The Sea Stares at Us from Afar

Renata presents herself to the camera like one of these fascinating film noir heroines: a beautiful woman with a nondescript accent, with assured gestures, who looks people right in the eyes. Sentenced to a prison term for a man’s murder, Renata has not lost her charisma behind bars. Does she accept the crime she committed? Does she regret having killed someone. A neighbour? A lover? Is she aware of her imprisonment?

Little is known about the figure of Isabel Santaló, an old artist, today fallen into oblivion. But occasionally some visitors come to her flat. Through them and the voice of Antonio López (Dream of Light, Víctor Erice), the only painter who remembers her, we shape a multifaceted film. This is a cinematic portrait, which well into the film takes a surprising turn. A film that reflects on memory and oblivion, art and the creative process; posing the question of what it means to be an artist and a woman.

A freighter crosses the ocean. The hypnotic rhythm of its gears reveals the continuous movement of machinery devouring its workers: the last gestures of the old sailors’ trade disappearing under the mechanic and impersonal pace of 21st century neo-capitalism. Perhaps it is a boat adrift, or maybe just the last example of an endangered species. Although we don’t know it, the engines are still running, unstoppable.

In the prelude of the twentieth century, Pedro arrives in Tierra del Fuego, an hostile and violent territory, to immortalise the marriage of a powerful landowner. Fascinated by the beauty of the bride-to-be, he betrays the rules and is left to face the land, crawling with violence and marked by the genocide of the land indigenous.

The inhabitants of a small village lost in the woodland between Galicia and Portugal play their own life mixed with dialogues from O bosque, a play by Galician writer Marinhas del Valle. Arraianos portrays a rural community in its obstinate resistance against disappearance.

A group of passengers cross a river on a small ferry. Fog, laughter, whispers and faces inhabit a floating, suspended space. Time passes, the shore is now closer and people prepare for another part of their journey. Aqueronte summons the essence of cinema to transport us to unreal spaces where life is crystallised in a changing landscape of light and shadow. In this cinematic trip, Manuel Muñoz Rivas reaffirms the fabulating power of moving images.

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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1492. Among the crew led by Christopher Columbus travel three men who by now should have been dead. They managed to avoid their sad fate by participating in this uncertain journey. After reaching the Canary Islands they flee taking with them one of the ship's sails. Meanwhile, in the "Old World", a woman tries to save her dying sister by taking her to a healer. Both of these trips attempt to make fun of death. Both of these trips are at the mercy of history

Every morning Manolo Aldeguer opens his business: an old-fashioned, tacky furniture shop located in a small Spanish town. Another working day begins: once again Manolo has to face eight endless hours to kill.

Three sisters on the Canary Islands, their everyday lives infused with a magical, meditative lyricism. Three life strategies without a breadwinner, narrated via the body, a mix of staging, observation and memory. Before the volcano, serenity arrives.

In a little village in the heart of Serbia Mirko takes care of the old and small Serbian Orthodox church of the community. Every day he opens the church and with strong dedication prepares all details for the service that the priest will give. When everything is ready, Mirko rings the bells. Only an old and devoted woman enters the church: she is the only person attending the service. But one day not even the old lady arrives.

Circe's daylife is quiet on top of a cliff. With a cave dug into the rock as a home and away from everything, she is known in the valley for her solitude mood, her pigs sheepherding and her witchcraft skills.

There are countless stories of Cubans reaching their dream destination of Florida as boat refugees. A lesser known route to the United States starts with a flight in a ramshackle plane to Guyana. Then the refugees travel to Colombia where they cross the jungle to arrive in Central America, from where they hope to reach the promised land of America—a hard and dangerous journey. Cuban filmmaker Marcel Beltrán visits them in a refugee camp in Panama, where one of the residents gives him an idea. Many people here have filmed their journey, she says, and these videos tell their real story. These jerky, shocking videos are interspersed with Beltrán’s footage of the camp, tangibly illustrating the difference between the hectic pace of the journey and the insecure life at the reception center.