Playlist
<p>A frantic gaze runs through the convulsed Mexico City, a colossal metropolis sustained by the myth of miscegenation and other colonial violence. Past and present weave a flurry of images; fragmented memories of this territory.</p>
<p>The director returns to her native village and pays a visit to her father, who spends most of his time with his best friend. Both left by their wives, they live in a forsaken village, but they are trying their best to recreate themselves.</p>
<p>Amadeu Martins, capoeira master, therapist, father, grandfather, and community leader, narrates his life through encounters and reenactments that blend documentary and fiction. During the day, he reminisces about his exploits, comments on photos and videos, sings, and hangs out with friends. At night, he leads capoeira and batuque rodas at Senzala, the iconic grounds where he teaches children and young people. The film combines his personal account with dramatized scenes, showcasing the cultural and social power of capoeira in a working-class neighborhood and the intense stories of resistance and community.</p>
<p>A short film that revives ancestral Wankavilka memory in the hands of its people, exploring themes of identity, culture, and heritage as it reflects on America through the lens of Ecuadorian ancestral roots.</p>
<p>A film‑letter from Narcisa Hirsch to her daughter, Andrea Hirsch, for her 21st birthday.</p>
<p>Stones are at once the most foundational and the most overlooked parts of our lifeworld. When a retired nature documentary narrator passes a kidney stone, she decides to tell one more story about this forgotten world of stone . A hypnotic essay film asking urgent ecological questions, Apple Cider Vinegar takes the viewer on a journey meeting Palestinian quarry workers, passionate Britisch Geologist and People living on the lava fields of Fogo.</p>
<p>Calle K is a documentary film that looks at the evolution over time of an illegal squatter settlement. In 1978 Titus Fossgard-Moser lived with his brother and filmmaker/anthropologist parents in the Indio Guayas community in what was then the outskirts of Guayaquil Ecuador. The outcome, the film ‘People of the Barrio’ portrayed the struggles of the community – led by a community leader Emma Torres – to survive and get out of poverty.</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 – frequently by unconventional means. When events unexpectedly impact her, Carmen’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’s film captures a world defined by hardship and hope. It’s a vivid, unforgettable portrait of solidarity in a world where the line between right and wrong is not always clear.</p>
<p>What do you tell your dead parents? Combining family archives and glimpses of today, the filmmaker weaves together fifty years of his life and the socio-political history of Chile. The montage wanders through the ages, between light and shadow, without ever leaving the joy.</p>
<p>A country awakens from a deep winter sleep. An incomprehensible and absurd world slowly unfolds before the camera, imbued with strangeness, even though we are familiar with its sounds, rhythms and colours. Then the stakes become higher, and the suspense grows. The shadow of ongoing collapse looms over Chronicle, but it is not spectacular.</p>
<p>Apartheid: a man reclassified as 'black' left his 'white' wife and children for Soweto camps. Others faced similar struggles with racial reclassification, finding court appeals nearly impossible and acceptance only in new communities.</p>
<p>A documentary produced in super-8 with a mixture of fiction. It caused a stir wherever it was shown, having to be subjected to the censorship in force at the time of the military regime. It poetically addresses the various prejudices and conflicts that involve the field of sexuality. Two men star in love scenes. Testimonials by Lauro Nascimentos, Eleonora Menicucci, João Silvério Trevisan, Henrique Magalhães and popular people about conflicts involving affection between people of the same sex.</p>
<p>Genealogy, uncomfortable questions and reams of archival material are Tavares-Abel’s tools in discovering the political truths of her family and the Dominican Republic. Election fraud and dictatorship are frighteningly topical. Activism suggests itself.</p>
<p>Director Ignacio Agüero interrupts the production of several films that are taking place in Chile during 1984 to ask the filmmakers what is the point of filming in Chile under the Pinochet dictatorship.</p>
<p>30 years on, Ignacio Agüero revisits Chile to question his colleagues about the meaning of their work and the future of his country's cinema, while images from his own past recur alongside testimony from a school teacher of film workshops for children.</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 geografía de un pequeño país.</span></span></p> <p>Film Organizations: Sierra Tropical Cine, Inventiva Films</p> <p>Director & Writer: Wil Paucar Calle<br /> Producer: Karla Guevara<br /> Cinematography: Nicolás Monteros<br /> Sound Design / Mix: Alexander Pereira</p>
<p>To dance is to remember. To dance is to remind. As the Palestinian identity continues to be threatened with violent erasure, young Palestinians turn to their folk dance, the dabke, to assert their existence. From its humble beginnings as a worker’s dance, the dabke has come to represent an evolving history of cultural resistance, and is needed now more than ever. <em>Dancing Palestine</em> is a document of this embodiment of collective memory – as those who piece together a dabke choreography also piece together their identities. Together with the film – a performance in itself – the dabke is a testament to Palestinians’ deep love of life and an insistent act of contribution to the archive of Palestine in the present.</p>
<p>Graffiti, stencils, people, and insects appear and disappear on a bridge in Cuenca, a city in southern Ecuador. As we observe the everyday life of this space, a voice reflects on the transformations of the place. One official story and another that reveals the violence that persists over the years.</p>
<p>In the Witteveen family, the war is rarely discussed, not even by their grandmother, who lived through it. That changes when Jos Mauro, who grew up in Ecuador, discovers her carefully preserved liberation skirt. Intrigued, he begins researching its story through family members and archives. His search becomes a personal journey that reveals his grandmother's wartime past and reflects on freedom.</p>
<p>A participatory documentary with campesinos and campesinas from the Comité de Defensa de los Recursos Naturales del Cantón Penipe. It portrays their collective resistance against fraud, in defense of territory, dignity, and the future of their land and community.</p>
<p>What is a border? Besides the many uses and misuses of this word in our daily lives, a border is made by the people that inhabit it. This simple principle is the base of Iván Castiñeiras’ masterful debut: Deuses de pedra. Narrated as an odyssey moving back and forth in time, the film encounters the population living around the most ancient border in Europe: the one dividing Spain from Portugal. From smugglers to kings, from children to shepherds, this stunningly beautiful land becomes the theatre for history repeating itself. Addressing some of the crucial issues that interest many peripheral spaces in Europe, mining and emigration, Deuses de pedra shows the effects of far away political decisions on the daily life of common people.</p>
<p>Becoming family is an autobiographical documentary rooted in a personal and family journey. Filmed over a period of thirteen years, the film follows the filmmaker and his family as they navigate the challenges of relocating to Québec. Through a personal lens, the work explores the renewal of identity, balancing a deep connection to cultural roots with the construction of a new bi-national identity. This intimate exploration resonates with universal themes of migration, parenthood, and the search for belonging.</p>
<p>In this immersive sonic and visual experience, centered around the return of the American Great Eastern Brood X cicadas, a long distance conversation between two friends becomes the lifeline of an unfinished film. Measuring time through the cicadas' return provides a pulse for a post-pandemic moment in US history and invokes a reflection of our collective futures. A cacophony of human and non-human voices builds, highlighting the power of nature as it interweaves socio-political narratives and ecological cycles. Caution: Film contains strobing lights.</p>
<p style="margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Calibri,sans-serif;">WEB PAGE: <a title="Film's web page" href="https://elarchivobastardo.com/en/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">https://elarchivobastardo.com/en/</a></span></p> <p style="margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Calibri,sans-serif;">After suffering a temporary vision loss, a filmmaker dives into her family’s home videos from the early 90's to challenge her father’s gaze. As she transforms the images, she liberates the characters trapped in those magnetic tapes and explores the mythology of family, the cracks of emotional distance and the tension between what is seen and what hides underneath the frame.</span></p> <p style="margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Calibri,sans-serif;">Using these awaken memories, she composes a new narrative that reimagines her father's vision. They reconnect in the present, amid vulnerability, awkwardness and love: the story of a gardener and a one-eyed woman. </span></p> <p style="margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: Calibri,sans-serif;">PRESS KIT: https://elarchivobastardo.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/EAB-DOSSIER-ENGLISH_final_230724.pdf</span></p>
<p>Exposé of the CIA-financed efforts of the Edwards family of Chile to cover up the human rights abuses of the Pinochet dictatorship through its newspaper 'El Mercurio'.</p>
<p>On a bustling footbridge separating Argentina and Paraguay, where people traffic all kinds of things in a mix of Guarani and Spanish, the director meets nine-year-old Angel. Struck by his expressiveness and panache, she follows him home. Over the course of ten years, they create a film together, during which Angel will have to make decisive choices for his future.</p>
<p>A solitary road‑movie documentary in which Carla cycles through roads of Uruguay, confronting wind, time, migration and memory. The film interweaves objective camera observation with intimate images, voice‑over narration, diary recordings and sound design to explore identity, origin, loneliness, and how the timeless intersects with personal history.</p>
<p>Through the production of an obsidian prosthetic eye, body and territory are mirrored as traces of an inverse time, which uncover syndromes of our present.</p>
<p>Filmed with a Super 8, this independent production portrays discrimination among homosexuals themselves and stereotypes often attached to gay men. At a Carnival camp, two boys meet and get involved. One of them catches the other dressed as a woman. A disagreement ensues.</p>
<p>A film that revives the memory of Quito's old movie theaters, which disappeared with the arrival of international chains. Through testimonies and vestiges, the film condenses eight decades of cultural life.</p>
<p>The signing of the peace accord between the Colombian government and the FARC guerrillas in 2016 led to the formation of the Search Unit for Missing Persons. The act of finding and identifying the missing was thus seen as essential for rebuilding a nation, whose identity is shaped by those who disappeared. This experimental essay interweaves three stories: a female director reconstructing the life of a dead transgender woman through film; an intimate study of the filmmaker’s family, who also dealt with a missing relative; and the testimony of forensic pathologist Karen Quintero. This formally unremitting work finds a compelling balance between the personal and the political, adding conceptual reflections on the texture of the region, on cartography, and the unspoken traumas of Colombia’s modern history.</p>
<p>Gente del Barrio is a documentary by Brian Moser that captures life in a Latin American neighborhood, exploring the dynamics of everyday survival, community identity, and social transformation. The film observes the struggles and joys of its residents, offering an intimate portrayal of urban life from the inside out.</p>
<p>“The United States of Fonda” is the motto of this three-hour autobiofilmographical monument, put together with cinematic passion and editing verve for a president that will only ever have existed on the big screen: Henry Fonda.</p>
<p>Amid the landscapes of Ecuador and Peru, 'Huaquero' 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>Forty years after ETA kidnapped her family and the State tortured and murdered her father, Tamara Muruetagoiena throws herself into the indefatigable search for the truth and justice, while personally telling us about her family tragedy: the revolutionary tax, the fact of her 17-day kidnapping by ETA, her family's falling apart, the State harassment and the political pressure they suffered, the trial, the arrest of her father and mother, the torture endured, the murder... but also her own path, that of knowing the truth and recognising it and of the use of dialogue as the principal means of resolving conflicts.</p>
<p>Yamel, a Mexican cinema student in Cuba, is randomly filming a stormy afternoon in Havana when Jans, an 18-year-old fisherman, walks across her frame and captures her attention. From that first recorded encounter, she, her camera and him become intertwined. As real emotions emerge, ethical questions appear. Why can’t she stop filming him?</p>
<p>Joker, Kookie and Djumbo are “Khmericans”: Cambodian refugees who grew up in the United States and were deported back to Cambodia after serving a prison sentence. We follow this trio in their daily lives, as they reunite with their new Khmer families, oscillating between the vestiges of a vanished life and a future yet to be built.</p>
<p>Ana Ts'uyeb’s film tells the story of three Tsotil women: the filmmaker herself, her mother and her aunt, all of whom have lost loved ones, including young infants, to patriarchal violence. The arrival of the Zapatista movement, which fought for indigenous rights, including land reform and redistribution, in Mexico, brings new hope. With it comes the chance to dream, as the women defend what matters to them most: their land and a life built on freedom and possibility. Ts'uyeb’s striking directorial debut is a quiet, lovingly intimate testament to empowerment and the strength of a community that is full of hope for the future.</p>
<p>Visiting the family home in Caracas for the summer, Ena takes up her place again with her grandmother, Mamama, and her father. He literally lives in books and continues the crazy enterprise of saving, without anyone knowing exactly from what or why, the Venezuelan literary heritage. Following the discovery of a postcard hidden in a book, Ena sets off in search of the mysterious work of a writer, Rafael Coronado, who is said to have written under many pseudonyms. Los capitulos perdudos does not explore these promising intrigues. On the contrary, Lorena Alvarado sketches them out as so many false leads and prefers to leave the narrative dimension hanging. In an economy of retention, Los capitulos perdudos installs atmospheres, stases that result in a gentle melancholy. The character of the grandmother irremediably loses her memory. The young woman seeks to remember; her father runs after the rare works that he still has to find in the mass of dead leaves that books for Venezuela seem to have become – some great readers are dead, others have gone to the other side of the Atlantic. We learn little about the socio-political situation. She is an off-screen person who penetrates the family bubble through echoes, allusions, ricochets. The filmmaker deposits a touch of sadness on the imposing libraries, in the large hollowed-out rooms of the house, the desolate urban spaces. A diffuse feeling of abandonment then hangs over everyday life. From what story, intimate or collective, do the lost chapters of the film's title come? There remains what can be preserved from being swallowed up in the torpor of summer, which we feel threatens the characters to their very core: the tenderness between the members of this family, a motorcycle ride which offers to our lucky eyes the vital energy of the frescoes of Caracas, the modest sharing of a love for literature, a poem saved from oblivion.</p>
<p>An Islands' diary, told through the sombre but loving portrait of its oldest inhabitants. The Galapagos Islands and their majestic tortoises suffer the same fate of exploitation and disfigurement as the influence of humans on this once pristine and untouched corner of the world develops and devours. This film is the first 'chapter' of an ongoing adaptation of Herman Melville's 1849 novel about the islands, The Encantadas.</p>
<p>In a small Hungarian town painter Péter Molnár leads filmmaker Márton Tarkövi on a journey through meadows, clearings and Molnár’s drawings. The viewer joins them, as they discuss art, time and life itself.</p>
<p>At 36, director Ana Cristina Benítez 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—with oneself, one's ancestors, and one's past—in the midst of a life-altering transformation.</p>
<p>Kevin is a young filmmaker who has spent his whole life in a tourist city in Ecuador. However, the growing wave of crime that afflicts it forces him to confront the changes in the place he calls home.</p>
<p>In 1968, Argentine artist Leandro Katz attends a performance by the Theatre of the Ridiculous in a New York pornographic cinema. The actors, in drag, recite texts that weave high literature with queer slang, undress, and perform with exuberance. Katz becomes part of the ensemble, assisting in lighting, photography, experimental film works through 1976. Eventually he parts ways as his artistic path diverges. In the present day, living in Buenos Aires, Katz revisits his archives—photos, negatives, slides, works, and an unfinished film believed lost. As testimony and memory unfold, the past's specters seep into the present.</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'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>Is it possible for a building to change the life of a neighborhood? Yes, more so when it makes the view of the Province and the Andes Mountains disappear.</p>
<p>During the power outages in Ecuador, a filmmaker films from his balcony. Empty streets, shadows, and the sounds of the night reveal a city in darkness. He creates an intimate diary, reflecting on confinement, desire, and the search for meaning in the darkness.</p>
<p>In the beautiful yet darkly complex city of Rio de Janeiro, a mother's relentless search for her son's remains uncovers the harrowing reality of forced disappearances in the city.</p>
<p>A complex and interwoven declaration of love from Narcisa Hirsch to Rafael Maino. A portrait with a sensual and warm gaze: that of the camera and that of Rafael himself.</p>
<p>On Rafael Maino’s birthday, Hirsch creates a letter-film using images they shot together in Patagonia and travelling through Chile and Brazil, as well as images of bodies (above all male ones) that she thought he would be attracted to.</p>
<p>This film is crafted from extremely sensitive material, perhaps the most painful kind imaginable. Letters Civil War prisoners wrote just hours before they died and that now, nine decades later, are read out by their relatives. Although these words of farewell show barbarism and injustice, more than anything they convey their gratitude to loved ones. Fernando Vílchez Rodríguez puts together a solid and particularly rigorous piece by interspersing the readings with observations of the Riojan landscape, often at magical hours. Shot entirely on Super-8, this work is a fundamental part of the Spanish filmography dealing with the issue of historical memory.</p>
<p>Leni Riefenstahl is considered one of the most controversial women of the 20th century. Her films TRIUMPH OF THE WILL and OLYMPIA stand for perfectly staged body worship and the celebration of the superior and victorious. At the same time, these images project contempt for the imperfect and weak. Riefenstahl's aesthetics are more present than ever today - but is that also true for their implied message? The film examines this question using documents from Riefenstahl's estate, including private films, photos, recordings and letters. It uncovers fragments of her biography and places them in an extended historical context. How could Riefenstahl become the Reich's preeminent filmmaker and keep denying any closer ties to Hitler and Goebbels? In personal documents, she mourns her "murdered ideals". Riefenstahl represents many postwar Germans who, in letters and recorded telephone calls from her estate, dream of an organizing hand that will finally clean up the "shit-hole state. Then, her work would also experience a renaissance, in a generation or two this time could come - what if they are right?</p>
<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 – both literally and figuratively. Through Ricardo’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>Portrait of women where they look at the images of their own faces and reflect on that experience.</p>
<p>Bilel is enjoying one last teenage summer with his friends. Their fathers work in the silicon factory where the fire of the ovens never stops. Light brings life, shines, burns, hurts and kills. Will Bilel break free from this generational cycle?</p>
<p>The life of the bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey during a day of bullfighting, from the moment he dresses up to the moment he undresses.</p>
<p>Through Ecuadorian Andean landscapes and memories of my grandmother and father, I begin to explore my grandfather's identity from the moment of his death, illness, and depression in order to find a reality.</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>A group of young adventurers sign up for one of the most challenging military training courses in Latin America, which will turn them into fearsome warriors operating in the dangerous VRAEM region, an area with a military presence identified for its heterogeneous armed groups, coca plants and narcotics trafficking. In his absorbing look at the hermetically sealed world of the army, debut director Paolo Tizón paints a portrait of one institution while depicting individual human stories and reflecting on male identity, the potential for self-determination, and a fragile masculinity that stands in striking contrast to the brutal training. Sensitivity alongside violence, beauty alongside vulnerability.</p>
<p>In 2019, Emilia filmed the streets, love, and joy, but all of that couldn't be sustained, and she paused. This film is a letter to her past self, a play with archives and cameras that connects emotions between memory and the present.</p>
<p>After fifteen years of absence, Farah returns to Lebanon to be with her aging father. Hoping for one last conversation, the two try to find a common language. It will ultimately be with the only one he understands: poetry. As revolution rages outside, Farah Kassem creates a moving body of work, both intimate and open to her country in crisis.</p>
<p>Rediscovered MiniDV footage from Gaza in 2001 frames the filmmaker’s search for a former prison‑mate, accompanied by Hasan, a local guide whose fate remains unknown. As they journey from north to south Gaza, the film evokes memory, loss, and the fleeting beauty of everyday life in a place forever changed</p>
<p>“Yuyaymanta” narrates, from the collective memory of the Indigenous uprising of June 2022 in Ecuador, through personal testimonies and archival footage. The documentary amplifies the voices of victims and their relatives who share vivid and painful memories of the protest; it documents psychological aftereffects, physical wounds, and irreparable losses, as well as the ongoing efforts to heal and honor resistance in pursuit of a more just and equitable future.</p>