Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola

A lively geologist working as an intern at the Prehistory and Paleontological Museum of Orce in Granada meets a badly hurt shepherd. This chance encounter plants the seed of Historia de pastores, an adventurous film that finds a perfect mixture between the old and the new. Dwelling equally on orality and charged silence, suggestion and contemplation, Jaime Puertas Castillo builds an engaging narrative of rural life in the south of Spain – punctuated by extraneous elements plus some powerful, surprising twists.

A strange weapon of optical complexity is able to project an enormous dazzling light over the territory. Precisely aimed, the ray can cause the spread of colossal heat, enough to destroy everything. The night is extinguished, the earth burns, the creatures run away groping towards the depths of the world. In the dark holes of the earth the space expands enough to imagine a refuge where another imaginary may appear.

The making of a soldier in Peru. A group of young men, some of them teenagers, voluntarily enlists in a rigorous military program within the Peruvian Armed Forces. They are driven by their desire to engage in an ongoing armed conflict in the VRAEM, an area with military intervention framed by a 'war on drugs' policy. They aspire to become ‘men of war’ and embark on a transformative journey from hopeful adventurers into soldiers. Amidst the violence in the secluded military environment in Peru, intimate moments unfold beyond a prejudiced gaze, where compassion and care blossom among them.

An adaptation of “Sea Foam”, a chapter from Cesare Pavese’s “Dialoghi con Leucò” published in 1947. The ancient Greek poet Sappho and the nymph Britomartis meet beside the sea and have a conversation about love and death. Sappho is said to have thrown herself into the ocean from lovesickness. Britomartis apparently tumbled off a cliff and into the water while fleeing from a man. Together, the two discuss the stories and images that have emerged around them to try and understand, at least for a moment, the bittersweet nature of desire.

In a village in the Extremadura province of Spain, where bullfighting and the Catholic faith have long been a way of life, 16-year-old Tristán is training to become a bullfighter. His mother silently but anxiously observes his preparations. He practices graceful moves and posture, but he is plagued by insecurity and fear of the fight to come. TO DIE BEFORE DYING tells a personal story about a controversial reality of the 21st century.

My father only used a camera once in his life. Thirty years later, he asked me to digitise the material he had filmed. I was wondering what he remembers. Created from an impulse to rethink and rewatch personal archive footage, the film explores memory and its relation to documentation and non-institutional archive practices. Connecting politics with intimate spaces, the documentary questions both the influence of war on private archives and the role of gardens as places of new begginings.

A hairdresser's shop in Madrid crowded with people who come to see and touch a replica of the Virgin of Quinche. A priest proposes to take the statue to a church downtown. The story continues when the replica of the Virgin is returned to the barbershop after an angry crowd disagrees with the way the priest handles things. So, I decide to write a letter to the priest. Offer him a deal he can't refuse.

Video installation study between landscape, a woman, and the portrait of both.

A baby is bathed by its mother, who sings: “When I was a young girl…”. Later, a little girl’s voice will pick up the thread: “When I’ll be an old lady…”. Between the two, the film sketches an anthropology of all the different games, wonders, and plays with auditory perceptions that children carry out with water in all its shapes (baths, sprinklers, lakes…). But other dimensions are hinted at: an exploration of its meanings for mankind, a kaleidoscope of its movements, textures, and reflections, a spectrum of the scales in which it is to be contemplated. (Nathan Letoré)