Holding Desire

While a gamer uploads a testimonial video to denounce the harassment she suffers in a video game, a stranger enters her home and hacks her computer, blurring the boundaries between the real and virtual worlds.

Lucía and Valeria take out three Tarot cards that reveal the first two dishes of a menu that takes them from Embún, Spain to Llanquihue, Chile; the towns of their grandmothers. Among improvised still lifes, maps and video calls, the friends try to discover the meaning of the third card through a ritual that connects both continents.

Rocio, a Colombian immigrant living in New York, is forced to work as a cleaner. After a phone call with her family, she learns that her grandmother is severely ill and is about to pass away. While communicating at a distance becomes more difficult, Rocio will use technology to say farewell her grandmother.

Amanda (46), a complaisant and lonely woman, lives with her son Daniel (16) in the mountains of southern Chile. Octavio (16), a Daniel’s friend, is accidentally injured while hunting in the forest. Amanda takes over the healing sessions, developing an intimate bond with the teenager. They discover that the contact with the wound produces an addictive pleasure.

In a house far from Santiago de Chile, little Alonso tries to change the fate of his sister Daniela, still just a child, who is about to become the seventh wife of the Lion of Judah, a supposed prophet, leader of a cult, who apparently provides electricity when he is touched.

Niña Hermosa is the story of a place—the edge of a road— that links a family tragedy, religious culture, infrastructural change, and erasure. This film, almost entirely visual, observes the past four years of an animita (shrines memorializing devastating deaths) dedicated to a young woman who is now considered miraculous.⁠

In 2019, a nationwide movement forms in Chile to create a new constitution. For three years, the film accompanies indigenous, feminist, militant, legalistic, anarchist and conservative activists. A timely large-scale canvas of democratic protest.

A journey back to the darkest years of the military dictatorship, where Valeria Sarmiento, using for the first time in her career her own voice, reflects on the traces of the political violence of that period and summons the testimony of victims and privileged witnesses, but also the opinion of scientists, memory theorists and researchers of genocides of other times. The result is an intimate account of how these traces have impregnated our life stories, our bodies and also our landscape.

The members of the CORFAPES Film Workshop, a psychosocial rehabilitation space for people with schizophrenia, come together to make a film about the end of the world. As they try to warn the authorities about an approaching asteroid, the group constructs a fiction in which their own experiences, fears and desires merge with the threat of the end of times.

As a strange disease spreads across a polluted coastal area, a young forensic cleaner looks after her sick sister.

Valentina (23) shares a room in a hostel in Paris. Her new roommate, Nadia (50), brusquely demands that she not look at her while she washes in the room’s sink. Intrigued by strange sounds, Valentina observes her and discovers a scar on her breast. Her impertinence sparks a tense conversation marked by hostility and prejudice, dividing them culturally, religiously, and linguistically.