Shorts in Competition – Program 1

Selected from over 140 submissions, 15 finalists by filmmakers from across Latin America and the diaspora will compete for the Best Short Film Award. This section explores identity, memory, injustice, grief, love, and the body. Pushing the boundaries of cinema through fictions, documentaries, archival and experimental works, we encounter daring characters, unique stories, and incredible visuals.

Curated by Ana Tonso & Dani Rodríguez Chevalier


Program running time: 90 min

Available for viewing ONLINE across Canada from August 25 – September 4.


CALL ME JONATHAN
YON


Director: Bárbara Lago
Argentina
2021
Spanish with English subtitles
8:08 min

Faced with the discovery of videographic archive material from their childhood, Bárbara Lago reprograms their childhood’s mythology and reflects on their body traversed by affections, fictions and the passing of time. In these intimate materials, they find a possibility of thinking about dissident sexualities, the relationship between technology and the human body, language and childhood. The images capture what cannot be named and prepare for the possibility of a fragmented and subjective metamorphosis. Jonathan/Yon is the body outside of social domestication. 

THE LIGHT OF MASAO NAKAGAWA
La luz de Masao Nakagawa


Dir: Hideki Nakazaki
Peru
2021
Spanish with English subtitles
8:30 min

The camera captures the final breaths of the Nakagawa Photo Studio, the first photography studio in northern Peru, 91 years after it was founded. The studio employees reveal their memories surrounding its founder, a Japanese immigrant by the name of Masao Nakagawa. These memories further reveal the story of a place destined to be forgotten in time in a world overwhelmed by modernity. 

NUNCA MÁS UN MÉXICO SIN NOSOTRXS

Dir: Juan Jacobo Del Castillo
Mexico
2021 
Spanish with English subtitles
6:00 min

Among the film collections lie fragments of the history of the Indigenous peoples of southeast Mexico. Paradoxically, their gestures, voices, and looks remain absent from these documents. Through this video essay, images burst forth. They stare at us, in order to interrogate the past and demand the place of the people in the images of the present.


LUMBRE

Dir: Carolina Mejía Salazar
Colombia
2021
Spanish with English subtitles
11:51 min

The memories of childhood come back to me, the love and care of my grandfather oppose the pale face and abandoned body that I see today. Our idyllic relationship has become a dark and distressing bond, his long illness and addiction to morphine have transformed him into an absent being; we are two distant people, almost unknown. Through this essay I explore my memories to understand what unites us and what separates us, an attempt to go through recent pain and reconcile with the figure of my grandfather. A search for a body that fades into childhood memories.

PAPEL

Dir: Gisela Carbajal Rodríguez, Felix Klee
Mexico/Germany

2021
Spanish with English subtitles
8:04 min

Sofía is putting up search posters of her missing boyfriend Luis all over town. Copies of his picture surround her. Luis is one of the more than 80.000 missing persons in Mexico. At night Sofía faces a recurring dream: little by little her world transforms into paper. First the birds, then the ground, her room, until even death is made of paper.

KOPACABANA

Director: Marcos Bonisson, Khalil Charif
Brazil
2020
Portuguese with English subtitles
9:37 min

Experimental film made through a collage of current and archive images in Super 8 and digital, set in a Copacabana as an epicentre of intercultural, social, and sensory experiences. Narrated by the significant speech of the poet Fausto Fawcett, with sound by the musician Arnaldo Brandão

MUTATO/ROSIE

Dir: Victoria Guillem
United States
2022
English & Spanish with English subtitles
4:20 min

Mutato/Rosie is about a relationship with a beloved stuffed animal juxtaposed with the loss of a childhood pet.