• The eleven works competing for the Richard Leacock Award, whose screening is scheduled for April 26, show how prolific Canarian filmmaking currently is, with enough room for experienced and new authors to coexist in it
• Marta Torrecilla, Arima León, Pedro García, Fátima Luzardo, Marcos Crisostomos and María Abenia’s short films make up the section’s first group of screenings, while Miguel G. Morales, Chisco Valdés, David Pantaleón, Amos Milbor and Antonia San Juan’s second group will close the section
Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Tuesday, April 22, 2025.- Universal conflicts only approachable through intimacy, an illuminating memory of history, an alternative look at the territory undermining current mainstream discourse and a good deal of acid and sharp humor. The short film selection comprising the Canarias Cinema section of the 2025 Las Palmas de Gran Canaria International Film Festival proves, above all, that the islands’ filmmaking is quite alive, and beats with a present-day drive. In this section, experienced directors coexist with new emerging ones who are driven by their calling, formation and boldness, thus continuing the festival’s tradition. That is, a space that consistently incorporates new filmmakers to the national film circuit, as the authors themselves have noted.
Indeed, if Canarias Cinema has been known for anything, it is for standing as an essential platform for Canarian cinema, and for being a source of new filmmakers. Experienced and upcoming directors alike make up this diverse and appealing section: eleven short films that’ll compete for the Richard Leacock Award, as well as the distribution award granted by the Canarian production company Digital 104.
First group
Canarias Cinema’s first short film group will be screened on Saturday, April 26, at 10 a.m. at Cine Yelmo Las Arenas Screen 6. At 5 p.m., at the same screen, it will be shown for a second and last time, on this occasion with some of the filmmakers themselves in attendance.
The works comprising this group are: De interés insular (Of Island Interest) (Marta Torrecilla, Spain, 2024, 4 min.); Koyas (Arima León, Spain, 2025, 16 min.); El grito de César del bosque (The Shout of César del Bosque) (Pedro García, Spain, 2025, 25 min.); Tour (Fátima Luzardo, Spain, 2024, 2 min.); Dime, Mari (Tell Me, Mari) (Marcos Crisostomo, Spain, 2025, 18 min.), and Las sirenas (Mermaids) (María Abenia, Spain, 2024, 20 min.).
Second group
Canarias Cinema’s second short film group is also scheduled for Saturday, April 26, at 12:15 p.m. at Cine Yelmo Las Arenas Screen 6. Its second and final screening will take place at 7:30 p.m. at the same screen. Once again, some of the filmmakers themselves will be in attendance.
The pieces that make up this group are: Escuchar la sombra (Listen to the Shadow) (Miguel G. Morales, Spain, 2024, 30 min.); It Was Hot That Day: A Jandiman Story (Chisco Valdés, Spain, 2024, 11 min.); Cartas desde el Zoo (Letters From the Zoo) (David Pantaleón, Spain, 2024, 26 min.); Inmaculada (Inmaculate) (Amos Milbor, Spain, 2025, 14 min.), and La paciente desconocida de Freud (Freud’s Unknown Patient) (Antonia San Juan, Spain, 2025, 7 min.).
De interés insular / Of Island Interest
De interés insular is a piece shot at La Palma’s last Festivalito, whose premise consists of finishing a work in a limited amount of time while following a given theme. Its filmmaker, Marta Torrecilla, won the Jury Award for Most Outstanding Short Film in an edition built around the motto “How bad we are, but, hey, how much fun we’re having.” Afterwards, Torrecilla obtained the Best Short Film Award at Lanzarote’s Muestra de Cine. Both of them prove that her work, coming now to the Gran-Canarian film event, is deserving of the audience’s full attention.
In this short piece, the director delivers a strong, purely visual message on the Barlovento Lagoon. “Creating something in such a short time was a challenge for me,” she explains. “But I did a little research and was attracted by the subject of water. Looking at La Palma-related topics, because I was interested in the context. The truth is that I’ve never been at the Lagoon, which I think was a positive thing for the short film, because I used aerial maps instead. I think that, for the time we were there, it was fine. Then, of course, I found out about the news.” And through them, the purpose of a work that depicts the environment’s desiccation in contrast with the tourism industry.
Torrecilla admits that, regarding her short film’s impact, “it’s been surprise after surprise, although the awards have also allowed me to trust a little bit more in my own criteria.” “I’d keep on making works dealing with these issues, because they worry me,” the filmmaker explains, just before stressing “the special excitement” she feels about her Canarias Cinema selection. “The Festival,” she points out, “has helped me discover films and shape my gaze. I’ve learned to make the things I make thanks to that kind of cinema that teaches but cannot be seen in commercial theaters. And that’s becoming increasingly difficult.”
Koyas
Arima León creates in Koyas an urban drama, as contemporary as harsh, that she conceived years ago when she taught at the Canary Islands Film Institute. In fact, the script was born from one of her acting exercises. “However, Paula Ojeda and Andrea Cabret’s skill, two of my students back then, made me think that with them I could tell something else,” the director herself recalls. She found in both actresses the perfect evocation of those “girls-women I came across as a teenager, who had an overwhelming strength and who, holding onto reggaeton and bras tightened to the retina, were capable of surviving everything their social class threw at them.”
The filmmaker used her own experiences taking the bus as inspiration for the story, when she heard during a trip “a conversation between two young girls who considered themselves absolutely empowered and, at the same time, because of what they were saying, it seemed to me they were working as prostitutes. When they got off the bus and I saw their girl-like bodies, I shivered, and it has stuck with me forever.”
León reveals how she had to overcome certain difficulties during the shooting: a scene in constant movement on the bus, or the final moment in a small room, where heat was causing havoc. The director was grateful for the previous work of her cinematographer, Lucía Grimaldi, and her costume designer, Daniel Hernández, that allowed her to bring her short film to fruition.
For León, “the Las Palmas de Gran Canaria International Film Festival is not only a reference for its programming line, but also for having remained the film lung of the Gran-Canarian capital for decades.” The filmmaker points out that “being able to premiere this short film in the island where it was made is a gift in itself.” “Sharing Canarias Cinema,” she adds, “with filmmakers I admire such as Chisco Valdés, David Pantaleón, Miguel G. Morales, María Abenia or Antonia San Juan means a lot to me, too.”
El grito de César del Bosque / The Shout of César del Bosque
In the Gran-Canarian field and ravine landscapes between San Lorenzo and La Milagrosa, Pedro García tells a story sparing in words, but very intense in emotion. The director returns to the Festival, after his last participation with Már de Mármara (2016), with El grito de César del Bosque, in which he develops an initial idea he had “when David Delgado—his cinematographer—took me to the place. I immediately fell in love with it.”
The short film, which participated in the 2023 script contest of Asociación de Cine Vértigo, stars Rafael Navarro Miñón (who has been a regular participant of the Canarias Cinema’s short film section for the past few years) and Nayra Ortega. “Both showed a very good disposition to participate in it,” the director explains. In this work he approaches “what the place and a person’s retirement suggests,” that is, “that relationship we have with the world, sometimes wanting to be part of it and sometimes a little bit retired from it.”
García, a declared admirer of Iranian cinema, is especially grateful for Delgado’s collaboration, “one of the best cinematographers you can find,” as well as for that of musician Paco García Cruz. And the help he received from “Virginia Saavedra, Catalina Castro and Gloria Pérez, classmates from my Italian workshop.” In addition to the third most important member of the cast, Maxi the dog, and its owner, Vicky. “Sometimes this section and life embrace each other,” the filmmaker notes before explaining that the dog “which was the most interesting actor,” passed away barely a month ago at 14 years of age.
For the director, “participating in my city’s festival is a pleasure and a responsibility. It’s always interesting to measure oneself and your colleagues.” “Now,” he finishes, “the short film must continue by itself, the son was born beautiful, healthy and lovely, and I’m very proud of having filmed it and having gone through the experience.” He does, however, point to a second story, “a sequel,” which is in the middle of production.
Tour
Tour, by Fátima Luzardo, is a two-minute spark appealing to the audience’s ability to be moved. “A small, unpretentious dart,” the director herself explains, being certain that “art must do something for the world, provide some food for thought.”
Luzardo notes that “I don’t know how to classify my short film, as non-fiction, a false documentary, I don’t know.” In any case, “what I wanted was to cause that feeling of estrangement” in the audience. A Canarias Cinema regular, the director has been present in the section since 2021, and is particularly remembered by her Todo el mundo habla de Javier (2022, Audience Award at Visionaria). On this occasion, she decided to impose herself “a time limit, in order to find some incentive and see what I could do. That forces you to attempt to communicate what cannot be done with words, but with a certain abstract touch.”
Tour shows a contradiction between what appears onscreen and what the audience hears. “I was thinking about Soviet filmmakers, in the orchestral counterpoint, when they used sounds that had nothing to do with what was seen,” Luzardo points out, in a attempt to provide food for thought with her work. She even admits that “I’m still shocked by some of the images.”
Once again in the Festival, the director continues to appreciate “a lot” her work being selected in a film event she considers “a reference.”
Dime, Mari / Tell Me, Mari
Carlos Crisostomo debuts at the Festival with Dime, Mari. The filmmaker from Tenerife, a film student in Barcelona, tells a full story from the same point of view: a truck driver’s cabin. “I was inspired by a video I saw in YouTube about a truck driver’s day-to-day life. Something I had never thought about whenever I saw a truck on the road. The subject stuck in my head,” Crisostomo recalls. He spent “months” maturing his idea, until he found “the most complicated thing,” that is, “the story. I had the message, but I needed a situation that captured it.”
The director acknowledges that using a fixed shot from the same point that shows different landscapes and scenes turned out to be a perfect way of depicting the passage of time on screen effectively. Before that, he “was writing for a month. Shooting it was the easy part. First the actors’ voices and then the images.” He managed to finish his short film sticking to the maxim of independent cinema: “asking as many favors as possible and spending as little of my savings as possible, too.”
Regarding his Festival selection, Crisostomos says he is “very excited about it, it’s the first festival where I present one of my works.”
Las sirenas / Mermaids
María Abenia returns to the Gran-Canarian festival with Las sirenas after debuting with Circe (2022) and participating with Sísifo (2023). Las sirenas, she says, “was meant to be a film essay, with the association Mamachana. And suddenly this piece came out.”
“I’m very happy about the result,” Abenia points out. The work was born from a workshop in Tegueste (Tenerife) that offered a reflection on the identity of women in the rural environment and that took shape thanks to its participants. The filmmaker, who is also a programmer, included in her short film AI-built elements that give it a personality of its own. “Before working with them, the night before, I decided to see what I could do with AI. I was a little bit naughty and made them sit through those images,” she explains.
The filmmaker co-authored the script with these women, “because it was their choice the way I was going to film her, in the puddles.” “Then,” she adds, “the mythological part occurred to me as well, which is something I’ve been working on for quite some time.”
Abenia, who was a member of a jury in the Gran-Canarian Festival in 2024, says she is “delighted” with her new Canarias Cinema selection. “Also, because I’m accompanied by people I admire a lot. And, besides, some women are coming and we’re going to be together there. The Festival is a tradition. I feel very loved and cared for here.”
Escuchar la sombra / Listen to the Shadow
Escuchar la sombra is a pure documentary exercise by Miguel G. Morales. The author of On the Name of the Goats (2019) tells the hidden history of thousands of people who crossed the ocean from Cuba to fight Fascism in the so-called Spanish Revolution.
As usual in his work process, “the previous selection of images is a sort of first editing,” Morales points out. And that is what has happened in this short film, which is made up of unused images in almost three quarters of its footage. And in which “there are almost no dead people, no trenches, guns or bombs. Violence is something fascist narratives feed on.”
In addition, the documentary naturally integrates the presence of women and African Americans in the conflict. Everything in order to shape an idea Morales had on his first trip to the Havana Film Festival, where he found a speech by Dolores Ibárruri (La Pasionaria) in her only visit to Havana. The idea was then developed with a script by Cuban writer Atilio Caballero.
The piece also stands out because of its sound atmosphere, created by musician Fajardo. Morales authors “a hymn to the memory of the so-called defeated but who were never so, of those who sacrificed themselves and gave up their bodies for the sake of a better world. A work about the love of that Cuba for the Spanish Republic, for the modern, free and cultured ideas that were being forged there.” It is also, the director continues, “a short film that demands a reappraisal of what was left out of the mythical International Brigades’ official history, in which thousands of anonymous people from Cuba were not included. It seemed as if they had also been defeated by memory. Oblivion in official history strengthens the ideology of power.”
Morales, a grandson of a Cuban and great-grandson of a construction worker who built Havana’s Capitol, comes full circle, in a way, with Escuchar la sombra. Trained at the San Antonio de los Baños International Film School, the director says he feel “indebted” to Cuba, which “has given me so much.” His short film, which uncovers a semi-unknown story, “has connected me even more to the island.”
The filmmaker claims that “I work on anti-fascist projects in a world that is once again letting through that darkness, now disguised with algorithms, fake news, hate speeches against women, transsexuality or migration, and that attempts to take from us concepts such as Freedom.” Now, he returns to the Festival he considers “a home, where I’ve learned to shape my gaze, and where I watched, for instance, all of Chris Marker’s filmography, an example that marks this form of storytelling that I intended to captured in Escuchar la sombra.”
It Was Hot That Day: A Jandiman Story
Chisco Valdés directs It Was Hot That Day: A Jandiman Story: an intimate reflection on his role as immigrant and filmmaker, shot during his time as a construction worker in Arizona (USA) in the middle of the pandemic. “When I began to revise all the material I filmed,” he says, “I was always thinking about that idea of the American Dream, which in Latin America, I’m from Guatemala, means so much to people.”
The short film is a production of the Canarian Amissus Media. Its CEO, Daute Campos, met Valdés in 2022 at the Málaga Talent. Since then, “we’ve had a lot of chemistry and felt like creating things. He’s given me that vote of confidence,” the filmmaker explains. His piece starts from a trivial picture to take the audience into the most personal feelings of a Guatemalan in Phoenix. “Everybody asks me if my idea of the American Dream changed. And I still believe it exists. But it has changed. We’ve always regard it there from the perspective of being successful. But now that I live in Europe, I’ve found out what it means to have quality of life, which is an idea we don’t fully understand in Latin America. I don’t know if I’d live there again, in the United States.”
“I was crazy about being selected at the Festival,” the director points out. “I’ve followed the careers of many filmmakers who have been there. Arima León, Cabo Sur, I’m looking forward to being with friends in the Canary Islands. It’s almost like being at home. I also know Sean Baker was there, which is amazing.”
Cartas desde el Zoo / Letters From the Zoo
Veteran director David Pantaleón comes back to the Gran-Canarian Festival with Cartas desde el zoo, a short film that begins by recovering pictures from the old zoo at the Doramas Park and then gets into an even more transcendental territory during the rest of its footage. “This was born from the idea of how humanely we behave with animals, and how animalistic we sometimes behave with humans,” the island filmmaker explains. “We always find excuses to justify the other person is locked up.”
His piece focuses on the work carried out by the social theater association Hestia, which incorporates inmates into their projects. Pantaleón’s begins “when we accessed the archive of the Gran Canaria Audiovisual Culture Center and found those pictures of the zoo, which luckily belonged to Dácil Manrique de Lara, another filmmaker. That was the spark of the project.”
The director started to work on the short film “little by little”, joining their group meetings. “At first, when I arrived home for the first time, I didn’t like how I had behaved. When they invited me to participate in a first theatrical session, and I said no. Then I felt dirty for having reacted that way. And that made me think about this idea.” Pantaleón wants to stress that “these people have been doing theater for ten years. They are very experienced, and it was a pleasure to be there with them,” although he notes that his short film has “very few pretensions.” That being said, “we are very proud of how it has turned out. It was cathartic that they (the inmates) wrote a letter in the end: they are eager to be heard.”
David Pantaleón defines the Las Palmas de Gran Canaria International Film Festival as a “key element in my education as a filmmaker, and in that of all local filmmakers. It has opened a window to non-conventional cinema, which we might not have been able to smell.” And he points out that “we have a lot of young people from our island making very interesting things. It’s true that I belong to another generation, but we are not a closed one and we have to be very careful not to be so. We have to be very attentive to see what is made by those who come behind us. It’s true that we have generated synergies between us, and that has made us stronger.”
Inmaculada / Immaculate
Amos Milbor, who is also a writer and the screenwriter of the feature film Rendir los machos (2021, with David Pantaleón) and the short film Clavijo, tu amor (2017, with Amaury Santana Marrero and Luis O’Malley), now presents in Canarias Cinema his unique Inmaculada, an exercise in surreal humor in which its protagonist asks her sister-in-law’s help to convince his husband, who is getting out of prison, that she has been impregnated by the Holy Spirit.
The story is a challenge for the filmmaker, who must sustain it on screen. He manages to do so in an effective way, in which constitutes his debut in Canarias Cinema. The short film is also backed by cinematographer Zhana Yordanova and musician Fajardo’s work.
Milbor’s is one of the freshest proposals featured in the short film selection of the Canarian section.
La paciente desconocida de Freud / Freud’s Unknown Patient
Antonia San Juan, actress, comedian and tv star, returns to the short film format with La paciente desconocida de Freud, a piece she has directed and starred in, and whose script she has co-written with Enrique Gallego.
San Juan’s is a story full of acid humor, with a final twist, that also stands out for its cinematography, by Moisés Coello and Saulo Donoso. Colors and textures on screen deserve to be mentioned, too, when talking about a short film that delves into the exaggerated pain exhibited by its main character, Renata. And that it looks cared for in detail, even in its credits.
Blanca Rodríguez’s addition to the cast, as well as that of Roberto Herrera in the role of a hieratic Freud, also appeal to the audience’s interest in this latest work by the Canarian filmmaker, who last appeared at the Gran-Canarian Festival with her feature film Del lado del verano (2012).
The Las Palmas de Gran Canaria International Film Festival, organized by the Culture area of the Gran-Canarian capital’s City Council through Promoción de la Ciudad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, has received public assistance by the ICAA [Institute of Cinematography and Audiovisual Arts], the Visitors’ Program for the Internationalization of Spanish Culture (PICE), of the Spanish Public Agency for Cultural Action (AC/E), as well as public support from Promotur Turismo Islas Canarias.
Among the Festival’s collaborators we may find Fundación Auditorio Teatro, Cines Yelmo, Las Arenas Shopping Center and Hotel Cristina by Tigotan, places which also function as venues or hold activities of the film event; as well as other institutions and companies such as Sagulpa, Toyota, Royal Bliss, Fuze Tea, Coca Cola, Sholeo Lodge, Audiovisuales Canarias, Music Library &SFX, Blackout Films and International Bach Festival. Likewise, its market, MECAS, has been possible thanks to the sponsorship of the Gran Canaria Film Commission-Sociedad de Promoción Económica de Gran Canaria and the support of Proexca.
The University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, the Mid Atlantic University, Digital 104, the Audiovisual Cluster of the Canary Islands, the Association of Women Filmmakers and Audiovisual Media CIMA, the Cartagena International Film Festival, the Gijón International Film Festival, the Barcelona Independent Film Festival, the Tres Puertos Laboratory, Barcelona’s ESCAC, and Very Good Script, Freak World and Fimucité are also collaborators.
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