• The Las Palmas de Gran Canaria International Film Festival’s Official Short Films Section begins this Wednesday, April 24
• Thirteen Spanish premieres will be screened, divided into three different sessions, at Cine Yelmos Las Arenas on April 24, 25 and 26
Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Tuesday, April 23, 2024. The competition in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria International Film Festival’s Official Short Films Section begins this Wednesday, April 24. Thirteen works —all premiering in Spain, one of them internationally and another one worldwide— will compete for this 23rd edition’s awards. This year’s selection has gathered, according to programmer Andreea Patru, pieces that “through personal dynamics, expose vulnerabilities and question interactions seen as heteronormative.” Surpassing parity goals and ranging from Asia to Latin America, the short films have in common the idea of human perception.
The young creators of these films inform us about how filmmakers perceive themselves, “and whether they do it in a singular or plural voice, relating to another or in their own embodied subjectivity, is only a matter of film language and style,” as stated in the catalog.
These thirteen short films will be divided into three sessions.
OFFICIAL SHORT FILMS SECTION SESSION 1 / April 24 at 7:15 p.m.
512×512 (Arthur Chopin, France, 2024, 21 min.) will inaugurate the short film competition’s big screen. Chopin’s first work explores Artificial Intelligence bias to “(re)create a literally monstrous world memory.” His voyeuristic gaze, Patru said, “reveals not only repressed images but an uncanny mode of decrypting reality through means that mimic so well human knowledge.”
Renzo Cozza and Mariana Sanguinetti’s latest work, La necesidad de un testigo (The Need of a Witness) (Argentina, 2023, 21 min.), will have its international premiere at the 23FICLPGC. It explores otherness through Inés, solidly interpreted by a hilarious Laila Maltz trying so hard to fill her father’s empty apartment with stories to validate her own.
Filmmaker Daniela Muñoz Barroso finds companionship in an unlikely place with Cuatro hoyos (Cuba, France, 2023, 20 min.). Its main character, Pepe, is a retired senior who aims to create his golf course in Madrid. Daniela is a filmmaker who attempts to portray him. Both are hard of hearing, so sports and cinema become their means of communication. For the section’s programmer, it is “one of the most tender films in the program.”
Tiempo de carnavales (Carnival Time) (Antonio Munáiz, Spain, 2024, 20 min.), the only Canarian piece in the short film competition, will close this session with its world premiere. It is an accomplished fiction in which Antonio Munáiz pours documentary elements to depict a painful separation through talented non-professional actors.
OFFICIAL SHORT FILMS SECTION SESSION 2 / April 25 at 8:15 p.m.
In suburban areas of France, young people aspire to wealth and success, with their dreams metaphorically clogging air conditioning ducts until they start leaking. In 8 (France, 2023, 23 min.), director Anaïs-Tohé Commaret depicts the French banlieue through the fluid reality of very young people, “escaping our social depictions of the periphery.”
The animation in the competition In Dreams (Josh Shaffner, USA, 2023, 17 min.) moves on to another dimension to analyse the human experience in an almost alien universe. “With a psychedelic aesthet- ic and luxuriant nature reminiscent of Dali’s fantasmagorical compositions, the film bends the visual dimensions, expanding the human mind when the body becomes impotent,”claimed Andreea Patru, programmer of the section.
Coral (Sonia Oleniak, USA, Poland, 2023, 18 min.) by Sonia Oleniak brings out the ultimate Dadaist audiovisual trance to bewitch us with Iva Bittová’s singing in an imaginary language.
Finally, O Filme Feliz 🙂 (Duarte Coimbra, Portugal, 2023, 22 min.), a touching ode to friendship filled with music and joy, will be the fourth short film of the session. It is a creative non-fiction in which Gonçalo and his friends march towards the north of Portugal to his late grandfather’s house. There, memories of the past generate new perspectives of the future.
OFFICIAL SHORT FILMS SECTION SESSION 3 / April 26 at 8:15 p.m.
The last selection of short films screening at Cine Yelmo Las Arenas will be a 86-minute-long session comprising five international pieces that are premiering as part of the Festival.
The session starts with Engar madaram geriste bud aan shab (As if Mother Cried That Night) (Hoda Taheri, Germany, 2023, 19 min.). In director Hoda Taheri’s dual role as a filmmaker and protagonist of a story inspired by her condition as a refugee seeker, the woman’s body is a device she doesn’t own. “Employing nudity as a trade to avoid bureaucratic hell voids the eroticism of its appeal and makes us feel uneasy about Western privilege,” noted programmer Andreea Patru.
Stemming from personal angles, other films in competition address reconciliation with the self and getting over hardship. Under the motto of “We were girls together”, I Look into the Mirror and Repeat to Myself (Giselle Lin, Singapore, 2023, 18 min.) is an almost therapeutic endeavour in which the filmmaker and her sisters look back to their traumatic coming-of-age and re-define their relationship.
Basri & Salma dalam Komedi yang Terus Berputar (Basri & Salma in a Never-ending Comedy) (Indonesia, 2023, 15 min.) is Khozy Rizal’s hilarious proposal depicting societal pressures to procreate in traditional, patriarchal Indonesian society. With a brass take on sexuality reminding of trailblazer auteur Edwin and an impromptu proletarian musical moment, this satire on parenthood “will stir some chuckles in the audience,” claimed the Festival’s programming team.
In Via Dolorosa (France, 2023, 11 min.), Rachel Gutgarts focuses on a more experiential, free-form animated take on her tumultuous youth in a troubled Jerusalem. Her raw interpretation doesn’t shy away from sexuality, mixing images of her vulva and mouth with religious iconography questioning a political identity.
This year’s short film selection will finish with Rinha (Combat) (Rita M. Pestana, Brazil, Portugal, 2023, 23 min.). In her work, the filmmaker majestically depicts, in a tight 4:3 ratio, the inner fight of a woman who has to write off her desires and self to be a caregiver to her alcoholic father.
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