Synopsis

Winner of four Ariel Awards—for Best First Feature, Original Screenplay, Actress, and Breakthrough Performance—and selected as Mexico’s official submission for the Best International Film Oscar, We Shall Not Be Moved tells the story of Socorro—played by Luisa Huertas in a tour-de-force performance—a retired lawyer consumed by her obsession to find the soldier who killed her brother during the student protests of October 2, 1968, when demands for democracy and justice were brutally silenced in Mexico City’s Tlatelolco Square. Nearly six decades later, her relentless pursuit has fractured her relationships with her sister, Esperanza, and her son, Jorge. When a new clue emerges, Socorro sets out on a perilous quest for vengeance, putting her family, her legacy, and her own life in jeopardy. Shot in striking black and white, director Pierre Saint Martin Castellanos delivers a powerful and intimate reflection on the enduring wounds of Mexico’s modern history.

Synopsis

As a community grapples with the disappearance of one of their own, a young boy receives spiritual guidance from his grandfather. Hypnotic and profound, Lanawaru depicts one community’s bond with nature and their sacred spiritual practices.

This film screens as part of Shorts Program 7: Documentary.

Synopsis

These films showcase the richness of the documentary form. Through observation, testimony, and poetic reimagining, six different complex corners of the world come into view.

In Dooni, preacher Walter Hawkins delivers the moving eulogy for legendary singer Sylvester, who died of AIDS in 1988. In Visiting Hours, Tony pays daily visits to his mother at a care facility, helping her ailing memory. Koki, Ciao is a humorous autobiography of a parrot named Koki, who rubbed shoulders with some of the most famous people of the 20th century. In Lanawaru, a community grapples with the disappearance of one of their own, as a young boy receives spiritual guidance from his grandfather. Through audio recordings created by a couple over the course of a season, Hold Me Close portrays and celebrates the love shared between two women. Hoops, Hopes, & Dreams is an investigation into how basketball has played a crucial role in the political lives of two of the defining figures of American history, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Barack Obama.

Synopsis

In a remote, crumbling convent, young nun Rafaela has recurring, seemingly prophetic dreams. When rumor of a new archbishop in a nearby town reaches the small congregation, Rafaela is sent to find him with the mission of securing funds to save the convent and to ask for guidance regarding one particular mysterious dream that haunts her. Her journey finds her lost in a beautiful and perplexing landscape, guided only by her wavering faith. It is on this road, seemingly to nowhere, that her path intersects with other pilgrims and wayward souls who all seek the archbishop—and whose often questionable motivations unwittingly shape the course of Rafaela’s journey.

Director Karla Badillo’s home region—the sweeping, sparse landscape of San Luis Potosí—is a labyrinth for the spiritually adrift in their surreal, fraught pilgrimages. Oca, named for an ancient board game inspired by the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage, is a contemplation on one’s journey through faith and its many detours on the shifting winds of destiny.

Synopsis

From acclaimed Argentine auteur Lucrecia Martel, known for her poetic and dreamy class-conscious dramas (La Cienaga, The Holy Girl, The Headless Woman) comes a very different, but no less compelling, portrait of inequality. Martel chronicles the trial of three men who entered the Indigenous community of Chuschagasta in northern Argentina to take ownership of the land and then killed the community’s leader, Javier Chocobar. Drawing on vivid archival video of the incident, caught on cellphone cameras, Martel closely follows the story of the crime, its punishment, and its far-reaching consequences.

Part courtroom drama and part lyrical look at the past, present, and future of the Chuschagasta people, Nuestra Tierra provides a broader context for the murderous act and offers a space for members of the community to reclaim their lives from a government that has long tried to deny not only their rights to the land but even their very existence. With a keen eye for symbolic details and for the tensions between tradition and modernity, nature and technology, Martel also tells a larger tale about the perennial struggles and injustices embedded in contemporary society.