Every Document of Civilization

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.

Maximiliano is a psychiatrist who suffers from strange visions of his past. He grew up in an orphanage and then left for the big city. When his adoptive father dies, he goes back to his hometown where he will be reunited with his brothers and discover a dark family secret.

"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.

I film my sister arguing with my mom while I was preparing Christmas dinner, on a workers' camp, on a picket, singing. I discover in a VHS that I had been filming it since we were little. Apparently, according to some verses of "The International", socialism would be something like a paradise full of brothers.

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.

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.

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?

There is a house being emptied. There is an auction in the neighborhood of Flores. Clients fill the place, eager to buy all kinds of objects. There is almost no filter when fighting to get the best price that belongs to the dead, the exiles, the fugitives and the soulless. A reseller who is too preoccupied with the staging, a collector with a past as a fishing worker, and the owner of an antique shop that admits to selling the affections of people, hints at the state of things.

Two women, granddaughter and grandmother, discuss the stories and contradictions of our gender and class, while sewing. Outside, a new generation of feminists takes the streets.

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?

Faced with the death of a comrade, the workers of Line 60 look for lessons in past struggles in order to confront the boss once again. Santiago, one of them, reviews in his chronicles the pages of the last triumph in order to write his story: that of a collective of combative workers.