Bones Of Contention

Bones Of Contention explores the theme of historical memory in post-Franco Spain, focusing on the unknown story of LGBT repression under Franquismo. What happened to LGBT people during Spain's fascist regime? This film uncovers their stories and breaks their silence for the first time.

Lining the roads of Spain, masked by miles and miles of pine trees, are unmarked graves in which over a hundred twenty thousand victims of the Franco regime are buried. Among them is Spain's most famous poet, Federico García Lorca, who has become the symbol for both the historical memory and LGBT movements. The film explores the examined history of LGBT oppression during Spain's fascist regime, and places it within the larger human rights struggle to find some justice for Franco's victims. But how does a country excavate a past that is actively suppressed

Original title: Bones of Contention
Year: 2017
Length: 75 min.
Country: United States / Spain
Director: Andrea Weiss
Production company: Jezebel Productions
Sound Design: Sergio Fernández Borrás
Genre: Documentary 

The Land Of Azaba

Addressing climate change is the existential question of our time, but climate change and bio-diversity loss are two sides to the same coin. The Land of Azaba is the first feature documentary on the subject of ecological restoration, and it is set in one of the world's first "hot spots" for increasing and maintaining bio-diversity, Campanarios de Azaba Nature Reserve in Western Spain. The Land of Azaba immerses the viewer in a magical world where humans and wildlife work together to restore the largest remaining tract of wild nature in western Europe. The survival of many rare and endangered species, including ancient oaks, insects, vultures, aurochs and horses, is at stake.

Original title: The Land of Azaba

Year: 2020
Length: 84 min.
Country: United States / Spain
Director: Greta Schiller
Production company: Jezebel Productions
Music: Philip Glass, Paul Simon
Cinematography: Tom Hurwitz, Laura Sipán
Sound Recorder / Sound Design: Sergio Fernández Borrás
Genre: Documentary

In a Whisper

Childhood Childhood friends Patricia and Heidi grew up in Cuba, where they both went to the film academy. As children of the 1970s, they were brought up with the communist ideals of Che Guevara, but the promised bright future failed to materialize. Independently of each other, they fled the malaise and censorship of their homeland. Heidi ended up in Switzerland, Patricia in Spain. They had no contact for years.

Now both 40, they seek a way to approach each other again, choosing the medium that suits them best: video letters. Both have continued to film their lives, even though it seemed unlikely that they would ever work in film again. In their frank audiovisual communication, the two migrants recount all the roundabout routes they have taken in their lives: Patricia's years selling mojitos, Heidi's search for work and connection with society in Geneva, and the struggle with alienation and nostalgia for a country that no longer exists.

The result of the letters, ingeniously edited into a chronological yet freewheeling whole, is a sensitive, two-sided account of uprootedness, motherhood, love of film, friendship and freedom.

Original title: A Media Voz
Year: 2019
Length: 80 min.
Country: Cuba
Director: Heidi Hassan, Patricia Pérez Fernández
Screenplay: Heidi Hassan, Patricia Pérez Fernández
Cinematography: Heidi Hassan, Patricia Pérez Fernández, Joakim Chardonnens, Lucía C. Pan, Blaise Villars, Almudena Sánchez, David Rodríguez Alfonso
Production company: Coproduction Cuba-Spain-France-Switzerland; Matriuska Producciones, Perspective Films, La 5ª Avenida Producciones, PCT Cinéma & Télévision S.A
Sound Recorder / Sound Design: Sergio Fernández Borrás
Genre: Documentary

Peter Plan

A Thoreau-like portrait of Peter, a blind rock musician who decides to move to the mountains, far from the comforts of the big city.

Several years have passed since Peter decided to move to Plan, an isolated village in the Aragonese Pyrenees. Far from the advantages of the big city for a blind man, he survives as best he can on his art: rock music. Despite the recording of his latest album, the routine life of this small town weighs on his mood, haunted by old memories. Something is about to fade in the Chistau Valley, the seasons go on forever and the echo of the shearing becomes heavier and heavier.

Original title: Peter Plan

Year: 2019
Length: 74 min.
Country: Spain Spain
Director: Jean Castejón Gilabert
Screenplay: Jean Castejón Gilabert
Photography: Jean Castejón Gilabert
Sound Design / Sound Mix: Sergio Fernández Borrás
Genre: Documentary

The Hidden City

The vast labyrinth of tunnels, sewage pipes and subway stations forms an immense web on which the city rests and depends. You could see it as a purely functional space, but also as a symbolic, hidden region-the city's subconsciousness.

This eerie subterranean zone is also home to rats, cats and owls, making the urban underbelly an organism unto itself. As it feels its way along dark, mysterious tunnels that seem to have been made to get lost in, this visual masterpiece reveals a world usually hidden from our gaze.

Original title: La ciudad oculta

Year: 2018
Length: 80 min.
Country: Spain 
Director: Víctor Moreno
Script: Víctor Moreno
Music: Juan Carlos Blancas
Photography: Jose Alayon
Production company: El viaje producciones
Sound Recorder: Sergio Fernández Borrás
Genre: Documentary

Otra Isla

Spain 2012. A family of Cuban dissidents, repudiated by the Castro government and abandoned to their fate by the host country, camps for months in a square in Madrid, a tributary of the communist regime that molded them, heir to its successes as well as its mistakes, the family will have to face the capitalism they had dreamed of.

Original title: Otra isla

Year: 2014
Length: 70 min.
Country: Cuba
Director: Heidi Hassan
Screenplay: Heidi Hassan, Patricia Pérez Fernández
Cinematography: Heidi Hassan
Production Company: Cuba-Switzerland-Spain Coproduction; Alva Film, Light Night
Sound Design: Sergio Fernández Borrás
Genre: Documentary

A todos nos gusta el plátano

Seven black people star in an attempt to make a film. A choral, intimate and warm portrait.

And when he woke up, Black Lives Matter was also Spanish. 

Photographer Rubén H. Bermúdez, whose book Y tú, ¿por qué eres negro? in 2018 was a turning point in the visibilization of the Afro-descendant community in Spain, now presents the audiovisual evolution of his work. A choral, warm and mature feature film, in which he entrusts the camera to seven black people in Spain to try to make a film. Self-representation, doubts, in an intimate, fragmentary and necessarily partial portrait. Skins, bodies that are filmed in intimacy, that speak, are listened to and exposed." Gonzalo de Pedro, Cineteca Madrid.

Original title: A todos nos gusta el plátano (We all like bananas)

Year: 2021
Length: 60 min.
Country: Spain
Director: Rubén H. Bermúdez
Script: Rubén H. Bermúdez
Production Company: 16 de Febrero Films
Sound Design: Sergio Fernández Borrás
Genre: Documentary

The Swimming Pool

Under the supervision of Esteban, an enigmatic and not at all authoritarian swimming instructor, four teenagers with different disabilities spend the day at the public swimming pool in the Cuban neighborhood of Miramar, where they usually exercise. Diana has half of her leg amputated, Dany suffers from Down syndrome, Rodrigo has motor difficulties and, for some unknown reason, Oscar refuses to speak. The Havana sky foreshadows the arrival of a storm that is reflected on the trembling water of the pool. In the same place with few characters, the action takes place deaf, subway, tangent. Everything counts: the looks, the gestures, the noises, the silences... In the pool there is a situation of waiting, of something that nobody knows what it is.

Original title: La piscina

Year: 2011
Length: 66 min.
Country: Cuba
Director: Carlos Quintela
Screenplay: Abel Arcos
Cinematography: Raúl Rodríguez Cabrera
Production Company: Alter Producciones Audiovisuales, Centro Nacional Autónomo de Cinematografía (CNAC) (I), Fundación Villa del Cine, ICAIC, Ibermedia
Sound Design / Sound Mix: Sergio Fernández Borrás
Film Genre: Fiction

Gure Oroitzapenak

Gure oroitzapenak, is a collective film based on the work of Joseba Sarrionandia.

For a long time Joseba Sarrionandia has been a faceless poet. As if he had been frozen, for thirty years he has remained a black and white photo for the Basques. A single portrait. Absence.

The aim of the film 'Gure oroitzapenak' is to outline Sarri's face in the audiovisual. And that face is none other than the one that for years have shaped his poems, his stories, his essays... his literature. That is why our way of capturing him in images is to bring his poems and stories to the cinema.

Twelve filmmakers from the Basque Country and three other countries make up this collective project composed of twelve pieces. All the authors have a relationship with the writer from Iurreta, either personal, of affection or admiration for his literature.

But, in addition, it is a common work in which, in one way or another, more than two hundred people have embarked. We would like to express our gratitude and recognition to all of them.

Original title: Gure oroitzapenak

Year: 2018
Length: 96 min.
Country: Spain
Director: Oskar Alegria, Özcan Alper, Asier Altuna, Mireia Gabilondo, Eugène Green, Itziar Leemans, Josu Martinez, Fermín Muguruza, Ane Muñoz Mitxelena, Maider Oleaga
Script: Asier Altuna, Mireia Gabilondo, Eugène Green, Itziar Leemans, Josu Martinez, Fermín Muguruza, Ane Muñoz Mitxelena, Maider Oleaga, Carlos Quintela, Maialen Sarasua Oliden
Photography: Javier Agirre Erauso, David Bernués, Heidi Hassan, Aritz Moreno, Rita Noriega, Raphaël O'Byrne, Juantxo Sardón
Production Company: Adabaki Eroizpenak, Gastibeltza Filmak
Sound Recorder: Sergio Fernández Borrás
Film Genre: Fiction

Las lentejas y el destino

The bar Onis is one of the countless bars in the center of Madrid. Every day, Madrileneans meet here to eat, for a coffee in the morning or a drink in the evening. The bar was opened in 1976 by five brothers who left their village of Zamora, in the north of Spain, to go to Madrid and earn money as waiters. For the past 40 years, they have been working together here, in their bar, every day.

Original title: Las lentejas y el Destino

Year: 2017
Length: 75 min.
Country: Spain
Director: Miguel Müller-Frank
Cinematography: Lauara Hansen
Production Company: Kunsthochschule fur medien koln / Miguel Müller-Frank
Sound Recorder: Sergio Fernández Borrás
Genre: Documentary

Quiero hacer una película

Tony (26 years old) is fascinated by Neisy (28 years old) during the Rolling Stones concert in Havana. While following her everywhere he decides to make a secret documentary about her life. He infiltrates her house and from under her bed begins to film her intimacy. Thus, he becomes a witness of Neisy's generational conflicts with her mother, her bisexuality and her ways of earning her daily bread. This privileged approach makes Tony fall in love with her. But one day he will be discovered and the story will change radically.

Original title: Quiero hacer una película

Year: 2020
Length: 91 min.
Country: Cuba
Director: Yimit Ramírez
Cinematography: Yimit Ramírez, Neisy Alpízar, Tony Alonso
Production Company: Coproducción Cuba-México-Francia;
Sound Design / Sound Mix: Sergio Fernández Borrás
Genre: Fiction

Jirafas

Original title: Jirafas

Year: 2013
Length: 90 min.
Country: Cuba
Director: Enrique Álvarez
Cinematography: YNicolas Ordóñez
Production Company: Cuba-Panama-Colombia Coproduction; Galaxia 311, Pol-Ka Producciones, Open Roads Media, Producciones Largasluces
Sound Recorder: Sergio Fernández Borrás
Genre: Documentary

BATERÍA

In the interiors of an old fortress, today converted into a clandestine place for sexual encounters, we immerse ourselves in the experience of gay men who find refuge behind ruined walls.

Piscina Municipal

The swimming pool of a small town is an obligatory visit for its inhabitants. From morning to night, bodies of all ages parade to practice or learn to swim. It seems a mechanical, routine act; however, the hidden voice behind each swimmer emerges and we gain access to their intimacy, inhabited by dreams, memories and daily occupations. At night, the empty, silent space and the certainty of having witnessed a fragment of existence.

Original title: Piscina Municipal
Year: 2013
Length: 38 min.
Country: España / Cuba
Director: Patricia Pérez Fernández
Screenplay: Patricia Pérez Fernández
Cinematography: Heidi Hassan
Sound Design / Sound Mix: Sergio Fernández Borrás
Genre: Documentary