2014

“Good morning, grandmas and grandpas. Today I want to share with you the sounds I recorded on a rainy day,” says the radio announcer, the residents of Father Hurtado’s nursing home listening quietly to the daily broadcast. They wait patiently to hear news of those who have passed away, like a tired passenger awaits the arrival of the last train. Poetic and deeply human, The Last Station is an insightful portrait of life in a Chilean nursing home, where residents embark with determination upon their every chore.

Silvio Vega, a grandfather approaching the final stage of his life, demands that two of his grandchildren take his life because he wants to die by the hand of someone who bears his own blood. To fulfill this wish, they travel together to the plains of Casanare, Colombia, where Silvio lived in his younger days. However, when the grandchildren discover the truth about their grandfather’s past, they will defy his wishes, keeping him alive, agonizing, as punishment for his past actions.

Icaros explores the spiritual universe of the Shipibo, an Indigenous people who live by the Ucayali river, one of the main tributaries of the Peruvian Amazon. Mokan Rono, a young Shipibo man, sets out on a journey to discover the ancestral knowledge of ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic tonic made from plants that is known for its cathartic and life-changing powers. He is mentored by an elder shaman who instructs him how to prepare for the experience, and his mother, a master healer.

The immediate impact and dramatic photos from natural disasters dominate the media. But what about the period afterwards? This quietly powerful documentary captures the devastation and heroism of a community in those months and years after such a crisis. Filmed during four years in Chaitén in the south of Chile, it tells the story of a group of people who re-occupy their town, which was partly buried by a volcanic eruption and flood, in order to stop the authorities from forcing them to abandon it.

Analía is a 20-year-old girl from a small town in Argentina who travels to Buenos Aires to deliver some handicrafts for her mother. By chance, an address mix-up leads her to a Muslim neighbourhood where she finds herself taking part in a ritual completely unknown to her. She is given several objects that seem to harbour a mysterious message: these include a tunic, a map and a recipe in Farsi. Enthralled by the new world she has entered, Analía decides to change her identity, and she begins to dress, speak and act like a young Muslim woman.

Based on a true story that occurred in 1974, The Quispe Girls is the tale of three Coya sisters, Justa, Lucía and Luciana Quispe, who live on the rugged, isolated slopes of the Chilean Altiplano. They live an intimate and solitary existence as goatherders, with minimal contact with the outside world. The recent death of a fourth sister and hushed whisperings from the south of a brutal new political regime, force the sisters into an existential quest that will threaten their entire way of life. An exquisite and haunting meditation on the profundity of loss.

Using as a starting point a 1911 ethnographic film by Swedish explorer Erland Nordenskiöld, a Bolivian filmmaker and a Guaraní guide travel together through the forests of southeastern Bolivia with the intention of making a film about the Guaraní people. Each man creates and interprets his own character, walking the thin line between documentary, fiction and performance. The journey not only takes them to the interior of the country but to their own inner selves, as they seek to define their identities within a country undergoing enormous social, political and historical change.

Featuring an impressive roster of Cuba’s stage and film actors, Gerardo Chijona’s charming new film centres around two elderly gentlemen and the women they once loved. Still mourning the death of his wife Maruja, Lino Catalá’s now simple life is turned topsy-turvy when Larry Po, a man suffering from multiple personalities, informs him that Maruja led a double life as a bolero singer. Both men join forces to find out the truth about Maruja and the whereabouts of Esther Rodenas, the great love of Larry’s life.

Alex, a 16-year-old teenager who lives with his grandmother in Guadalajara, has various plans for the summer: writing a new song with his punk rock band, finding a job and having his first sexual experience. He has also become aware that his grandmother is starting to become increasingly dependent on him. As summer draws on, Alex realizes that things are going to change forever and that he will have to grow up and learn to say goodbye.

Junior is nine years old and has stubbornly curly hair. He wants to have it straightened for his yearbook picture, like a fashionable pop singer with long, ironed hair. This puts him at odds with his mother Marta, a young, unemployed widow. Already overwhelmed by what it takes to survive in the chaotic city of Caracas, Marta finds it increasingly difficult to tolerate Junior’s fixation with his looks. The more Junior tries to look sharp and make his mother love him, the more she rejects him, until he is cornered, face to face with a painful decision.