• The wildest section of the Film Festival will screen three Spanish pieces: the feature Lily’s Ritual (2025), by Manu Herrera, and the short films Amancio, Village Vampire (2018), by Alejo Ibáñez, and Poor Marciano (2025), by Álex Rey, as well as the Italian production The Forbidden City (2025), by Gabriele Mainetti
Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, April 13, 2026.- In such special edition as the 25th, the Las Palmas de Gran Canaria International Film Festival could not go on without one of its most characteristic sections—and certainly the wildest: The Freakiest Nights.
On this occasion, the pieces programmed by the indescribable Jesús Palacios, a savant of freak essay writing and fantasy genre analysis, have come with a strong Spanish accent. Thus, the feature film Lily’s Ritual (Manu Herrera) and the short films Amancio, Village Vampire (Alejo Ibáñez) and Poor Marciano (Álex Rey) will set the tone of this iconic section eagerly awaited every year by the Gran-Canarian audience.
Palacios himself has noted in previous editions how much freak movie production has changed with the arrival of big streaming platforms and their growing and diverse catalogue. That’s why coming up with the right selection for the Festival equally requires accuracy and sensitivity on his behalf, which the writer, as cult as the passions that drive him, has managed to show once again.
Latin Horror
This time, the spotlight shines on Spanish productions, as proven by Lily’s Ritual (2025). Manu Herrera, its director and co-screenwriter (in collaboration with Javier Fernández Moratalla), presents a diabolical slasher set in a secluded cabin deep in the forest. A reminiscent piece of Sam Raimi’s original Evil Dead, the feature shows its true colors and personality thanks to its filmmaker’s ability to conduct this ode to the fantasy genre, as well as the emotional display its female cast, starring Maggie Garcia, Patricia Peñalver, Eve Ryan and Elena Gallardo, managed to bring to the silver screen.
The other movie featured in this section comes from an equally Latin origin, in the most European sense of the term. The Italian film The Forbidden City (2025), by Gabriele Mainetti, is, according to Jesús Palacios, “the first neorealist martial arts film, with action scenes worthy of Jackie Chan, fused with an acerbic, romantic and poetic study of the multicultural Rome of today with its usual picaresque and mafia.” A description that essentially stimulates the audience’s appetite for a section which, year after year, upholds the tradition of celebrating freak culture within the Festival.
It is worth noting that Mainetti’s work had previously appeared at the Gran-Canarian film event with the screening in 2017 of They Call Me Jeeg (2016), a unique approach to superhero movies.
Spanish Short-Film Production
Jesús Palacios has recovered for these nights Amancio, Village Vampire (2018), by Alejo Ibáñez, an iconic short film that elevates the vampire myth to the heights of a grotesque freak piece. Trapped in a rural Spanish setting as the manager of a bar in an abandoned village, the unexpected arrival of some relatives disrupts Amancio’s rather hungrier than principled isolation…
Poor Marciano (2025), by Álex Rey, completes this section’s programming. In it, the Spanish talented filmmaker continues to showcase his sensitivity by transforming animation into homemade art and craft with a quirky, hypermodern humor that has become a staple of the Festival’s nights, as proven by its previous La increíble vacuna del Dr. Dickinson (2020). Rey shows the audience that being named Marciano Martínez Muela is not easy, even though fate might always be slightly unpredictable.
All in all, The Freakiest Nights scheduled for this 2026 keep alive the identity defining this unique crate in which the Las Palmas de Gran Canaria International Film Festival has been storing the wildest and most irreverent movie production made on the edges of the industry. A space which has also contributed to outline within the festival circuit the well-recognized and widely respected brand-name of the Gran-Canarian event.
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