Aritz Kortabarria

“El mal is basically a suspense story, where the audience senses that something disturbing is going to happen, but doesn't know how or when. But it also aims to get the viewer to question their own certainties, their capacity to love and to accept their own dark side.”

Two sisters bring their families together for a summer weekend near Madrid to celebrate milestones and the San Juan Festival. The celebration turns dark when a child makes a serious sexual abuse allegation.

After a night of self-destruction and chaos, Enzo records a suicide note as a cry for help. However, despite believing no one is listening, someone will remind him that he is not alone. Even if that someone is from some remote corner of the universe.

Inspired by films like “L’inconnu du lac” and “O Ornitólogo”, director Valentino R. Sandoli has created “Cruising,” a film that explores desire, erotism and flesh, using an almost voyeuristic style that mixes together with oneiric images that provides a metaphysic tone to the story. A man meets a group of young men while bathing in a lake at the end of summer, and he immediately falls for one of them, who seems to shine with his own light. He follows them into the woods, where he watches them as he finds them in different groups and sex scenes, until he arrives to the one he fell for.

Eloy, a 26-year-old man, remembers his first homosexual experiences in his hometown, entering a journey full of subjectivity and the anecdotes that have marked him.

A masked man plunges into the shadows of a remote darkroom nightclub. Speakers throb as bodies collide to the pulse of industrial music. Amid the crowd, his eyes locks onto a boy with a defiant, hypnotic gaze. To possess him is an all-consuming need—yet this obsession weaves a cage where hunter and prey become prisoners of their own hunger.

Bilbao, 1983. Torrential rains cause the river to overflow, flooding the city and plunging it into chaos. Meanwhile, the gay club High remains open, operating intermittently through power cuts as some men continue to come, suspended in a limbo of desire. Little by little, the outside world seeps in: rising water and distant sounds reveal an internal reality from which there is no easy escape.