María Abenia

Cima Jury

Filmmaker, teacher, scriptwriter and programmer. She trained in Pedagogy and worked as a teacher of children and teenagers for almost ten years in schools in the USA, Scotland and Spain. She then studied Documentary Photography at the Blankpaper School in Madrid, Film Directing at ESCAC and Film Theory and Contemporary Audiovisual Media at UPF in Barcelona. She worked on a final thesis on the cinema of Chantal Akerman and, as soon as she presented it, she programmed the special Cine al Cierzo for the Zaragoza Film Festival (2016) together with a retrospective in commemoration of Abbas Kiarostami. She currently lives in Tenerife, and in addition to programming at the MiradasDoc International Documentary Film Festival for the last five years, she has directed her first short film CIRCE (2022), which premiered nationally in the Official Section of the Gijón International Film Festival FICXX60 and has been screened nationally and internationally at festivals such as CurtoCircuito (Spain), Bogoshorts (Colombia), Portobello Film Festival (UK) and St. Lois Film Festival (USA). It won the Richard Leacock Award for Best Short Film at the Las Palmas de Gran Canaria International Film Festival and Best Canarian Short Film at the Tenerife Shorts Festival. She directed her second short film SÍSIFO (2023), screened at festivals such as Intermediaciones (Colombia), MicroActs (UK), Festival Internacional de Gijón, and El Festivalito. She is also in the process of producing her debut feature FUTURA, LA NIEBLA (2024). The MamaFilms production company is her latest venture in the sector.

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