‘Remembering’ Session

Four short films from Spain, Portugal, Poland and the United States bring to light things that have remained hidden and marginalised for years: stories that have been silenced and distorted by patriarchal society and injustices committed against those who depart from the norm.

Programme. Total duration: 75'

Els buits, by Sofía Esteve, Isa Luengo and Marina Freixa Roca. Spain. 2024. 19 minutes. OV with Spanish subtitles. Premiere in Madrid

Can oral history restore a forgotten memory? Can it break the silence perpetuated over generations?

At the age of 17, Mariona was arrested and sent to a reformatory run by the Women's Protection Board, an institution whose mission was to ‘reform fallen women’ during the Francoist regime and the early years of democracy. In 2023, she and her daughter try to piece the story together and fill in the gaps.

Sofía Esteve is a film-maker born in Alicante. With a degree in Audiovisual Communication from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, between 2016 and 2018 she was co-director of the TV project Follo Ergo Sum for betevé. In 2022 she co-directed the award-winning short film Perpetua Felicidad, and in 2024 Els buits [Gaps] premiered at the Málaga Film Festival, winning the Biznaga for the best documentary short film. It subsequently won the audience award at the D’A Festival in Barcelona.

Isa Luengo is a film-maker born in Guadalajara. She obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from the Complutense University in Madrid and then a Master’s degree in Creative Documentary Making from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. In 2017 she co-directed the short film La ciutat interior, and in 2022 she teamed up with Sofía Esteve to make the short film Perpetua felicidad. With Sofía she is also working on @la_calumnia, a research project that examines LGBTQI+ genealogies in cinema. In 2024 she released Els buits.

Marina Freixa Roca, a film-maker from Barcelona, has a degree in Audiovisual Communication (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) and specialises in documentary film-making and socio-political impacts on audiovisual material. Between 2015 and 2018 she was a member of the Metromuster cooperative, with which she promoted documentary projects like Tarajal: Desmontando la impunidad en la Frontera Sur (2016) and Idrissa: Crónica de una muerte cualquiera (2020). In 2017 she co-directed the documentary series Follo Ergo Sum (betevé) with Sofía Esteve, subsequently specialising in film editing after taking a postgraduate course in editing at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra-Barcelona School of Management. In 2024 she released Els buits. 

Tão Pequeninas, Tinham o Ar de Serem Já Crescidas, by Tânia Dinis. Portugal. 2024. 20 minutes. OV with Spanish subtitles. Premiere in Spain

This film tells the story of women from the regions of Trás-os-Montes, Beira, Alto and Baixo Minho who, between the 1940s and 1980s, travelled to Porto to work as domestic servants. Using archival material, photographs, real images and oral testimonies, it brings to light these women who never had the time to be children. At a tender age, they were sent from their villages to work as servants in well-to-do houses in the big cities.

Tânia Dinis is a Portuguese film-maker and visual artist. She has a Master’s degree in Contemporary Artistic Practices from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto and a Bachelor’s degree in Theatrical Studies from the School of Music and Performing Arts (ESMAE) in Porto. Her work straddles different perspectives and artistic fields—photography, performance, film-making—employing relational aesthetics and appropriating archive images from her own family and anonymous sources, as well as real images in different formats. In 2024 she released her short film Tão pequeninas, tinham o ar de serem já crescidas [So Small, Looking All Grown Up], which received its world premiere at IndieLisboa, where it won the award for best Portuguese short film. 

Grandmamauntsistercat, by Zuza Banasińska. Poland / Netherlands. 2024. 23 minutes. OV with Spanish subtitles. Premiere in Madrid 

Using the classic Slavic witch figure, Baba Jaga, this audiovisual essay explores the history of a matriarchal family, viewed through the eyes of a young girl grappling with the reproduction of ideological and representational systems. The film is based entirely on archival material from the Educational Film Studio in Łódź, originally created as didactic and propagandistic tools in communist Poland. Often sexist and anthropocentric, the images are repurposed as auto-fictional memories, distorting their nature as scientific records and transforming them into tools of freedom and resistance.

Zuza Banasińska is a Polish visual artist and film-maker currently based in Amsterdam. She trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, the University of the Arts in Berlin and the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam. Her works have been shown at venues like the Ujazdowski CCA in Warsaw, Dům Umění Mesta Brna in Brno and Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam. Her short film Grandmamauntsistercat premiered at the 2024 edition of the Rotterdam Festival and was subsequently screened at other prestigious film festivals, such as the Berlinale (Germany), where it won the Teddy Award for best short film, Visions du Réel (Switzerland) and IndieLisboa (Portugal). 

Life Story, by Jessica Dunn Rovinelli. United States 2024. 10 minutes. Premiere in Spain

An original text by the philosopher McKenzie Wark, author of books like Raving (Duke University Press, 2023), Reverse Cowgirl (Semiotext(e), 2022) and A Hacker Manifesto (Harvard University Press, 2004) is presented as a type of monologue combined with the exploration of her naked body, portrayed with an intimacy that reflects the close friendship between film-maker and writer.

During the film, the history of her life and her body is intertwined with left-wing politics, while the marks of her gender transition are exposed as she talks about love and lost futures. Set to a techno beat, the reflection on her own death, and the death of the Left, hovers just out of frame.

Jessica Dunn Rovinelli is an American trans-gender film-maker, actor, editor and critic. She made her debut as a film-maker in 2016 with the documentary Empathy, which captured the daily existence of a heroin-addicted escort and won an award at FIDMarseille (France). Her second film, So Pretty, premiered in 2019 at the Berlinale and went on to win the best film award at the Valdivia International Film Festival. Life Story received its world premiere at FIDMarseille 2024, where it won the Alice Guy award for best short film.