San Sebastian Film Festival ::

Jorge Alí Triana

93 min.

Santiago Miranda, actor in a famous TV series about the life of Bolívar, stomps furiously off the set when the script announces his, or rather Bolívar's death, by shooting, thus changing history. Miranda hovers on the border between lucidity and madness, acting like a Bolívar who will do anything to finish the liberator's task of unification. The dream of a strong and united Great Colombia, capable of standing up to the great powers of the world, plus the desire to put an end to the institutional chaos, the misery and horror brought upon the country by 160 years of continuous warring, drive Miranda to kidnap the President of the Republic and take power before the thunderstruck eyes of the nations following events on the big TV channels.

Caja negra / Black Box

Luis Ortega

83 min.

Dorotea is a lively, beautiful teenager who cares for Eugenia, her grandmother, a hundred-year-old woman who arrived to Argentina at the beginning of the century. She also works at a dry-cleaners and waters the plants for her 80 year-old neighbour, Silvio, who only pays her to do the job so that he can watch her while she's doing it. A weak, grey man leaves jail. It's Eduardo. He crosses the city until coming to the Salvation Army shelter, where he is promised a roof over his head and a daily plate of food. One day, Dorotea goes there to find Eduardo, claiming to be his daughter. Eduardo takes fright on meeting her. She insists on staying nearby. Their relationship grows as love nourishes the famished man until bringing him back to life. Dorotea finally succeeds in bringing the loose ends of her family together just before Eugenia dies.

Ciudades oscuras / Dark Cities

Fernando Sariñana

113 min.

Dark Cities consists of different stories, characters who appear and run into one another on the streets of Mexico city centre. Among these people are Zezé and Lola, a couple of prostitutes who still believe that a better life is out there waiting for them; Riquelme and el Rubio, a team of policemen who harass and extort anyone who gets in their way; Clarita, an old lady desperate for her husband to die and her imminent solitude; Maru and Vicente, a couple of drug addicts lost in their world; Javo and Satanás, one a policeman and the other a tramp, related to one another, but separated by the life in the neighbourhood; Pollo, a man in despair due to the loss of his work... And a long list of characters and tales gradually running to each other, surround us in the real and violent world of a dark city.

Cofralandes, rapsodia chilena / Cofralandes, Chilean rhapsody

Raúl Ruiz

350 min.

An oneiric voyage to the imaginary country of ?Cofralandes?. A country at the end of the world or, if you would rather, a country outside of the world. Far-off Chile is visited by three travellers: a Frenchman, a German and an Englishman. Following them as a witness, the camera conceals a narrator, a Chilean, who gradually rediscovers this strange country which is his own. A country of fantasies and nightmares. Before the camera extravagant characters, unwonted situations, images from an Archady of cutting, mortal sweetness. A country with a distinctive symbol which is, precisely, Absence. A place with no qualities, where discolour is its local colour. And nevertheless, gradually, from this sort of algae sea emerge here and there images and situations in which enjoyment and laughter make good company for pain and perplexity, a child's poem hides a massacre and a smile, an earthquake.

El juego de la silla

Ana Katz

93 min.

Having lived in Canada for several years, Victor Lujine is sent by his company to Argentina for the first time. His travel schedule leaves him one day in Buenos Aires to visit his family, with whom he has very rarely even exchanged correspondence. Excited at the prospect of his arrival, the Lujine's set out to make up for lost time, organizing a constant flow of family rituals in his honour and pouring on him the contained love of their long wait. Games, songs and meals are crammed into his short stay. The forced attempt to maintain old ties unleashes an ending very far removed from anything any of them could have expected. El juego de la silla was selected as a result of its presentation in Cinéma en Construcción (Films in Progress, Toulouse, March 2002)

En la ciudad sin límites / The City of No Limits

Antonio Hernández

118 min.

Max is lying in a modern Parisian hospital where state-of-the-art technology is doing its best to prolong his life. His relations, including his youngest son Victor, who works in the USA, and his girlfriend Eileen, have moved into a hotel to be near him. Max has lost his head. He confuses past and present, unable to distinguish between the two, saying that he's got to find a friend called Rancel to prevent him from being thrown into jail. Although none of them take him seriously, Victor starts worrying when his father tries to escape from the hospital, deciding to become his accomplice and find out what's behind his apparently disturbed mind.

eXXXorcismos / eXXXorcisms

Jaime Humberto Hermosillo

78 min.

To irradicate the homosexual inclinations of his youth and exorcise the ghosts of his past, Marco Antonio returns to the setting of the tragedy that changed his life.

Francisca (...de qué lado estás?) / Francisca

Eva López-Sánchez

Mexico

85 min.

The story takes place in the Mexico of the early 70s. An ex-informer for the East German secret police flees from his past to Mexico, where he finds love, fate and vengeance. The lives of those who formed the ?68 student movement run into the errors, betrayals and ideals of a history guided by providence and fate.

Guerreros / Warriors

Daniel Calparsoro

96 min.

Kosovo, winter 2000. Over a year has passed since the NATO bombings had wished to protect the Albano-Kosovar secessionist rebels from Milosevic's onslaught. A squad of Spanish Army engineers, part of the international KFOR forces, attempts to carry out a humanitarian mission. Vidal is one of these young soldiers recently recruited to the new professional army. His optimism verges on naivete, in contrast to the apparent indifference of the rest of his squadron. When they receive the order to repair a damaged booster station, the ambitious lieutenant Alonso sees an opportunity to give a significant thrust to his brilliant career. These two apparently opposite characters will be progressively drawn towards personal confrontation. Eternal concepts such as power, fear, personal morality and group integration will explode in the very core of the squadron.

Hable con ella / Talk to Her

Pedro Almodóvar

108 min.

Benigno, a young male nurse, and Marco, a forty-something-year-old writer, are sitting beside one another by chance at a theatre show having a powerful emotional impact on them both. Marco starts crying; Benigno would like to say that he, too, is moved, but doesn't have the courage. Months later, they meet again at the clinic where Benigno works. Lydia, Marco's bullfighting girlfriend, has been tossed by the bull and is in a coma. Benigno, who looks after the similarly comatose young ballet student, Alicia, doesn't think twice about stopping Marco when he passes in front of Alicia's room, and the two strike up an intense friendship. During the time that they spend in suspension between the walls of the clinic, the life of these characters flows in all directions, past, present and future, drawing all four towards an unsuspected fate.

Intacto / Intact

Juan Carlos Fresnadillo

108 min.

The probability of your plane crashing is one in a million... Of your being the only survivor one in 237 million. You have survived. You're the luckiest person alive. You have a gift. You enter a world in which coincidence does not exist, where only luck counts... and you possess it. You are prepared to bet on it. But... would you challenge the god of chance?

La guerrilla de la memoria / The Guerrilla of Memory

Javier Corcuera

67 min.

A story about memory and, therefore, about forgetfulness. It's also the story of a voyage alongside anti-Franco guerrilla fighters, a voyage through time, towards memories, a voyage back to the mountains and the trees. A voyage towards a moment in the history of Spain that nobody visits any more.

La playa de los galgos / The Beach of the Greyhounds

Mario Camus

135 min.

Martín Alcorta, who has been on the tail of his missing brother for ten years, meets an enigmatic woman who decides to follow him, starting life at his side on successfully managing to make herself irreplaceable. Initially mistrustful, with no idea of her real intentions, the man eventually puts his doubts to one side and they set off together in search of the aforementioned lost relation. But the passing of time uncovers the real reason behind the woman's behaviour. Her claims to love were nothing but a set-up to achieve her long-term aims. The thing is that lies and cheating take their peculiar toll. There's no way out, they can't live without each other, nor even at a distance.

Mercano el Marciano / Mercano the Martian

Juan Antin

72 min.

Mercano the Martian lived happily on his planet until a space probe had crashed down and killed his dog. Furious, he had jumped into his spaceship and left for Earth in search of vengeance, instead finding a new and unexpected life. And as if things weren't bad enough, his craft had been wrecked, leaving him with nothing better to do than stay on in Argentina.

O invasor / The Trespasser

Beto Brant

97 min.

Friends since their student days at Engineering School, Estevão, Ivan and Gilbert have also been partners in a construction outfit for over 15 years. Everything goes fine until they start arguing about how to manage the business. On the one hand, Estevão, the biggest shareholder, is threatening to dissolve the company; on the other, Ivan and Gilberto decide to take out their friend in the belief that by doing so they will be able to manage the company as they see fit. They therefore hire hitman Anisio to do the job. But Anisio has his own plans, gradually invading their lives and confronting them both with the process of violence they themselves had set in motion in the belief that they would be able to control it.

Piedras / Stones

Ramón Salazar

130 min.

The tale of five women and five men and how they inter-relate via their feet and their shoes. Adela, the woman with flat feet, runs a roadside club where she meets Leonardo, the man with the worn soles, who tries to teach her to dance the tango. Anita, the woman in the trainers, only loves her little mutt, Alpino; when Joaquín, the man in the white clogs, arrives on the scene, Anita tries to understand her new feelings. Isabel Batres, the woman in the small shoes, is particularly attracted to her chiropodist, the man who reads the soles of feet. Leire, the woman in the stolen shoes, leaves everything to live with Kun, the man in someone else's shoes. Maricarmen, the woman in the slippers, drives her dead husband's taxi and looks after the two children from his previous marriage, including Victor, the young man in wellingtons.

Pinochet's Children/Volver a vernos / Pinochet's Children

Paula Rodríguez

Germany - Chile

83 min.

Carolina, Enrique and Alejandro were still children when Pinochet violently grabbed power in 1973. Two of their fathers were assassinated and the third had to flee into exile. They remember the pain and the fear they experienced as children during the first years of military rule. In their adolescent years they began to revolt against the regime, all three becoming distinguished student leaders. At the end of dictatorship, with the start of the transition towards democracy, the protagonists turned into adults. They remember their disappointment when they realised that everything they had fought for during the years of dictatorship (truth and justice) had become subject to political negotiation, finally going on to analyse the meaning and consequences of Pinochet's detention and judgement with respect to themselves and to Chile.

Raising Victor Vargas

Peter Sollett

87 min.

New York's lower East side swelters in the summer heat. 16-year-old Victor, his pain-in-the-ass sister Vicki and shy little brother Nino are going stir-crazy in their cramped tenement apartment, all under grandma's watchful eye. To ease the heat, Victor frequents a municipal swimming pool, as do Judy and her friends. Cool and self-possessed, Judy is a beautiful mystery fancied by every boy in the neighbourhood. Victor thinks he's in love. He hears that she just ditched her boyfriend and fixes an introduction through her brother. But Judy's looking for something more than a boyfriend. Something she needs but can't name. Something real, something special, she's not going to settle for anything less.

Rencor / Rancour

Miguel Albaladejo

108 min.

Chelo Zamora is an entertainer, a has-been who sings at cheap restaurants and beach hotels. Running back into small-time crook, Toni, awakens her memories of a dark past, sending her off on a tireless quest to ruin the life of the man she says led her to risk and lose the little she had achieved. Toni loses his job, his girlfriend and his friends. Further complicating things, Chelo succeeds in bringing Natalia to town, the woman with whom Toni once had a love affair, fathering her son. Coming out of hiding to deal with these problems, Toni is forced to make some decisions ultimately causing surprising and unexpected results.

Sin noticias de Dios / No News From God

Agustín Díaz Yanes

108 min.

This last decade has been a bad one for Heaven. Virtually no souls have passed the entrance exam, and the bosses are starting to worry bigtime; while in Hell things are exactly the opposite and they're having problems finding space for the new inmates. Just when the folk in charge of Heaven are about to give up all hope, they receive a request: a mother asking them to save the son of her soul, Many Chaves, a boxer with a more than rocky past. Heaven's big shots send one of their best angels to earth, Lola, who pretends to be the boxer's wife and take Many's soul away with her. But Hell's information services instantly detect the good spirit's presence and dispatch the highly skilled Carmen to counter her efforts.

Sudeste

Sergio Bellotti

98 min.

Having witnessed the expected and accepted death of his father, El Viejo, and taking the occurrence as a signal indicating the beginning of his true freedom, young El Boga takes off amid the fascinating setting of his birthplace in the islands forming the delta of the Paraná River. Fishing for a living, he travels with no set course. Boga's adventures are overshadowed by those of other outcasts who invade this space he considers to be his own. Because the river is not only the current and the islands, but the banks on which the flow leaves its waste. As a result of his meeting with El Cabecita, half-stupid, half-saint, and later with El Pampa, a delinquent, violence and crime speed up the action, complicating things for everyone. Sudeste was selected as a result of its presentation in Cinéma en Construction (Films in Progress, Toulouse, March 2002)

Uma onda no ar / Something in the Air

Helvécio Ratton

92 min.

A police squad makes its way up the narrow streets of a skid row. While the drug traffickers prepare for war, a clandestine local radio recommends that people take shelter in their homes. However the aim of the police is not to quash the drug trade, but to silence the radio. In prison, Jorge, the radio director, tells his story to the other convicts. The film makes its way back in time: on the top of the hill, four young friends, Jorge, Brau, Roque and Zequiel, dream of creating a radio station acting as the voice of the ?favela? and permitting it to shout at the world.

Un día de suerte / A Lucky Day

Sandra Gugliotta

Argentina - Italy - Spain

97 min.

Today's Buenos Aires. In a city plagued with social unrest, unemployment and political conflict, 25 year-old Elsa looks for a decent job that will bring her the money she needs to fulfil her dearest desire: a trip to Italy. She dreams of meeting the man she loves, of a better life, ideas fueled by the tales of her old Sicilian immigrant grandfather. Walter, Laura and Toni are her friends and accomplices in the occasional illegal exploit, although her quasi-amorous relationship with the former of the three does nothing to deter her from harbouring thoughts of her ?voyage to a potentially new life?. Grudgingly, Walter finds the way for Elsa to start making her dream come true; however, on arriving in Europe, Elsa is smartly brought back down to reality. And it's not reality as she'd imagined it.

Un oso rojo / A Red Bear

Adrián Caetano

94 min.

Although Bear is the only one counting, seven years have passed since he was jailed for armed robbery and murder. Not much of a one with words, unpredictable, naturally or necessarily violent, he's probably never told anyone what's behind his silence and sad eyes. Alice, his daughter, was a year old on the day of the assault, and Natalia, his wife, is unlikely ever to have forgiven him for it. Now, out on probation, Bear thinks that maybe he can start again. The Turk still owes him his part of the plunder; helped by his cellmate, he gets in touch with Güemes, who gives him a job as a chauffeur. Although he has lost Natalia, who now lives with Sergio, and Alicia can hardly remember him, Bear intends to try and get them back, or at least to repair the damage.

Washington Heights/Ay, amor / Washington Heights

Alfredo de Villa

82 min.

Young illustrator Carlos Ramirez is burning to escape the Latino neighbourhood of Washington Heights and make a splash in New York City's commercial downtown comic book scene. But when his father, who owns a bodega in the Heights, is shot in a burglary attempt, Carlos is forced to put his dream on hold and run the store, coming to understand that if he is to make it as a comic artist, he must engage with the community he comes from, take that experience back out into the world, and put it in his work.

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