The Stone Bridge

A portrait of the disenchanted youth of the city of Tolyatti, once a symbol of Soviet progress and the automobile, now devastated by economic decline. Laura Sistero encounters an aimless young generation, who express their dreams of escape through crazy races in old patched-up Ladas. A cinematic object is propelled by spectacular skids to the rhythm of an electro-rock soundtrack.

In 2018, a user called AnathematicAnarchist published a suicide note in an online forum for incels – a subculture of heterosexual men whose self-pity, misogyny and fantasies of violence dominate the internet in many places and trigger offline actions in some. Did he really take his own life? Is America responsible for his death, as he claims in his text? A search for clues in the darkest corners of the net, an essay about pain and loneliness in the age of algorithms.

Like each afternoon, Alicia makes herself a cup of tea and watches VictorGaming, her favorite YouTube channel. Victor, the YouTuber, is just streaming questions from his fans and answering them, but Alicia has something very important to tell him.

When Miren recognises Elena, who is driving a rental car, she starts chasing her on the road.

A brother and sister are hibernating. Only the sister wakes up. Human hibernation blurs the boundary between people and animals. A thought experiment equal parts sci-fi and meditation shot in searing images.

Pol is 21 years old and lives with his grandmother. He dreams of living in Miami and generating over $10,000 per month. He attends personal development events, follows online coaches, and invests in cryptocurrencies. Pol doesn't know when he'll achieve his goals to become the best version of himself. The only thing he knows is that one day, he will.

One hot spring day, Lluís has a strong argument with his father at the construction site where they work together as architects. As a result of this confrontation, Lluís forced himself to abandon all his responsibilities, pushing his deepest fears to the limit and feeling overwhelmed by the world around him. Instead of going to pick up his daughter Julia at his ex-partner's house, he begins an intense journey that will lead him to decide whether or not to take control of his life.

Natu, a young woman from Switzerland, spends some time in San Sebastian. There, she undergoes a training to recover her strained voice which she has harmed from both her strenuous job as a primary school teacher and her toxic relationship with her partner. While wandering around San Sebastian, she meets people who each show her their work: a woman who makes poetry books by hand, a group of retired people who make dolls for an annual Christmas stall and a researcher who investigates the pollution on leaves in the city park. Slowly, her personal way of looking at the world and the people takes more form and she starts to speak up.

A man takes care of his sick wife in an isolated country house. The unexpected appearance of a young blind girl will awake in him a deep desire: a desire he thought was asleep forever.

During a dynastic crisis in 14th century Portugal, the 10 year old Beatriz enters into a forced marriage to become the country’s new queen. At the Monastery of Sancti Spiritus in Toro, where the tomb of Beatriz is located, this story is re-enacted, re-imagined, and recreated with children of the same age. As their imagination is allowed to roam free, a different way to interact with their country’s history opens up.

A woman talks to us from inside a machine that records her brain activity. She describes a mental labyrinth combining an old amusement park called Dreamland, 19th-century dream photographs, contemporary experiments in mental decoding using AI, and Prophetic, a start-up whose goal is to control dreams. But what do our dreams see when they look back at us? "like moths to light" is a meditation on the future of our dream worlds in the age of neurocapitalism.

Under the heat of the sun at a Spanish archeological mission in northern Jordan, local workers dig the land for long hours. The wages are poor and the cost of living is on the rise. Abu Deya, a Palestinian Jordanian, wants to provide a different life for his family, but a criminal record stymies his efforts. Alex Sardà’s observational film sensitively documents one man's relationship to his family, the land and its laws. Ultimately, it questions the possibility of exorcising the past in a society that seems opposed to the notion of rehabilitation.

At the far end of Europe, on the southern border of Spain, lies Almería. It is a huge province completely covered with white plastic, harbouring Europe’s largest vegetable garden. It is the place where our tomatoes come from, even in winter. But under all the plastic, strange things happen… Today, the vegetable garden inevitably moves to Morocco. Spanish farmers dive well under their prices to keep in the race. 120.000 migrants work in slave-like conditions on the plantations.

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?

Lita has been afraid of lizards since she was little. Every summer, he returns to Lagartera, where his family's traditions are deeply rooted. During the celebration of Corpus Christi, while her grandmother dresses her, Lita discovers the roots of her fear.