With Tetuán, Iratxe Fresneda completes her trilogy on records and memory that began with Irrintziaren Oihartzunak and continued with Lurralde Hotzak, premiered at FICX in 2018. The filmmaker and professor at the University of the Basque Country investigates in this creative documentary, which will have its world premiere at FICX, the lives of four migrants, using her own family history as the central theme. At times as an observer, at other times in the first person, Fresneda seeks to rescue the positive aspects of migration and cultural exchange in a humanist film that tackles social issues without being discursive, while exhibiting an astonishing musical fluidity.
Tiger Award for Best Film at the last Rotterdam Festival, and Best Director in the Vanguard and Genre competition at the recent BAFICI, Eami, by Paraguayan Paz Encina, will take us to the South American Gran Chaco. The drama of the extermination and displacement of the small indigenous community of the Ayoreo observed through the entranced eyes of a five-year-old girl, the omniscient narrator of the history of her community. With this fiction, the visionary director of La hamaca paraguaya (2006) uses her mastery of photography and sound to create an intense sensorial spectacle that seeks hypnotic and emotional immersion in an unknown universe.
Claudia Sainte-Luce (whose Los insólitos peces gato was screened at FICX in 2013) directs her nephew Diego Armando Lara Lagunes in El reino de Dios, winner of the Guadalajara Festival. In her fourth foray behind the camera, Saint-Luce, a leading voice in Mexican independent cinema, flees from the formalism of the script to portray, with the freshness and spontaneity of the world of children, the awakening to maturity of a boy, happy in the simplicity of his rural universe, who sees his innocence and his faith dissolve as he prepares to receive his First Communion.
The search for personal and collective identity through the foundations of culture and memory is palpable in the programme of the Tierres en Trance competition within the Official Section, which FICX dedicates to the cinematographies of our country, Portugal and South America.