José Ángel Alayón Dévora

On the arid island of Fuerteventura, Miguel and his daughter Mariana struggle to move forward after his wife’s death, a loss that has set them adrift. Traditional wrestling is all they know, their way of making a place in the world. But Miguel’s body is failing him, and Mariana’s anger is pushing her to break the rules. As the championship final approaches, father and daughter find themselves on uncertain ground, searching for a way back to each other before it’s too late.

Three sisters on the Canary Islands, their everyday lives infused with a magical, meditative lyricism. Three life strategies without a breadwinner, narrated via the body, a mix of staging, observation and memory. Before the volcano, serenity arrives.

Huelva, Spain, an isolated region lost in time. The grass, the sand and the sky are the same that those foreigners saw in the spring of 1895, when they crossed the sea from a distant country to mark the unspoiled terrain and extract its wealth, when the tower was new, when people could climb to the top of the highest dune and imagine that the city of Tartessos was still there, in the distance, almost invisible in the morning brume.

1492. Among the crew led by Christopher Columbus travel three men who by now should have been dead. They managed to avoid their sad fate by participating in this uncertain journey. After reaching the Canary Islands they flee taking with them one of the ship's sails. Meanwhile, in the "Old World", a woman tries to save her dying sister by taking her to a healer. Both of these trips attempt to make fun of death. Both of these trips are at the mercy of history

Marina is haunted by the idea of losing her memory. Her grandmother suffered memory loss and now her mother Aitana, daughter of the writer Maria Teresa Leon and the poet Rafael Alberti, seems to be as well. Locked in a room which her mother has not left for some time, she insists on reliving her memories. In the silence of the night, her family’s past returns, it is the history of a country and an entire century.

Away from home, a group of young people survive without job and stable residence. The passage of time is transforming them. Immersed in constant scape and full of energy, they suddenly will face a fact that will test them.

In the prelude of the twentieth century, Pedro arrives in Tierra del Fuego, an hostile and violent territory, to immortalise the marriage of a powerful landowner. Fascinated by the beauty of the bride-to-be, he betrays the rules and is left to face the land, crawling with violence and marked by the genocide of the land indigenous.

Three soldiers moving through the Cuban jungle: combat exercises and camouflage techniques are practised, but the battle never arrives. The nature of their mission becomes an ever-greater mystery, echoing unanswered in the impassive natural surroundings.

Renata presents herself to the camera like one of these fascinating film noir heroines: a beautiful woman with a nondescript accent, with assured gestures, who looks people right in the eyes. Sentenced to a prison term for a man’s murder, Renata has not lost her charisma behind bars. Does she accept the crime she committed? Does she regret having killed someone. A neighbour? A lover? Is she aware of her imprisonment?

In the early twentieth century, the Hotel Nueva Isla was an emblematic luxury hotel. After the Cuban Revolution, it was confiscated by the State and became a shelter for homeless people. Located in Old Havana, today it is an imposing ruin. Jorge de los Rios, a retired clerk, is one of the few residents who remain there, along with La Flaca, his lover, and Waldo, a young itinerant. As the rest leave for safer places, Jorge clings to his dilapidated home and its buried treasures, slowly digging his way through its debris. The film speaks poignantly to a lost generation who fought in the Cuban Revolution and dreamed of a better society.

A stunning descent into the tunnels, sewage pipes and subway stations of Madrid.

A freighter crosses the ocean. The hypnotic rhythm of its gears reveals the continuous movement of machinery devouring its workers: the last gestures of the old sailors’ trade disappearing under the mechanic and impersonal pace of 21st century neo-capitalism. Perhaps it is a boat adrift, or maybe just the last example of an endangered species. Although we don’t know it, the engines are still running, unstoppable.

In the Garden of the Hesperides, there once grew a fruit capable of granting immortality. This garden, located off the coast of West Africa, was guarded by a hundred-headed dragon. Through the bio-sonification of banana trees, a monoculture crop in the Canary Islands, we discover the tale of this mythical garden in which eternal life was possible.