PROGRAMME 2023
19:30pm in Niessen Cinemas
MONDAY 20
10 watt bakarrik
Title: 10 watt bakarrik
Direction: Oier Fuentes
Duration: 19
Country of production: Spain
Original language: Basque
Subject: Censorship
Other festivals:
• Festival Internacional de Cine Documental de Navarra PUNTO DE VISTA (España)
• Bideodromo International Experimental Film and Video Festival
• Zinegin Festibala
• Timeless Awards International Festival (Time, Memory, Film)
Land, steps, bare wires, night, radio-waves, noise, distance, voices, hope, cassocks, cracks, found, crosses, sweeps, cuts, music, junctions, shades, guns, flutter of pigeons, silence, sky: just 10 Watts.
Oier Fuentes
Oier Fuentes (Arrasate, 1985) explores in his short films the relationship between sound and image, searching for new narratives [“mugakoloreak” (2019), “OAIA” (2020)], playing with collective memory and the passage of time [“gogor atzea” (2018), “Azken Saskia” (2016)] or with found footage [“aska tasun hari” (2017)]. He has participated in national and international exhibitions and festivals with several awards.
La Rotonda
Juanmi Gutiérrez Laboratory Grand Prize
Title: La Rotonda
Direction: Carmen Tortosa
Duration: 18
Country of production: Spain
Original language: Arabe
Subject: Migration
Other festivals:
• Beyond Borders Inetrnational Documentary Film Festival of Castellorizo (Grecia)
• Moinho Cine Fest (Portugal)
• International Migration & Enviromental Film Festival (Canadá)
• Moscow International Film Festival (Rusia)
• Docs Without Borders Film Festival (EEUU)
Bader and Yunes, Moroccan immigrants, survive in a settlement next to a busy roundabout on the road to a tourist resort on the Almeria coast. They show us their day to day. No one seems to notice them.
Carmen Tortosa
Doctor in medicine and addicted to the art that is shared. Her training in the area of filmmaking includes courses and workshops with filmmakers such as Manuel Menchón, Pedro Costa, José Luis Guerín, and Mercedes Álvarez. She is the director of “El tiempo de la sal, tras las huellas de Víctor Fernández Gopar”. In 2019, she co-directed with Daniela Cajías, Flavio Ferreira, Helder Faria and Alejandro Vázquez San Miguel, the short film “Mujer como Árbol”. “La Rotonda” is her latest documentary project.
Yo tenía una vida
Title: Yo tenía una vida
Direction: Octavio Guerra
Duration: 75
Country of production: Spain
Original language: Spanish
Subject: Living place
Other festivals:
• Agora Docs In Progress – Thessaloniki Documentary Festival (Grecia)
• Docsmx Impact Lab (México)
• Sección Oficial Documentales Largometrajes. Festival De Málaga (España)
• Sección Oficial Canarias Cinema. Festival Internacional De Cine De Las Palmas (España)
Jesús arrives at a housing and employment reincorporation centre after living on the streets for a decade. Now Jesús’ life is full of rules. His struggle doesn’t make sense if he is not free to make his own decisions. Elena, the coordinator of the supervised accommodation, is writing her thesis on the reincorporation of homeless people. Elena becomes his only emotional support
Octavio Guerra
Octavio Guerra, 1976, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Graduated in Information Sciences in Valencia, he is studying the Ibero-American Masters in Film and Television Scriptwriting at the Foundation for Audiovisual Research (FIA). He directs the short documentary film The Russian Machine nominated for the Goya Awards. His feature film In Search of the Oscar premieres at Berlin Critics’ Week. In Television he has worked as a director in the documentary series Acción Directa for TVE and has been the director of the documentary series Six Dreams for Amazon Prime, awarded by the National Academy of Television, Arts and Sciences of the United States with the Emmy for best television program. entertainment in Spanish.
TUESDAY 21
Acuatenientes
Special mention
Title: Acuatenientes
Direction: Andrés Gil, Michael Avila
Duration: 16
Country of production: Colombia
Original language: Ecuadorian
Subject: Ecology
Other festivals:
• Festival Sembrando Cine (Perú)
• Festival Internacional de cine documental DOCA (Argentina)
• MIDBO (Colombia)
• Festival Internacional De Cinema Ambiental Da Serra Da Estrela (Portugal)
At the north of Colombia there is a municipality called Zona Bananera which its economy is based on banana and palm oil crops, these plantations are mostly owned by landowners with large tracts of land. They are hoarding water and leaving several completely dry.
Andrés Gil, Michael Avila
Andrés Gil is a young Colombian filmmaker who focuses his career in documentary production. His first experience was as director of three chapters of the documentary television series “Ciudad Pantalla” made in 2019 by the Universidad del Magdalena and broadcast by the television channel Señal Colombia. From there he worked as general producer in the transmedia documentary project “La Piragua”, a collaborative platform to rescue hidden memories through orality. He was in Canada, where he had the opportunity to work on a project for The Firsts Nations University called “I Heart my Homeland”: Four Stories About Indigenous Sovereignty. Back in Colombia, he directed the documentary project “Acuatenientes”.
La memoria escondida
Title: La memoria escondida
Direction: José Luis Pecharromán
Duration: 92
Country of production: Spain
Original language: Spanish
Subject: Sexuality
Other festivals:
• Lesgaicinemad. Festival Internacional Lesbico, Gay Y Transexual De Madrid (España)
• Ficc – Festival Internacional De Cinema De Cerdanya (España)
“La Memoria Escondida” talks, through first-person conversations, about the situation and life experience of four members of the LGTBIQ+ collective, now older, at the end of the Franco regime and the Spanish transition. The project has a strong authorial component; It does not intend to add data or figures or reveal specific facts of the history of our country, but rather focuses on the emotional experiences of two elderly men and two women, who lived in this context of police criminalization, family exclusion, of social marginalization, and of employment and health discrimination, with underlying problems such as prostitution and AIDS.
José Luis Pecharromán
José Luis Pecharromán, (Madrid, 1970). Since 1997, after his time at ECAM, he began working as a Director of Photography for the most important production companies and in all production formats, being the visual creator of emblematic series such as «Herederos» and «La Otra Mirada» for TVE, or “Mar de Plástico” for Atresmedia. Other series are «Unauthorized Living» for Mediaset and Netflix, «Promesas de Arena» for TVE, «Hernán» for Amazon Prime Video or «Los Hombres de Paco» for Atresplayer. Among the projects yet to be released, it is worth mentioning the series «Los Pacientes del Doctor García«, an adaptation of the homonymous book by Almudena Grandes, produced by Diagonal Televisió and Dea Planeta for TVE and Netflix and the feature film “Camino de la Suerte”, produced by Lyo Media and Versus Entertainment.
WEDNESDAY 22
Volver
Title: Volver
Direction: Borja Larrondo, Diego Sánchez
Duration: 14
Country of production: Spain
Original language: Spanish
Subject: Sexuality
Other festivals:
• DOCA – Festival Internacional de Cine Documental (Argentina)
• Guanajuato International Film Festival (Mexico)
• Visioni Corte International Short Film Festival (Italia)
A group of artists from the LGTBIQ+ collective return to their hometowns aboard a pride float. A road movie that travels through the Spanish geography making visible the cultural clash with the most intransigent past.
Borja Larrondo, Diego Sánchez
Borja Larrondo. Filmmaker and photographer. His work is based on the exploration of narrative-visual worlds, as well as experimental documentary. “Volver” is his second short film as director, after “The road bad and the place dark” (2021).
Diego Sánchez. Asturian documentary filmmaker whose personal interests focus on society, which he documents through the image and where personal growth and introspective reflection become his main objectives. Together with Borja Larrondo he forms the collective The Kids Are Right, a label born for the development, experimentation and research through the image. “Volver” is his first short film as director.
Decían que era bruja
Title: Decían que era bruja
Direction: Judith Prat Molet
Duration: 20
Country of production: Spain
Original language: Catalán
Subject: Feminism
Other festivals:
• Festival de Mujeres de Chiclana (España)
• Festival Directed by Women (España)
Women who now live in the Pyrenees, in places where the most fervent witch-hunting once took place, now talk about the reality of femicide from between the 15th and 18th centuries. They invite us to delve into their own lives and themselves.
Judith Prat Molet
Judith Prat Molet had so far ventured into the audiovisual field with “Tú siéntate”, a complementary work to her photojournalistic projects. Now she presents her film documentary “Decían que era bruja”.
Remember my name
Title: Remember my name
Direction: Elena Molina
Duration: 76
Country of production: Spain, France, Qatar
Original language: Arabic, Spanish
Subject: Migration
Other festivals:
• Sección Oficial Documentales Largometrajes. Festival De Málaga – Premio del público (España)
• L’Alternativa / Festival de Cinema Independent de Barcelona – Seccions Paral·leles (España)
After crossing the Melilla fence from Morocco, Ihsane enters the “Divina Infantita” nuns’ reception centre, where Assia and Nuhaila live. Hamza turns 18 and has to leave La Purísima, the reception centre for unaccompanied boys. They all arrived alone in Melilla but have found a new family: the NANA dance company. After months of hard work, they are selected to participate in a famous TV talent show, where they experience a mirage that seems to take them away from their reality for a few days and that vanishes in a flash when the spotlight goes out.
Elena Molina
Elena Molina trained in Madrid, Perugia and Barcelona. She directed the feature film Rêve de Mousse (2018) and the shorts Le cimetière des marionnettes (2015), Quand j’étais petit (2016), Laatash (2018), All I need is a ball (2020) and YUNGAY7020 (2021), prize-winners at Visions du Réel, Zinebi, Alcances and the British Film Institute.
THURSDAY 23
Vigilia en Cayara
Title: Vigilia en Cayara
Direction: Luis Cintora
Duration: 8
Country of production: Peru, Spain
Original language: Spanish
Subject: Ethnic minorities
Other festivals:
• EMIA Encuentro y Muestrario de Investigaciones Audiovisuales (Mexico)
• Give Peace a Screen (Italia)
• Festival Globale Bogotá (Colombia)
• Festival de cine social y comunitario Invicines (Argentina)
On the night of 13 May, the inhabitants of the High-Andean village of Cayara in Peru recall the massacre they suffered by the Peruvian Army in 1988 in an intimate wake where they strengthen their communal ties.
Luis Cintora
During the last decade he has been involved in documentary filmmaking and human rights advocacy projects in countries such as Peru, Ecuador, Chile, Mongolia, Algeria and Somalia. He has made a series of 14 documentaries on the memory and violence of the internal armed conflict in Peru. He has just finished two new feature documentaries: “Un Viaje hacia nosotros” and “Este fue nuestro castigo”, a last work of his documentary series on the memory of violence in the region of Ayacucho, Peru.
LYRA
Audience Award “Ion Arretxe” for Best Feature Film
Title: LYRA
Direction: Alison Millar
Duration: 94
Country of production: Ireland, United Kingdom
Original language: English
Subject: Armed conflicts
Other festivals:
• DocsBarcelona – Premio Amnistia Internacional de Cataluña (España)
• Sheffield International Documentary Festival (Reino Unido)
• Santa Barbara International Film Festival (EEUU)
• Belfast Film Festival (Reino Unido)
On 17 April 2019 Lyra McKee was murdered in the city of Derry (Ireland) by the new IRA. She was only 29. Lyra was a celebrated Northern Irish investigative journalist and LGTBIQ+ activist who had the courage to ask the uncomfortable questions that no one in her country seemed willing to ask. Torn by the structural conflict in her homeland, Lyra was never held back by fear, convinced that ending the violence was possible.
Alison Millar
Alison Millar is one of the U.K. and Ireland’s most respected documentary filmmakers. She is a BAFTA, IFTA and Prix Italia winner as well as winning both the UK and Northern Ireland Royal Television Society award in 2016 for Channel 4’s Dispatches documentary Kids In Crisis. In 2010, Alison founded Erica Starling Productions Ltd, an independent documentary production company in Belfast.
FRIDAY 24
Agur artzai
Audience Award “Ion Arretxe” for Best Short/Medium Film
Title: Agur artzai
Direction: Julien Zubiete
Duration: 26
Country of production: Spain
Original language: Basque, Spanish
Subject: Tradition
Other festivals:
• Flight – Mostra Int.del Cinema di Genova (Italia)
• Grand OFF – World Independent Short Film Awards (Polonia)
• Festival International du Film de Montagne Autrans (Francia)
• Mediterranean Film Festival (Bosnia y Herzegovina)
• DokuBaku Documentary Film Festival (Azerbaiyán)
• Festival de Cine de Gibara (Cuba)
Julen approaches Jose, one of the last shepherds of his town, wanting to portray a way of life that ends. In the time that both spend together the doors to the past open to observe what has remained behind.
Julien Zubiete
After graduating in Audiovisual Communication at the University of the Basque Country, he furthered his studies in several film schools such as EICTV in Cuba and EFTI in Madrid. In 2019 he completed a Master’s Degree in Film Directing at ESCAC in Barcelona where he wrote and directed several short films in addition to starting the development of his first feature film. From there he began his career as a filmmaker combining his professional career with the development of different personal works.
Malqueridas
Title: Malqueridas
Direction: Tana Gilbert
Duration: 75
Country of production: Chile, Germany
Original language: Spanish
Subject: Feminism
Other festivals:
• Venice Settimana Internazionale della Critica (Italia)
• Festival Internacional de Cine de Valdivia (Chile)
• Festival Internacional de Cine de Mar Del Plata (Argentina)
• Semana Internacional de Cine de Valladolid. Seminci (España)
They are women. They are mothers. They are prisoners serving long sentences in a correctional facility in Chile. Their children grow up far from them, but remain in their hearts. In prison, they find affection in other partners who share their situation. Mutual support among these women becomes a form of resistance and empowerment. Malqueridas builds their stories through images captured by them with cell phones inside the prison, recovering the collective memory of a forgotten community.
Tana Gilbert
Tana Gilbert (Chile) is a filmmaker. His documentary shorts have screened at such international festivals as Hot Docs, RIDM Montreal, Chicago International Film Festival, Valdivia International Film Festival and SEMINCI, among others. He holds a Master’s in documentary film from the University of Chile and teaches at different universities in her country.