Shorts in Competition – Program 1

EL TORITO, A FREEDOM DANCE
El Torito, una danza libre

Director: Roberto Salazar
Mexico, 2021 | Spanish with English subtitles | 10 min

“There’s no feast without TORITO!” It’s what people say. 

The LGBTQ+ community in Silao, Guanajuato appropriates one of the characters of the popular “El Torito” dance and finds a voice in society through the famous icon, “La Marínguía”.

Winner of the Identity and Belonging contest at the Guanajuato International Film Festival.

Roberto Antonio Salazar Aguiñaga was born in the city of Silao, Guanajuato, in 1990. He studied Graphic Design at the University of Guanajuato, where he started photographing people, portraying their stories, their environment and their lifestyle. El Torito, a freedom dance is his first work as a documentary filmmaker and his first approach to cinema.

WHEN THE NIGHT COMES
Cuando llegue la noche

Dir. Feguenson Hermogène
Cuba, 2022 | Creole and Spanish with English subtitles | 12 min

On a trip down memory lane, Fefe dedicates a letter to his seamstress mother who lives far away. Upon meeting Martha, a Cuban seamstress, Fefe reflects on the sewing trade and the struggle of mothers to support their children.

Feguenson Hermogène (Haiti, 1988) studied sociology at the Université D’Etat d’Haïti. After many workshops in making, producing at the Fondation Connaissance et Liberté (Fokal) in Port-au-Prince, he made his first documentary La déchirure in 2016. This film won an Honorable Mention at the Libélula Dorada International Short Film Festival of the Dominican Republic in 2016 and was selected at various festivals in France, Canada, and the United States. In 2019, he worked as a production assistant on the film Zombie Child by French director Bertrand Bonello, which was selected for the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes. In 2020, Feguenson worked as a production assistant on the Haitian feature Malatchong from director Bruno Mural at Muska Films. Before joining the EICTV documentary chair, he made various audiovisual reports for the newspaper Ayibopost.com.

THIS, THAT I CARRY INSIDE
Esto, que llevo dentro

Dir. Enrique Pedraza-Botero
Colombia, 2022 | Spanish with English subtitles | 6 min

In a letter to an artist lost to suicide at age twenty-eight, a filmmaker revisits his own battle with a rare anxiety disorder, forging an intimate relationship with his mother.

Enrique Pedraza-Botero is a visual artist and filmmaker from Bogotá, Colombia. He served as Manager of Sundance Institute’s Documentary Film Program for five years, running creative labs (Edit and Story Lab, Music and Sound Design Lab, Art of Editing Lab). He was Senior Programmer for Ambulante Documentary Film Festival and has worked with other arts organizations such as Film Independent. Enrique holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Film & Television from the New York Film Academy and an MFA in Documentary Film & Video at Stanford University. 

His work focuses on identity, memory and the complexity of home, aiming to break conventions of masculinity and sexuality. He’s interested in the evolution of the documentary form at the intersection of socially-conscious work and the art of filmmaking.

His latest short, Alpha Kings, premiered at International Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) in 2023 and was acquired by The New Yorker for distribution later this year.

REMIND ME TO FLOW
Recuérdame fluir

Dir. Morena Barra
Guatemala, 2023 | Spanish with English subtitles | 4 min

A personal essay film which blends fragments of collective experience and the filmmaker’s intimate memories of being a child. Through a mix of analogue and digital shots, voice recordings and abstract sounds, Recuérdame fluir portrays kaleidoscopic layers of childhood.

Morena Barra was born in Naples in 1991, grew up in eastern Switzerland, and now lives in St. Gallen. Barra has worked since 2012 with her cameras in the documentary and artistic field. In her film studies at the F+F School of Art and Design Zurich, she began her passion for video art and essay film to which she has since devoted herself. Through the medium of video, Morena Barra deals with socio-cultural, feminist, erotic, and existential themes.

ECLIPSIS

Dir. Tania Hernández Velasco
Mexico, 2022 | Spanish with English subtitles | 16 min

A recently discovered monarch butterfly subspecies (scientifically named “Danaus plexippus eclipsis”) possesses strange toxins in its scales that cause powerful sensorial alterations to its predators. Intertwining vivid colours and textures of microscopic footage with the sway of the human body, this is a sci-fi speculation about what would happen to human beings if they came across the Eclipsis butterfly in the midst of our hurting world.

Tania Hernández Velasco was born in Mexico City. Through a poetic, ludic and sensory approach, her work explores questions of territory, nature, legacy and identity that traverse her Brown body and her intimate sphere. Titixe (2018), her first feature documentary, was selected in more than forty international film festivals and collected several awards. In 2019, she was selected as a Flaherty Seminar – Professional Development Fellow (Flaherty Seminar, NY) and was awarded the Charles C. Guggenheim Emerging Artist Award (Full Frame FF, NC). She currently is working on her second film My Body Is an Expanding Star, in collaboration with Semillitxs Hernández Velasco.

GLORIA

Dir. Daniela Briceño, Diego Felipe Cortés & Blanca Castellar
Colombia, 2022 | No dialogue | 14 min

Gloria, tired, moves slowly within her thoughts, the mirror, the siphon, and the bathroom light. Between pleasures and pain, what she carries inside grows without being able to contain itself anymore.

Daniela Briceño Bello, Diego Felipe Cortés, and Blanca Castellar are visual artists who studied together at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Colombia. They created a collective called “Residuo” from which they attempt to explore visual sensations through animation. Gloria is the first animated short film made together.

ALL MY SCARS VANISH IN THE WIND
Todas mis cicatrices se desvanecen en el viento

Dir. Angélica Restrepo & Carlos Velandia
Colombia, 2022 | Spanish with English subtitles | 14 min

Content Warning: Contains offensive language and references to physical abuse.

Among intrusive and sought-after memories, a woman hears a disconcerting call from the depths of her being. A cryptic cry for help that becomes intelligible guides her to the original wound, to her inner child, becoming her own protector.

Angélica Restrepo and Carlos Velandia are Colombian filmmakers with backgrounds in Film Programming and New Media, whose work focuses on feminism, anti-hegemonic representation, and expanded animation. Their films have premiered several times at the Annecy International Animation Festival and have won the ZINEBI Grand Award (Oscar-Qualifier) at the International Festival of Documentary and Short Film of Bilbao and the Silver Lynx Experimental Award at FEST – New Directors | New Films.

THE BATHROOM IS WHERE MOTHS DIE
En el baño mueren las polillas

Dir. Natalia Mejías & Fernanda Lagomarsino
Chile, 2022 | Spanish with English subtitles | 14 min

It’s Laura’s 21st birthday, but she’s not here. Through a secret ritual, Violeta and Sofía try to communicate with her, years after her death. Violeta immerses herself in a world of magic, complicity, temporary tattoos, and farewells.

Natalia Mejías is an Audiovisual Director of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Her stories address intimate accounts of women, adolescents, girls, and dissidents involved in Latin American contexts. In 2019 she co-directed the short film The bathroom is where moths die, winning the FEMCINE 2023 Best Emerging Actress award. She is currently distributing the short film 5 ways to get rid of a hickey. 

Fernanda Lagomarsino is an Audiovisual Director at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. During her career, she has developed an interest in scriptwriting and directing, especially around women and everyday life. In 2019 she co-directed the short documentary Reliable Sources, which was part of the official selection of student short films at FEMCINE 2021, in addition to FUC 2021. She is currently developing her first feature film script and distributing her first fiction short film The bathroom is where moths die.