José Ángel Alayón Dévora

The Undergrowth

Three sisters on the Canary Islands, their everyday lives infused with a magical, meditative lyricism. Three life strategies without a breadwinner, narrated via the body, a mix of staging, observation and memory. Before the volcano, serenity arrives.

Aitana

Marina is haunted by the idea of losing her memory. Her grandmother suffered memory loss and now her mother Aitana, daughter of the writer Maria Teresa Leon and the poet Rafael Alberti, seems to be as well. Locked in a room which her mother has not left for some time, she insists on reliving her memories. In the silence of the night, her family’s past returns, it is the history of a country and an entire century.

Between Dog and Wolf

Three soldiers moving through the Cuban jungle: combat exercises and camouflage techniques are practised, but the battle never arrives. The nature of their mission becomes an ever-greater mystery, echoing unanswered in the impassive natural surroundings.

White on White

In the prelude of the twentieth century, Pedro arrives in Tierra del Fuego, an hostile and violent territory, to immortalise the marriage of a powerful landowner. Fascinated by the beauty of the bride-to-be, he betrays the rules and is left to face the land, crawling with violence and marked by the genocide of the land indigenous.

This Film Is About Me

Renata presents herself to the camera like one of these fascinating film noir heroines: a beautiful woman with a nondescript accent, with assured gestures, who looks people right in the eyes. Sentenced to a prison term for a man’s murder, Renata has not lost her charisma behind bars. Does she accept the crime she committed? Does she regret having killed someone. A neighbour? A lover? Is she aware of her imprisonment?

The Hidden City

A stunning descent into the tunnels, sewage pipes and subway stations of Madrid.

The Sea Stares at Us from Afar

Huelva, Spain, an isolated region lost in time. The grass, the sand and the sky are the same that those foreigners saw in the spring of 1895, when they crossed the sea from a distant country to mark the unspoiled terrain and extract its wealth, when the tower was new, when people could climb to the top of the highest dune and imagine that the city of Tartessos was still there, in the distance, almost invisible in the morning brume.

Dead Slow Ahead

A freighter crosses the ocean. The hypnotic rhythm of its gears reveals the continuous movement of machinery devouring its workers: the last gestures of the old sailors’ trade disappearing under the mechanic and impersonal pace of 21st century neo-capitalism. Perhaps it is a boat adrift, or maybe just the last example of an endangered species. Although we don’t know it, the engines are still running, unstoppable.

Hotel Nueva Isla

In the early twentieth century, the Hotel Nueva Isla was an emblematic luxury hotel. After the Cuban Revolution, it was confiscated by the State and became a shelter for homeless people. Located in Old Havana, today it is an imposing ruin. Jorge de los Rios, a retired clerk, is one of the few residents who remain there, along with La Flaca, his lover, and Waldo, a young itinerant. As the rest leave for safer places, Jorge clings to his dilapidated home and its buried treasures, slowly digging his way through its debris. The film speaks poignantly to a lost generation who fought in the Cuban Revolution and dreamed of a better society.

Slimane

Away from home, a group of young people survive without job and stable residence. The passage of time is transforming them. Immersed in constant scape and full of energy, they suddenly will face a fact that will test them.

Las carpetas

How fair is it for the government to control its citizens? Four Puerto Ricans confront their past when they open their “files”, the records obtained of the illegal surveillance and persecution that the Puerto Rican government held against citizens and organizations that disagreed with the establishment. Through their daily life, they will tell us their stories, experiences and intimate feelings of the persecution they suffered. Taking their past as an example, we will confront the present.

Malpaís

A man tries to start life in the stone by the volcano spit. An everyday marked by hostility of a beautiful and terrible enviroment.