Instructions for Staring at the Mirror

A retrieved picture of a window elicits memories and the impulse to recreate a lost site. By this same window, an eight year old child feels the cold air on his face and imagines the future.

The moon watches us as we sleep and tunes into an ominous dream inhabited by red-winged blackbirds, feared for their aggressiveness. In this illusory urban landscape, the natural order seems irrational and hostile. However, as the chirping of the birds warns us, perhaps it is the dream of cities that is out of sync with its surroundings. In the empty spiral between moonrise and dawn, the film examines contingent relationships with natural and urban landscapes in an era of perpetual crisis.

A Venezuelan city is emptying. A labor less priest struggles with a sonic sleep disorder while trying to safe-keep his meek buffalo from being taken. As the intentions of the remaining ones become more desperate, the priest’s malaise becomes more alive.

Santiago, a young filmmaker, wanders around Caracas lost in a romantic reverie, longing for his girlfriend Carmela, who has left Venezuela. In this autobiographical portrait, Santiago Martín constructs a charming hybrid narrative between film shoots, friends and memories, an atmosphere of words and spaces evoking moments lived.

An imaginary look back at the present and distant past from the point of view of the year 2049. The return of an exile to Los Angeles decades after social and environmental collapse. He recreates the memories of his past (our present), and imagines the lives of those who inhabited his old apartment when he was gone. His sense of displacement elicits a meditation on place, memory and dream.