Paola Andrea Pérez

After hearing a loud 'bang' at daybreak, a Scottish woman begins experiencing a mysterious sensory syndrome while traversing the jungles of Colombia.

18-year-old Jesús lives with his stern, somewhat unaffectionate father in Santiago, Chile. When not doing drugs, having casual sex or simply slouching in front of the TV, Jesús and his friends perform in a K-pop boyband. But his routine is thrown into chaos one evening when he and his drunken posse viciously assault a young gay man and leave him for dead. It’s an act that propels Jesús into a profound moral crisis which have severe consequences.

In the crime filled city of Buenaventura, Colombia, a group of friends prepares for a dance competition that might change their lives forever. In this rough world, talent might be your only way out.

Ras is a graffiti artist from the city of Cali who works in construction, he works during the day and paints walls at night. One day he is caught stealing cans of paint from the construction site where he works, for which he is fired. With no money, he will look for Calvin, another popular urban artist. Both will circulate through the streets without a fixed destination, spreading their art to every corner.

Marcos, a withdrawn park ranger, sees the fragile balance achieved in his isolation collapse with the arrival of a couple of biologists investigating strange bird deaths. Unfortunately, the desire and envy for normality represented by the couple awaken the monster he has been trying to control. His face, his legs, and his arms don’t belong to him and as the desperation becomes incontrollable, he can only see one way out: mutilation.

Camilo, 35 years old, son of Colombian guerrillas, returns to his home country after 25 years of exile in Italy. In an attempt to understand his parents' radical choices, he dives into the family archive. Extraordinary amateur films and private writings reveal never-ending conflicts and painful memories. Those of a father, a revolutionary commander, who sacrificed everything in the name of political struggle, but who saw his dream of justice vanish. Those of a son, who grew up in the shadow of a charismatic but cumbersome man, unable to accept the needs of a child. Those of a mother. A ghost that has haunted Camilo's dreams since he was five years old. A unique opportunity to give life to an impossible dialogue, long desired but never really happened.

Willington's only love, Mariana, is about to get married to René, Willington's cousin. While Willington is trying to get her back, a demobilization process concerning an illegal armed group is underway in the region, and new killings, besides rumors of a thief at large, will endanger Mariana's new family.

Alfonso is an old farmer who has returned home to tend to his son, who is gravely ill. He rediscovers his old house, where the woman who was once his wife still lives, with his daughter-in-law and grandson. The landscape that awaits him resembles a wasteland. Vast sugar cane plantations surround the house, producing perpetual clouds of ash. 17 years after abandoning them, Alfonso tries to fit back in and save his family.

It was during a casting session in their school that the two personages of this film met the director. Each separately told him the story of how they had broken up. And what if fiction allowed them to get back together again?

A drama set in the black communities of Colombia's Pacific coast, where a man looking to flee the country by boat encounters a local fisherman.

Lázaro is a film that portrays the journey of a father to the depths of his mind and the places where he built his life. Upon learning of his illness, he decides to bring his family together: a wife that he was separated from for twenty years and who returns to care for him, and a son who returns from a long journey to be by his side. An attempt is made to mend a broken bond, to unite a family in the moment of parting.

Tomas, an Afro-Colombian teenager who fled the country's Pacific coast pushed out by the war, faces the difficulties of growing up in a city if exclusion and racism. When Jairo, his younger brother and closest friend disappears, Tomas plunges in the streets of the city. His search becomes an initiatory journey that compels him to face his past and to leave aside the influence of his is brothers in order to find his own identity. Through this journey, Tomas reveals a unique perspective of a vibrant and unstable city that, like Tomas, stands on the threshold between what once was and what might be.

When the rainy season begins Helena's baby shall be born. Her mother and brother prepare for the coming weeks of rain and maternity. Men and women fish and harvest in deep solitude; while nature becomes the prison for all of them. The promise of a new life would have to change things.

Eric, a ten-year-old boy, finds himself living overnight with Gabriel, his father whom he barely knows. Seeing that the man is having a hard time building a relationship with his son and staying afloat financially, Maria Isabel, the upper-class woman Gabriel works for as a carpenter, decides to take the boy under her wing.

There are countless stories of Cubans reaching their dream destination of Florida as boat refugees. A lesser known route to the United States starts with a flight in a ramshackle plane to Guyana. Then the refugees travel to Colombia where they cross the jungle to arrive in Central America, from where they hope to reach the promised land of America—a hard and dangerous journey. Cuban filmmaker Marcel Beltrán visits them in a refugee camp in Panama, where one of the residents gives him an idea. Many people here have filmed their journey, she says, and these videos tell their real story. These jerky, shocking videos are interspersed with Beltrán’s footage of the camp, tangibly illustrating the difference between the hectic pace of the journey and the insecure life at the reception center.

A man in chains, a young man who dreams of being part of something, to become a militant for an armed group who must wield a cruelty in which he may not believe in. The characters, each voluntary or involuntary part of a mechanism that overcomes them, reveal their greatness or misery in the “minimum” tasks that they perform to survive. From that sometimes morbid poetry of the everyday and the irrefutable truth of the details, we see a country whose social body is sick and injured.

Efraín Gómez is a clown who is no longer funny; the children are no longer amused by his presence. One day he gets up to go to work, but he realizes that his life is a disaster.

7 year old Matías returns home from a friend’s birthday party to find his mother, Laura, unconscious on the floor. When she recovers her senses they decide to leave home and rush to a shelter for abused women where they spend 48 hours before Laura decides to rebuild her life somewhere else. Through the eyes of Matías we will discover their escape in a city where everything Matías once knew feels dangerous and foreign until Laura finds a secure place to raise her son.

Two humble fishermen who live in a forgotten hamlet near to the Cauca river, discovered that a dead body had been tangled in their cast net. Failing to give notice to the authorities, they decided that it would be more humane to bury him, so they start dragging the dead body towards the jungle.

Oscuro animal tells the story of three women forced to flee their homes in a war torn region in Colombia. Each of their journeys, marked by terror, takes them on a trek from the deep jungle to the outskirts of Bogotá, where they will gather new strength to start a new life.

In this poetic, richly allegorical debut by Colombian director William Vega, a teenage girl flees to a rundown inn after being driven from her home in the Andean highlands by civil war, as the violence engulfing the country creeps ever closer to her remote refuge. (TIFF)