Sergio Garot

After 40 days, Marina finally sees the light. A coffee shop, a milkshake, a croissant, and a lot of bad blood.

In this small village in Extremadura, population has been declining since the 1960s, driven away by unemployment. Alberto Martín Menacho returns to this region he knows intimately, and together with local youths, spins stories in a reality suspended between tradition and modernity, human and animal, between a thousand-year-old oak tree and Tinder. A strikingly graceful debut film.

Bombs fall down while a mother sings to her daughters. Nature shivers. Houses become empty. 9-year-old Emilia is about to learn that the war around her is not a game anymore.

Raquel and Maika are two neighbors who have been at war for 10 years. The former has been diagnosed with a mental illness. The second struggles to survive in the face of the ghosts of her past. Neither of them knows which came first: war or madness, repression or freedom, common sense or delirium. Both relate to each other as if they were those two Spains that refuse to disappear.

On another day, a group of policemen guard the outskirts of a city. There is no one else on the streets. They wait for an order to go into action. However, that order never comes and a state of confusion and disorientation begins to take hold of them, until they forget what they were doing there.

The search for a territory. The absence of the recognizable and familiar. The cartography of a landscape traced by memory and remembrance.

Vera is not yet 18 and has lost her virginity by having cybersex. In her town, nobody looks at her as a woman. But everything can change when the possibility of being "the maidens" of the town's festivities comes up among her group of friends. To achieve this, the mayor has to call them... but Vera has not received that call so far.

Activist brigades organise a green-fingered resistance against destructive plants and neglected overgrowth around their villages in Galicia. The files they use to sharpen their chainsaws are sourced from a metal factory in Switzerland. Through these two territories, the filmmaker weaves an unexpected narrative - at once personal and political.