SINAIS
PROGRAMME 3
Salsa (S8) Palexco | Saturday June 3rd | 1:00 p.m. | Free entry to all venues until full capacity. It will not be possible to enter the venues after the screening has started.
WHITE SCREEN (FOR AMY HALPERN)
Deneb Martos and Pablo Useros | Spain | 2022 | 16mm | 6 min
In August 2022, over a few days’ holiday in Soajo (Portugal), we received the shocking news of the death of Amy Halpern.
CONTRA O INVERNO
Xacio Baño | Galicia | 2023 | 16mm to video | 5 min
Nina Simone knew how to sing.
BLOOM
Helena Girón and Samuel M. Delgado | Galicia | 2023 | 16mm to video | 18 min
San Borondón is a mythical island that appears and disappears. Throughout history, it has been located on maps near the Canary Islands. The legend of the Island of San Borondón came to gain such weight that, during the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, expeditions were set up to discover and conquer it. After centuries of oblivion, it was finally found.
AÑO CERO (WIP)
Carlos Vásquez Méndez | Spain | 2023 | 16mm to video | 13 min
This film is about the concept of time in different strata: a day, a year, a lifetime and the huge cosmic timeline, where the entire human timescale fades into insignificance. How long was pre-human time? In the countryside, in a hiatus from years of pandemic, a girl talks to her mother about how subjective our perception of time is, about human attempts to represent the elusive form of time and to understand its immeasurable force.
OH, UTE!
Lucía del Valle Ramírez | Spain | 2022 | Video | 2 min
This piece was recorded on a trip that begins on a plane going to London. “You give them water and they grow,” Ute Aurand writes to Alex Pirie; I imagine the images like this: growing between the outbound journey and the return.
CORPÚSCULOS
Laura Ibáñez López | Spain | 2022 | 16mm | 3 min
A corpuscle is a very small fragment of matter lodged in our skin that enables us to feel a soft touch. Corpúsculos (Corpuscles) opens up an entrance for us to a cosmos in which the inside and the outside of one’s body collide, intermingle and dissolve. Corpúsculos is an experiment, a tribute and a learning experience.
¿SE PUEDE DELETREAR LA HOJA?
Valentina Alvarado | España | 2022 | 16mm | 8 min
A walk.
A hand.
Sorry—my hand.
Can the leaf be spelled out? It’s a short trip.
It is also a petal, little bug, breath, rehearsal, sigh.
Again, a walk: a return journey.
An excursion around the workshop, garden, courtyard, archive and traces.
This is the first example of a series of essays about travel writing and the description of landscapes we see for the first time.
SINAIS
JOURNEY TO A WORLD OF ONE’S OWN
Sometimes it is necessary to look through the elements to find the answers we seek. We must filter our view through the earth, wind, fire and water, to thus form an almost dreamlike image, but one which is true to our most artistic and sincere interests. It is hard to find the magic that fills cinema and blurs the light until it becomes lost in our eyes. But once again, we have found it for our SINAIS section. This is a selection of films presented as a space for searching and abstraction by filmmakers who create by using small things but focusing on big human matters. SINAIS is a journey to a world of one’s own, like the one that Urbano Lugrís (the Galician painter heading this year’s festival) devised and journeyed through during his lifetime. And it is where we shall find many aspects in common with the painter’s work.
SINAIS
PROGRAMME 3
In the last block of the SINAIS section, memory is the leading theme. It deals with an almost mystical, cosmic memory in which images take on more importance than ever. The hands appear in the frame, or they are felt to be latent in the handling of the camera and the editing, so as to carefully present the cuts and sketches of a sea of ideas, feelings and visions. A whisper of Urbano Lugrís blends here with that of Amy Halpern, to host this seed of limitless creation.
WHITE SCREEN (FOR AMY HALPERN) opens this last programme in the SINAIS section. In this piece, Deneb Martos and Pablo Useros describe their experience of learning of the death of the filmmaker Amy Halpern. In CONTRA O INVERNO (AGAINST WINTER) by Xacio Baño, the image is shown as housing all memories, experiences and senses. We continue with BLOOM, by Helena Girón and Samuel M. Delgado. This is a film about the tireless search for the mythical island of San Borondón. Carlos Vasquez Méndez shows us the WIP of AÑO CERO (YEAR ZERO), a work on the nature and uncertainty of time. OH, UTE!, by Lucía del Valle Ramírez, is a short but intense work in which the images progressively grow on the outbound journey and the return. Laura Ibáñez López, with her film CORPÚSCULOS (CORPUSCLES) opens up an entrance for us to the cosmos through matter and skin. And we end this year’s SINAIS with ¿SE PUEDE DELETREAR LA HOJA? (CAN THE LEAF BE SPELLED OUT?), by Valentina Alvarado. This is a journey through everyday life, through first times, through small details, through everything that can be touched with one’s hand.
Aldara Pagán