OAO

Portales follows the course of the Guadalete river in Cádiz, Spain: a catalogue of landscapes that hide other landscapes. A collection of inter-dimensional portals (and postcards). Live action and animation fuse, creating an impossible fauna and flora.

Seven-year-old Vera lives in the big city but adores spending the holidays in her grandparent’s town and particularly in their deserted tobacco barn. Nieves, a teenager native from there whose father forces her to help out at the family’s land, can’t avoid but feeling caged. The two girls, driven by the sense of adventure and the need to find oneself respectively, will be connected to a magical creature that will change the way they see their own reality.

Orensanz is the antithesis of the conventional biopic. The film begins as a guided tour through one of the Lower East Side’s most singular artistic landmarks, only to unfold into a revealing journey deep into the Aragonese Pyrenees and its people. Contemporary artist Ángel Orensanz becomes the hinge between Manhattan and the remote village of Larués, Spain: an elusive, omnipresent man who seems to exist everywhere and nowhere at once. The film questions the very idea of what we understand an artist to be, searching for possible answers that may help redefine the collective imagination surrounding the figure of the creative genius.

A Kawa Ijen sulfur miner finds his routine radically altered the moment his wife goes away. He enters then a time loop that transforms his reality as his beliefs move from animism to Islam and capitalism. In a hybridization between ethnofiction and documentary, the film questions the myth of progress and explores the relationship with the otherness in the neocolonial reality of the South Seas
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This film was created as a gift for our loved ones while we were all in isolation. The sole utility of the piece is to brighten up your day and to bring you back to the little pleasures of childhood. Filmed and in-camera edited in Super 8mm by Rocio Mesa with an original soundtrack by Landon Caldwell. Spring 2020.

16mm in-camera-edited symphony portrait of the anachronistic city of Burbank through its most iconic neon signs

The land gives. The land traps. The land calls. VEGA (*Spanish): flat, low and fertile land. VEGA: It is the fifth brightest star in the night sky, and the second-brightest star in the northern celestial hemisphere, after Arcturus.

The tobacco plant was introduced to Granada (Southern Spain) in 1923. It became a monoculture in the region until the end of the century. When the tobacco production stopped being profitable, the farmers switched to new crops like wheat, corn or asparagus. However, the lands of Granada are still replete with tobacco barns: large empty houses where the leaves used to be hanged to dry. They inhabit the landscape like architectural ghosts.

The caves of Almería where Conan the Barbarian was filmed bear the profound imprint that cinema leaves on the places where it is shot. What happens when the myth of fiction fades? Can we reuse that imprint to imagine something different through it?