Pablo Alvarez Mesa

Facing the death of his country’s glaciers and the loss of his beloved grandparents, Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason turns his archives into a time capsule to hold what is slipping away — family, memory, time, and water.

A doomed love triangle between intrepid French scientists Katia and Maurice Krafft, and their beloved volcanoes.

Weeping Rocks follows Art, an entomologist nearing the end of his life, who has spent over five decades walking the same ten trails, meticulously counting every butterfly he sees and witnessing the slow erosion of the world. His eccentric, patient research has uncovered patterns of decline that went unnoticed for years, revealing the deep environmental impact of detrimental human activities. As time reshapes the landscape and species fade, Art’s journey becomes a meditation on mortality, change, and the beauty of what remains.

Hurricane María abated, the news crews packed up and left Puerto Rico, and the interest of the international community turned elsewhere. What happened next?

'La Pesca' portrays a day in the life of a family of fishermen in Colombia. With poetry and sensorial richness, the film captures the gestures of these men as they weave nets, cook, and play dominoes, all the while waiting for the fish to come so that they can recommence anew.

Follows a young woman named Audrey Benac on a research odyssey of ghostly possession in which she endeavours to restore the legacy of the forgotten Canadian violinist Kathleen Parlow.

Retracing Simón Bolívar's liberation campaign across Colombia, searching for The Liberator's ghost in the high altitude marshlands.

Pushing at the limits of non-fiction cinema, A Man Imagined is a bracingly intimate and hallucinatory portrait of a man with schizophrenia surviving amidst urban detritus and decay. Made in close collaboration with 67-year-old Lloyd, this immersive documentary fable follows the jagged path of a decades-long street survivor, across harsh winters and blistering summers, as he sells discarded items to motorists, sleeps in junkyards and lapses into near-psychedelic reveries.

Juanicas is an intimate portrait of a Mexican immigrant family in Quebec affected by mental illness. Using material shot over almost 10 years, the filmmaker documents her complex relationship with her mother and brother, both suffering from bipolar disorder.

Alan built a castle in rural Illinois with his late love Adrianne. Facing life alone, he revisits their fantasy through musical reenactments transporting him to the world they shared.

“In this meditative essay on the infamous Cuban prison of Panopticon design, the walls in the prison crumble revealing a past that has been covered by layers of thick yellow paint. Exquisite photography and lyric narration reveal a world where pain left unvisited turns into amnesia; history cannot absolve everything.” – BIG SKY FILM FESTIVAL

Drifting between moving-image formats and collaging local textures and bygone voices, Oscar Ruiz Navia’s film reflects on loss and mourning as experiences of temporal dislocation.

In this short lyrical film, haunting childhood memories, photographs and family stories form the heart of a woman's search for transformation. A descent into the labyrinths of memory, the film documents Jelena's recollections of her childhood in both Croatia and Canada, resulting in a fragmentary reconstruction of her past. With candour and sensitivity, Jelena reclaims her own identity, disarming us with her courage and will.

The 𝘳𝘶𝘴𝘩𝘦𝘴 evidence the presence of the person filming, revealing their movement and their center; they are the record of a hesitation seeking balance, testimony to the measurement of time. In that sustained gaze that pursues the precision of a gesture, meanings and bewilderment suddenly unfold. Filming, then, is the construction of a logic permeated by speculation, which in turn fertilizes it.

Anonymous voices follow one another, leaving messages on an answering machine, creating a purely auditive experience. The messages are destined for various recipients, some identified and some not. From one voice to the next, the tone shifts from recognition and joy to boredom and anger. The degree of familiarity varies; the messages range from banal matters to the serious illness of a relative. All these voices have the goal of being heard on the other end of the line and eventually receiving an answer. Infinite Distances explores how we communicate, evoking recent nostalgia for the landline and pointing to our fundamental need to connect, share, and be heard.

Colombian teenagers study the traditional art of bullfighting in the sleepy town of Choachi. They live and train in an oasis of teen aged camaraderie and dreams for the future. But when bullfighting becomes banned in Bogota, the boys' sanctuary slowly becomes susceptible to society's larger struggles of class and conflict. Inspired by the watchful eye of retired bullfighter Nicolas, the bullfighting students strive to succeed first as Matadors, then as role models themselves. Interpreting bullfighting as a living metaphor for personal, social and historical struggles, the film focuses on the individual experiences of these boys and their mentor as they try to break free of the bleak future being dictated to them by Colombian society.

Frank Furko, an 80-year-old eccentric in the Pittsburgh suburbs, takes stock of his life and tries to reconcile his forty years working on the family farm with his domineering father, the end of his 20 year marriage, and his role as a celebrity derived from Pudgie Wudgie, his 20-pound performing house-cat. Supported by Frank's twenty years of VHS video archives, the film explores memory, loss, friendship and mortality.

Exactly 200 years after Simón Bolívar’s Colombian war of independence, a campaign that ran from late May to early August 1819, filmmaker Pablo Alvarez-Mesa follows the iconic Libertador’s route through the country. At each historic battleground, he calls on a medium to summon the general’s spirit, helping Alvarez-Mesa reveal Bolívar’s permanent and more or less visible presence in an array of social rituals and state structures. This historic legacy, after two centuries transfigured into a blend of political mysticism and unchallenged military doctrine, remains an integral part of Colombia’s collective unconscious. It keeps finding new expression in an endless cycle of violence, which this intriguing medium-length film seeks to exorcise. (Charlotte Selb)