Lullabies

A voice that claims to be from a hippopotamus. A voice that doesn’t understand the perception of time. Pepe, the first and last hippo killed in the Americas, tells his story with the overwhelming orality of these towns.

In the fictional city of Santa Teresa, located on the border between Mexico and USA, the researcher Juan de Dios Martínez straddles the line between journalism and detective work. Based on an unfinished book by Roberto Bolaño, his character investigates a handful of crimes and abuses perpetrated on women and workers of the zone.

A rapturous crime fable set in the Dominican Republic, Nelson Carlo De Los Santos Arias’ COCOTE follows Alberto, a kind-hearted gardener returning home to attend his father’s funeral. When he discovers that a powerful local figure is responsible for his father’s death, Alberto realizes that he’s been summoned by his family to avenge the murder. It’s an unthinkable act — especially for him, an Evangelical Christian. But as pressure mounts, he sees few ways out. Questions of faith, tradition and honor course through this electrifying film, which, seemingly at the speed of thought itself, jumps between film formats, colors, and aspect ratios, radically envisioning a community torn asunder by senseless violence.

She Said He Walks, He Said She Walks (2008) is nostalgia, bitter love and postures encapsulated in a skilled short film by Dominican Nelson Carlo de los Santos. Presents a resounding account of a relationship, subject to contemplation of four minutes. Sleazy love disoriented by the wandering wanderings of what was wanted and felt, within a complaint about the industrialized and prefabricated image that pollutes the natural feeling.

Gladys and her daughter live on the periphery of New York City where they share their isolated lives together in their own little space in the same house, which is their whole world. Hidden in a city that also hides from them, a New York that grows smaller as the two of them stay within their own four walls where they only speak Caribbean Spanish together, and a few words in English they have managed to remember.