>Director &amp; Writer:&nbsp;Wil Paucar Calle<br /> Producer: Karla Guevara<br /> Cinematography: Nicol&aacute;s Monteros<br /> Sound Design / Mix: Alexander Pereira</p>

<p dir="ltr">In a dream journal I find notes to make a film, but there is nothing concrete about the dream that generated them. Just a mix of fascination and concern. I decide to retrace my steps and start at the place where I grew up: the Faculty of Architecture and Natural Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires. The history of sciences and cities is founded on a structure of power and bureaucratic violence, and at the same time, these institutions are inhabited by sensitive scientists who wonder about other ways of cohabiting the world. In the contradiction, I become a witness to the unexpected: birds dreaming synthetic melodies, a parrot singing songs about animals, a monkey howling in response to the roar of engines. How do these institutions see and hear? How is knowledge about nature represented over time?</p>

<p>A group of women comes into the life of a writer to take care of him and the poem.</p>

<p>On the banks of a river in the Peruvian jungle, Meshia, a Matsigenka teenager, finds young Iv&aacute;n unconscious, two years after he disappeared. She takes him to a hospital in the city of Quillabamba, where he receives emergency eye surgery and is reunited with his family.</p>

<p>&quot;In a Certain Light&quot; is a journey through the different processes of capturing light using pinhole cameras (Super 8 pinhole cameras), accompanied by a cassette recorder during my residency at Nanolab (Daylesford, Australia). It&#39;s a step between the inside and the outside, between moving forward and retreating. It&#39;s the space I inhabit, the one I walk through and capture again and again.</p>

<p>From that brief but intense film, a color Super 8 film travels to Havana, lying like a drawing, a bottle on the seashore. Loose syllables, small events always manifest themselves. A necklace of glass beads remains. &quot;Anunciaci&oacute;n. Dedonde son los cantantes&quot; is a formal, baroque, and structurally rural exercise. It exhausts itself in its material and its reiterations. Edited on camera, disassembled in a timeline.</p>

<p>Du Soleil, que &ccedil;a existe examines the temporalities through which the body forms, stores, and creates what we translate as reality. Focusing on longing, distance, and language, this text-based project explores the spaciousness of both language and landscape, installing spaciousness in dialogue and considering landscapes as bodies.</p>

<p>The days slip by as I watch the trails of clouds drift away against a backdrop of desolate buildings. On the horizon, I hear the sound of that mountain lake. As I walk along the path or the grey pavements, a sudden vision of that garden resonates deep inside.</p>

<p>This project is part of a series of variations exploring affect, landscape construction, and mourning rituals, centered around non-anthropocentric interactions. Interspecies Erotica was created with a found Super 8 file from The Jungle Book, modified with menstrual blood, scratch paper, and fragments of black and white film developed with plants.</p>

<p>I think I said (I...bug...scare...bird...eye...tear...thing...heartbeat...centaur...dream...my love...) yes.</p>

<p>The film revisits the stagecoach attack sequence, an archetypal Western scene. Using a Super 8 projector and re-filming on a dismantled LCD screen, the film appears vivid and floating in lantern light. The landscapes of the American mainland stretch out in time, and history repeats itself. Made from an 8mm reel of an excerpt from John Ford&#39;s 1939 film &quot;Stagecoach.&quot;</p>

<p>A small, hand-woven film. A drawing that weaves everything into a single mechanism of light, skin, clouds, hands, plant and mineral beings, forming the world&#39;s hat. A spatial portrait of the master Apuleyo Hern&aacute;ndez Ocampo, palm hat weaver in Santa Catalina Chinago, who closes and opens, attracts and disperses archaic beings. Two 16mm rolls, a camera-drawn film that lasts 60 meters. struc/ruralist cinema</p>

<p>Portales follows the course of the Guadalete river in C&aacute;diz, Spain: a catalogue of landscapes that hide other landscapes. A collection of inter-dimensional portals (and postcards). Live action and animation fuse, creating an impossible fauna and flora.</p>

<p>In between cities, I think of home. But I wonder if there&rsquo;s even such a thing. One day, two ladybugs stopped on my index finger. I let them stay for a while.</p>

<p>As a pre-Hispanic legend foretold, everything was flooded: the sun set into the sea, and humanity disappeared. Only a few survived. "Water Sun," filmed in Super-8, explores the mutation of the landscape and the materiality of the environment in a world transformed by water.</p>

<p>In the heart of the Andes of Nari&ntilde;o (Colombia), stands the remnants of the once-prosperous textile factory, El Contadero, established in 1943. Now reduced to ruins, it serves as a movingbackdrop to the memories of Estela, an 87-year-old woman who worked in the factory from the time she was 16 years old until its closure. Through her memories we delve into the early years of the factory and life with her co-workers as well as the art of traditional guanga weaving, a practice to which Estela stills dedicates her life. Interwoven with Estela&#39;s narrative are glimpses into village life, where nature slowly reclaims the decaying ruins of the factory, and archival photographs from 1992 of the women weavers of the past. As the film unfolds, it confronts the failed promises of modernization and witnesses the gradual disappearance of the last guanga weavers of El Contadero.</p>

<p>In the Sibundoy Valley, Mercedes Cuatindioy cultivates her chagra as an act of resistance and remembrance. Between seeds and polyculture practices, her life embodies the transmission of Indigenous knowledge threatened by oblivion</p>

<p>A caring cinematic homage to the filmmaker&rsquo;s ancestresses, and the neglected region of their origin.</p>

<p>Portugal, 1872. The Emperor of Brazil, Pedro II, travels to Porto and stays at the Grand Hotel du Louvre, owned by Maria Henriqueta de Mello Lemos e Alvelos. Today, the attempt to make a film about this episode becomes an invocation. Maria Henriqueta is with us. Memories, sounds, and sensations invade the screen and contribute to constructing an emotional geography of our invisible protagonist. It&#39;s a phantasmagoria of the senses. A good ghostly experience.</p>

<p>In D&uuml;sseldorf Zoo&rsquo;s tropical hall, a woman and crocodile keeper exchange memories, ghost stories, and the zoo&rsquo;s history among crocodiles.</p>

<p>The long journey of the stones used in the construction of a Buenos Aires monument, and the vicissitudes they endure along the way, are the vantage point from which we observe Buenos Aires&#39;s heritage. If we humans are the preferred recipients of sculptures, how can we engage in dialogue with them? How does their material manifest itself? Sculptures hold secrets that, unlike the secrets kept in caves or mountains, are specifically directed toward humans.</p>

<p>Once upon a time there was a Revolution in a small Portuguese village. Savana ea montanha is a hybrid documentary where villagers stage their own struggle &ndash; still current &ndash; ​​against a government plan to extract lithium which threatens their land. It is a generous and funny resistance film, a ballad in songs, a rural western which is reminiscent of the cinema of Moullet or Guiraudie</p>

<p>Desktop images, letters, text messages, interviews and CCTV footage, this aesthetically eclectic, politically daring collection of films by Altyazı Fasik&uuml;l: Free Cinema stresses the need for criticality in times of censorship and repression.</p>

<p>When the Russian troops occupied Ukraine&rsquo;s Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant, their activities were documented by CCTV cameras. Spetsialna Operatsiia is based on that footage, recorded at the site of the worst nuclear disaster in history.</p>

<p>Ten years after the civil war in Syria, in the face of a new urban project built on historical erasure, two displaced Syrian residents recall the vibrant community and orchards of Basateen al-Razi, a Damascus neighborhood that was destroyed by armed forces in 2015 as punishment for the community&rsquo;s uprising against the Assad regime.</p>

<p>Abandoned houses, surviving objects that carry memory. Exiled from Iran after her film on the 2009 Green Movement was banned, a filmmaker breaks her family&rsquo;s decades-long silence about a disappeared cousin, executed during the 1988 purges in Iran&rsquo;s political prisons. Grappling with estrangement and loss, she uses fragments, archives, and the images made during her years of diaristic filming in Iran to reflect on the collective taboo, the fear that silenced the population for so many years, and the explosion of resistance that continues to grow within Iranian society today.</p>