Manuel Embalse

According to the myth still in force in the coal towns of Patagonia, if a woman enters a mine, the earth becomes jealous. Then, there’s collapse and death. Shady River starts from a dark personal experience to transform in a film about the silence of women who live in men's villages. How to film where our presence is prohibited? How to record the resonances of what doesn’t sound? As the fog and smoke from the power plant cover the town, the voices of the women of Shady River force their way between the white of the ice and the hum of the drilling machines, until blowing up the structure of silence.

There is a monster in Lake Nahuel Huapi. At twilight, it spreads across the surface of the water like a taut cowhide, grabbing its victims with sharp claws. Another monster also lurks around the lake, near Bariloche, in the Argentine Andes.

The filmmaker decides to make a film in an attempt to remember a dream from his notes: at the crossroads of essay and diary, the film offers a sensitive investigation into the relationship between dreams, animals and the city.

This fully archival journey through the 35 years of Alfredo Stroessner’s regime in Paraguay reveals unseen footage and explores one of the longest-running dictatorships in history, whose effects still resonate today.

Juan and Luciano find out some girls are staying in the neighboring house and decide to spy on them. The girls play hide and seek and start changing. When they realize they are being watched, they will try to capture the boys.

The Antes Muerto Cine collective presents an episodic film about nature, technology, politics, violence and affection; about times past and times to come, from the noisy, angry, rebellious present. Rather be dead than policemen, than defeated, than...

One day, I found a box in the trash with super 8 cartridges and a book entitled “Catalog”. The images could be from a cameraman of the past or the future. What would happen if someone found my life in a SD card in a pawnshop? What would my catalog of images contain? Cities, nature and a diary of a digital memory.

A ship is shipwrecked on a desert island in the Río de la Plata. One of the crew, without name or age, wanders through the ruins of a city project that was not. The voices of the original spirits guide him through the territory, making the formation of the Argentine State emerge from the shadows, in the years of the Conquest of the Desert. How to find in the roots of the trees the memory of a place?

At the end of the 1960s, Argentine artist Leandro Katz participated in “Theatre of the Ridiculous”, an eccentric group linked to New York’s queer underground. This film-essay moves between archives, testimonies, and spectres of the past that question the present. Photography, film, video, and sound intertwine to approach, if only in brief flashes, that mythical past and raise questions about time, art, sexuality, death, and cinema.

A group of young writers, entangled in their relationships, argue about success, love, and death. The night's tide brings to light what was previously hidden and some weaknesses.

A look back at the murder of a teenager by the Buenos Aires police, through the words of his mother and her obsessive observation of the place of his forced disappearance.

An amateur archaeologist obsessed with e-waste records images and sounds over ten years. His research takes the form of a personal, playful and musical diary, crossing borders and archives. One day, he arrives at an electronic recycling workshop where the ghost of a working poet manifests itself. The search takes an unexpected turn and he sets out, in the company of his cat Pendrive, to explore the links between technology and memory. In times of environmental crisis, overproduction and acceleration of consumption, he wonders: how will history be written in the future?

In a country where the consumption of meat is prohibited, a group of vegans face off against the last resistance of barbecue lovers.

What is it like to produce images in 2020 while blind? Zezé Fassmor is a Peruvian multidisciplinary artist living in Buenos Aires: "I do everything but see", says his biography on the social networks he uses. He lost his sight at the age of 25 and today, at 32 and with the idea of seeing again, he films and takes photos, creating his own archive to see those images in the future. We travelled to the Iguazú Falls, exploring the geography of the senses to film another scene from his imagination. What is an image? What we see or what we have in our mind?

Meri unearths memories about Osvaldo, her father, a militant and leader of the Workers’ Party in Argentina. Much like piecing together a shattered vase, she delves into the chronicle of the first accusation of gender violence within that organization. The story winds through both party and family archives, intertwining with the portrait of her mother, Flavia. The director reconstructs her family history, which is, in turn, the history of the party and the political history of the country. An unsettling journey of discovering and yet still loving a father who unveils his monstrous side, “Internal Newsletter” stands as a testament, reflecting on the personal and political upheavals that bind three generations of revolutionary activists.

Miren Felder died on top of a snowy mountain after a plane crash in 1977. The director discovers secret messages from her grandmother in photographs taken by her military grandfather and offers herself as a medium in a ritual to communicate with her.

The first films of Patagonia - where I grew up - show a territory that no longer exists, as the araucarias, millenary trees from the Patagonian forests, were in part replaced by more productive pines. Near my new home, in Belgium, I find araucarias that adorn front gardens. We hear some girls playing in the car, pointing out araucarias on the road. How did these plants become a petty-bourgeois fashion in northern Europe? I confront these archives with contemporary technoscientific images, used by a lab to explore plant modifications. What can these modes of representation tell us about our time?

"Owner's Portrait" is a documentary fable, with an atmosphere of science fiction: on a remote island, where there are no more humans or money left, lives a community of cats that transmits a libertarian message. The antennas propagate it throughout the planet and are the dogs the first to hear it. Meanwhile, workers lose their lives working in the factory. The animals escape from their homes and the owners go looking for them. In the streets they hear the voices of past revolutions and wonder if a new world can grow at this moment.

After collecting multiple records related to a painful family tragedy, Victor dives into the archive in search of answers about what really happened on January 26, 1983

Using footage filmed in Peru in 1950 by a foreigner, Víctor writes a letter to his son to question the country he will inherit: among heartbeats and ruins, he searches for a hope that still endures amid disillusionment.

A young author sets off to Argentina to seek the lost fragments of her life story. Using the archival photographs and a personal narrative, this autobiographical reconstruction of a family history documents how world history shaped the outcome of one summer fling, the emergence of new families and their tragic separation.

Authorities have prohibited access to a forest on the outskirts of the city. Strange vegetation has infested the area, and those who have been questioned report sightings of rare species, human-sized birds, or figures that appear and disappear. Despite the restrictions, several people decide to visit the place. Once there, they coexist and play without fear of the warnings. Little by little, reality begins to distort, blending with their memories, dreams, and fantasies.