Absences

A woman’s body on a bed. The camera follows her silhouette and slides out of the window to frame an urban landscape on the water’s edge. The sky and the sea share the horizon. A breath of freedom emerges from the images, like a dream in the shade of summer. A short effort made as part of the Pompeu Fabra film school, in Barcelona.

A farmer marries a neighbour’s daughter. When she falls ill, the man welcomes the woman’s sister into his home, forming an unusual family. They can’t have children. They adopt one, who is now married and has his own children. They all live together. A humanist film, against exclusion. In favour of sharing.

Eleven award winning directors explore why nearly one out of every two students in Latin America never graduates high school.

An arid landscape in which various people move around: a girl walks along holding a goldfish in a glass of water, children have fun with an empty bath tub, people at their window observe what’s happening. And finally, rain. Drought is treated with realism and oneirism in the filmmaker’s first work, made when she was still a film student.

A woman is recruited to a prison controlled by organized crime while another woman searches for her missing daughter. Through images that submerges us in a journey from north to south Mexico, both testimonies collide and take us to the center of a storm: a country where violence has taken control of our lives, our desires and our dreams.

Years after the Salvadoran military destroyed the village of Cinquera in that country’s civil war, survivors have returned to rebuild their community. Soulful, beautifully rendered, this amazing debut is an evocative testament to place, memory and the power of life to rebound from tragedy.

In a mountain town, where corn and poppies grow the girls wear boyish haircuts and have hiding places underground to escape the threat of being stolen. Ana and her two best friends grow up together, affirming the bonds of their friendship and discovering what it means to be women in a rural town marked by violence. Their mothers train them to flee death, to escape those who turn them into slaves or ghosts. They create their own impenetrable universe, but one day one of the girls doesn’t make it to her hiding place in time.

Dreams, voices that recount the violence in El Salvador, fights between gangs, mourning for the dead. And a feeling of fear that resonates in the words. On screen are girls, shown in the course of their daily lives, people who work, the details of their existence. A film that points at the deep disease of a society.