The Banished

Mexican short about a boy who falls in love with his new swimming partner.

On the shores of the largest lake in Mexico live "the night flowers", a group of teenage gay and transgender friends who get together to live their freedom and identity.

Leonel works at convenience store late nights, a time of the day when the harassment imposed by the paramilitary forces in the city becomes evident. The brutality he witnesses often leads Leonel to tag a wall with a message. His message is answered, and realizes he is not alone, there is more people that suffer and fight back the oppression practiced by the Mexican state.

A meet between two strangers that become a trip to the sea, where their deep solitudes will be complicit in the cycles that both are about to close.

Julian is a child who fantasizes about seeing a mermaid. He treasures a collection of clues that he finds after each day of fishing with Chava, his father.

Life doesn’t always go as planned. After the death of the family patriarch, mother and child go separate ways to find themselves—she crosses the ocean to pursue the singing career she left behind, while filmmaker Gal realizes they are transgender—in this collage of video diaries. "My father dies. Days later, my mother escapes to Turkey to meet her secret Facebook lover. I suggest to my mother that we communicate through video letters. My mother, who gave up singing to raise me, finds freedom for the first time away from home. The video correspondences reveal our attempts to see each other through a shaky emotional journey. Alone, while filming this movie, I realized that I want to transition gender and change my name. An extraordinary journey of self-discovery, a mother and a child who always wanted to be more."

Gema’s suicide attempt brings her three children together after many years, on the eve of an unusually cold Christmas in Guadalajara. Cristina, stubborn and deeply Catholic, sees herself as their mother’s caretaker; Sony, a psychic on the local Latino TV channel, fled as far as she could over twenty years ago and never came back; and Brunito, the much younger one, a frustrated biologist and forty-something gay man still dreaming of finding the love of his life. A cold front moves in and traps them inside the house, threatening to bring back the family’s most painful memory—and place it right on the table.

Fog rolls roll across the green highlands of the Wixáritari in Western Mexico. Young Pedro lives here with his mother Aurelia, isolated from the rest of the world. Pedro leads the goats out to graze and explores his surroundings playfully, while Aurelia weaves fine cloth, gathers firewood and prepares food. A documentary portrait of the symbiotic relationship between a small Indigenous family and their remote homeland.