Enza, in her early twenties, is a singer and seeker studying the rhythms of life in Salento. She breathes music, collects old folksongs and thus connects the people, the present and the past. Rooted in Tarantism and in the tradition of the healers she uses singing as a means to fight alienation. Her portrait is a cinematic legacy vibrating with intensity. It reveals the thin line walked by those who refuse to be satisfied with relative freedom.

As a happily married manager of a department store, everything in the protagonist’s life is peaceful and orderly. But on his customary walk through the park one Sunday, he is suddenly confused by a sign marked with just one word: “Park”. The disturbance is so great that his everyday routine is thrown into chaos. Freely adapted from a story by Arthur Schnitzler.

More than twenty years have passed since the death of Catalan architect Enric Miralles. He left iconic traces with his buildings, not just in and around Barcelona – the Scottish parliament in Edinburgh is also based on his designs. Maria Mauti chooses a poetic approach to her impressive protagonist, in eleven variations. They take us from the Igualada cemetery to a community centre in Hostalets de Balenyà, a gym in Huesca or the Torre Marenostrum office skyscraper in Barcelona. The architect’s home with its open and at the same time labyrinthine character is given a major role, becoming the starting point and epicentre of a unique mind.
Maria Mauti carefully scans the still lively architectures, stages them. In Huesca, the smell of a sweating soccer team seems to mingle with the omnipresent cool raw concrete, while a group of Spanish cowboys and cowgirls shake their leather boots in the futuristic community centre. Despite the tragic note that comes from the work of the prematurely deceased, “Miralles” is not without a certain wit. This poised essay which combines personal and theoretical statements achieves a multi-layered quality that is in itself evocative of a Miralles design: airy and dense, abrupt and fluid, always idiosyncratic.

Be warned: This film consists of flashing images. It happens not only on the screen, but is generated in the brain. Flickering circles in complementary colours move, overlap, creating new shapes and colours. Interacting with the general structures of our eyes and nervous system, they trigger individually different irritations.

Tattooed skin, harbour music, the horror of a shipwreck, the fog bells of a lighthouse, the changing of the tides. This film about the glorious and deadly ocean, which pulls you down into the depths of the sea, is the result of an interoceanic workshop that uses the creative mechanisms of the cadavre exquis technique. An intuitive tale arises from a collective act of creation.

Ricky is a boy from the Ashéninka tribe who lives with his family deep in the Peruvian Amazon Forest. But even here, the children’s favourite pastime is watching videos on their mobile phones. One day, Ricky is faced with the task of overcoming his fears and going hunting for a huge catfish that can only be caught by hook. This is where his journey to adulthood begins.

The day begins for father and daughter. They climb beyond their treehouse, glide over and under water, cross blooming landscapes, travel through the air and fly on into space. By ship, bicycle, balloon or on foot. A film about travelling, collecting souvenirs in passing and the question of what’s left at the end of a life.

Isabel Herguera herself welcomes us in the title sequence of this autobiographical short film and gives us a brief glimpse behind the scenes of her work as an artist. Right after that, we join her on a fast-paced trip through the part of her family history that begins with the birth of her brothers in 1965 and ends with the death of General Franco in 1975.

Dreamy animated images in detailed henna painting and atmospheric watercolours dominate a young Spanish artist’s moving journey of discovery. In a small bookshop in India, Inés comes across the feminist-utopian science fiction story “Sultana’s Dream.” It is about the terrible revenge on men, the bookseller explains. In the slim volume she wrote in 1905, Rokeya Hossain describes the fantasy realm of Ladyland – a land in which women are self-determined and live in peace, in which they run all government affairs and all forms of education are open to them. And the men? Their place in Ladyland, the bookseller continues, is where they belong: locked up at home.

Fascinated by the literary “painting” of this place and its inventor, Inés sets out in the footsteps of the writer and teacher Hossain, who championed education and equal rights for Indian girls and women as early as the beginning of the 20th century. The trip takes the Spaniard across contemporary India. Her companions are the dreams of Ladyland – and the utterly different realities of the lives of the women she meets on her journey.

In an Indian city, the young Spanish artist Inés comes across the book “Sultana’s Dream” by the Bengali writer Rokeya Hossain. This feminist science fiction story from 1905 will accompany Inés on her travels through present-day India. Her experiences intermingle with Sultana’s utopia: in translucent watercolours and detailed henna paintings.

Barcelona, 1991. Juanjo has to repeat the last school year. His new teacher seats him in the last row next to Miquel, who is not exactly happy about this. The two have to write an essay together on the same afternoon. A disagreeable task that is gradually forgotten as they discover that they share a great passion: music!

Juanjo comes from sheltered circumstances, his family pamper him. Miquel is the son of a single mother who could hardly manage to take care of his two siblings without his support. Heavy Metal becomes the refuge and central node of their friendship. Screeching guitars and screamed vocals – with a few remarkable exceptions – are the soundtrack of this exciting but warm-hearted and gentle story that allows a glimpse into the souls of two teenage boys. The film’s visual design is consistently pared down – to the point of leaving out whole sections of the background and character portrayal. The directors’ poignant use of distinctive striking visual elements takes us ingeniously into the world of the two friends. A wonderful journey into a time of changes, insights and growth.

A film about a child with a passion: The little girl loves everything that flies high. She lets herself being pushed on the swing until she is almost out of the frame, and she loves her new balloon. But then she gets caught in the clutches of a bird dealer who locks her up in his flat on the top floor of a high-rise. The only way out is through the window.

This rhythm-driven animation is inspired by the 4th movement of the “Sonades de la calor del foc,” the “Sonatas of the Heat of the Fire”, created in 1984 by Catalan composer Josep Maria Mestres Quadreny. It passes through four poeticised spaces: The first is dominated by coloured blocs, the second by gravity, the third by silence, and the fourth takes us back to vibrant life at last.

Nazario, founder of the Spanish underground comics movement and pioneer of the gay graphic novel, looks back on his eventful life, his flamboyant and explicit works. 16mm films, photos, illustrations and paintings document the spirit of departure of a counter culture, but also recount Nazario’s great love for Alejandro with whom he was together until the latter’s death. Profession and passion merge in this artist.

This animated short film documents a workshop with Mehndi artists in Ahmedabad. While the women work together to create phantastic forms in henna colours, they tell their tutor Isabel Herguera what they dream of: flying, for example, a women’s parliament, or a journey to Switzerland. Samira longs for independence – and makes herself heard with a rap.

It has been said that the baroque artist Diego Velázquez didn’t paint figures, but the air and light between them. And one could say about this film that it is not Velázquez’s larger-than-life painting “Las Meninas” that is the subject, but the penetrating gaze with which it looks back at his viewers. Among the many clever minds that discuss the artist and the intricate structure of this painting’s composition, it is curiosity itself that somnambulates here.

“Paintings aren’t movies, they’re paintings”, insists art critic and historian Svetlana Alpers. She’s right, of course – and then again, she isn’t. She’s one of the renowned talking heads interrogated by director Andrés Sanz Vicente to solve a crime. But who or what actually died? Perhaps our ability to see, as Alpers claims? For around 400 years, Diego Velázquez’ painting has been exposed to the eyes of its public, the analyses of its scientifically advanced critics who have racked their brains over who on the canvas enters through which door and why. “The Painting” is a continuation of this painting-eye-encounter with the means of cinema. The air and the light between the concrete thing and its passionately glowing aura are captured. In this, but only in this, a painting can be a movie after all.