Patricia Ferreira
EL SECRETO MEJOR GUARDADOAn orphan living with his grandmother in Southern India, Ravi has to travel a long way to a school in another village because he's not wanted at his, although he doesn't know why. Only his friend Krishnaveni seems comfortable at his side.LA VIDA EFÍMERAVicenta, daughter of a Spanish mother and Guinean father, returns to Malabo, the city she left as a child to work at the General Hospital, at which she learns about some of the plagues devastating the African continent, such as malaria, still the main cause of child death in Equatorial Guinea.LAS SIETE ALCANTARILLAS3-year-old Maca will tell us why she's happy. She shows us her family, her house, her district, but her view of reality doesn't quite correspond to that of the spectator. Life in "Las 7 Alcantarillas" isn't easy, as she'll soon have to discover.HIJAS DE BELÉNEusebia lived with the Jeberos in the Amazon jungle. At the age of 10 she moved to the Belén neighbourhood of Iquitos (Peru) with the intention of going to school. She never learned to read and write because she had to work from childhood. Three generations later, history repeats itself with Nancy, another child from Belén.BINTA Y LA GRAN IDEA7-year-old Binta lives in a village in southern Senegal and goes to school. Her cousin Soda doesn't have the same luck; she's not allowed to learn the things she doesn't know about this world. Binta admires her father, a humble fisherman whom, concerned by the progress of humanity, is determined to carry out an idea he's had.
Oliver Stone
In the spring of 2003, Cuba suffered a wave of hi-jacks of ships and planes in which scores of Cuban citizens were trying to emigrate to North America, drawn by the chance of US residency. Fidel Castro?s regime arrested and imprisoned 75 of them, including freelance journalists, accusing them of being US agents and of conspiring against the revolution. Three kidnappers, detained while trying to take control of a ferry in Havana bay, were condemned to death and executed following extremely summary trials. These events constituted a point of inflexion for the worldwide image of the Cuban regime and caused numerous intellectuals and different governments to revive their condemnations of the Castrist regime. Given the situation, Oliver Stone returned to Cuba to obtain answers and take a deeper look at the island?s political reality.
Benjamín Avila
During the period from 1976 to 1983, Argentina was in the grip of the military dictatorship. Throughout these years, thousands of people were illegally confined and assassinated in total impunity. The children of these ?missing? people and the newborn children of women pregnant at the time of their imprisonment were often taken away and brought up by the families of the military. 500 missing children is one of the darkest legacies of this period. The tireless dedication of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo throughout the last 25 years allowed 77 of these children to be reunited with their biological families. Nietos does not attempt a political or historical examination of this period, but recovers the human dimension that the process of assertion of a new identity has for them, exploring the way in which the history of the past comes back and roosts into the present, indicating a path to the future.
Eterio Ortega Santillana
They?re anonymous. No-one knows them. Even in their closest environments they have seen how certain eyes of those familiar with them avert their gaze. Their circle of dialogue, of discussion, of potential comprehension is increasingly smaller. Right from the moment they leave home in the morning, when walking along the street on their way to work, they are accompanied by two bodyguards. On finishing their working day, they arrive back at their doorway, saying goodbye to the people who protect their lives. Five real, anonymous actors. Their lives, long in some cases, short in others. Their families, their memories, their dreams. The terrible experience of living in persecution.
Manuel Palacios
In 2002 the Spanish House of Commons condemned the 1936 coup d?état against the democratic government of the republic. 28 years had gone by since Franco?s death and the country had experienced pacific transition to democracy. But the voice of the beaten, forgotten and effaced from the Spanish geography during forty years of dictatorship hadn?t entered the country?s democratic collective memory. Foreign exile, formed by thousands of prisoners ideologically opposed to the Franco dictatorship, began in 1936 with the devastating fratricidal conflict of the Spanish Civil War practically concluding with the dictator?s death in 1975.
Carlo Nero
An Englishwoman wakes up in the middle of the night in a small hotel in a poverty-stricken foreign city where a civil war is being fought. She has a fever and tries to remember why she has returned to this frightening country. During the night, she retraces her happy childhood and her relatively happy adult existence as a pleasant, hardworking professional woman who has enjoyed her own life and loved music, the arts, her family and her friends. She also retraces the unusual events that have led her to this place, and how the people she has met have changed her understanding of the world. Now she confronts a new and unpleasant perception of herself and her life. As dawn breaks, her fever subsides. The woman has arrived at an honest appraisal of who she is, finally understanding her own responsibility for the violence of poverty and exploitation.