Documentary movies

Who were the unknown heroines who helped to promote women's rights in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century? The documentary by producer and director Silvia Venegas highlights the importance of past and present activism that continues to fill the streets of Spain today with people demonstrating and paying tribute to those whose rebellion advanced the status of women in society and opened up opportunities they could only dream of before. But their journey is far from over…

The most successful Mexican pop group in decades returns after a successful tour of the United States, Colombia and Brazil to share not only their greatest hits, but an intimate, behind-the-scenes look at what the RBD reunion means to them.

Tania and Cocteau, a cat that comes from the not too distant future, tell the story of the passage of animals through the world and their relationship with humans.

Across the Amazon, Indigenous guards are unarmed patrols that peacefully defend ancestral territories against threats like oil, mining and poaching. They use diverse technologies to monitor their lands, and when necessary, force out illegal operations and actors. Most of this daily work, which involves lengthy hikes and patient observation, goes unseen. This film depicts the process of the Indigenous Guard: its patrols, its watchful vigilance over the landscape, and its support of the community. Their work as guards helps ensure that destruction in the Amazon doesn’t advance, and that their community has the vital space it needs to live life on their own terms.

Creative documentary about the construction of the President Néstor Kirchner Gas Pipeline, a work that changes the energy paradigm of Argentina, lived and told by a group of collaborators involved in its execution.

In a search for giving new meaning to the past and understanding her present, the director tries to establish a dialogue between her parents -which has been non-existent for years- through letters and family archive material prior to her birth.

Amaya has filmed the four love relationships that marked her life. She covers the last 20 years, from her first fall in love when she was 18, to her current age of 38. Faced with the desire to be a mother, she writes an audiovisual letter to her future children. She thus takes us on a journey into her past that reveals the phases of love, the challenge of long-distance relationships and the clash between illusions and frustrations or guilt. The film combines documentary and animation, the real and intimate, with the expressive. An apparently personal and intimate film, where the turn and evolution of the protagonist can also be read from an anthropological or political prism, reflecting the change in the role of women in intimate relationships.

In 1976, while he was taking his grandchildren to school, a businessman was kidnapped by a guerrilla organization. Two months later, the army broke into the house in which he was being held captive in order to release him. That same day, one of the guerrillas was abducted and disappeared by the civic-military dictatorship. Decades later, the director of this film, and the son of that guerrilla man, meets to talk with the businessman’s son and grandsons. The Businessman is made up of talks, but also of magazines, poster, flyers, photographs, newspapers, ads, home movies and objects that are also the testimony of a time; its editing makes personal memories intertwine with the story, and in it, the question of the relationship between who’s filming and who’s being filmed becomes inescapable.

This is the cinematographic diary of an extended trip across the Pampas, on the trail of Guillermo Enrique Hudson, aka William Henry Hudson. Hudson is an enigmatic figure, full of paradoxes: he was an Argentine gaucho who became an English writer. He fought in the army against the “savages” but also defended them. He wrote obsessively about his native land, but never returned. In the twists and turns of the road, emerges a mix of documentary speculation, personal memory… and dreams.

Breathe. A group of maximum security prisoners recounts the injuries they suffered as children. Breathe. The prisoners themselves narrate the wounds they have inflicted. Breathe. The box reminds them that they have to suffer to continue living.

A well-known filmmaker follows a famous mountain climber to Nepal, documenting the journey. Conversations about their lives lead to philosophical reflections, as the mountain challenges their motives. As days go by, the higher altitude and the depletion of oxygen will raise their debate to interior and transcendental territories, putting at stake their trajectories and their egos when facing the mountain and its millenary depth.

A look at the life and work of Spanish filmmaker Mario Camus (1935-2021).

In California’s Central Valley, tucked between the county jail and the shooting range, 100 Mexican-American farmworking families live, love and strive at the Artesi II Migrant Family Housing Center. Until every December, that is, when they’re asked to leave.

In his previous films, Hacerme feriante (2010) and Embodied Letters (2015), Julián D’Angiolillo managed to go deep inside two universes that, even though they take place in front of everyone, remained invisible and inscrutable, as though they were subterranean—that of La Salada fair and of the authors of political graffiti in walls. For Ongoing Cave, his third work, the director goes back underground, this time in a literal manner, in order to reveal the mysteries of speleology, the science that studies caves and caverns. Italy, Slovenia, Cuba; antiwar bunkers; an exploring, revolutionary ballerina; an electronic party in which the stalactites and stalagmites dance under the flashlights. Everything is part of the ecosystem of tunnels and people that D’Angiolillo connects on screen, through images in which what lies still comes to life.

Dorotys dream was to dance and be recognized as the woman she was, but death came first. Her best friend Misael, a sixty-year-old gay man, will make it happen. Misael creates the first diverse folk dance group, questioning traditions that are defended by cultural values in order to erase their queerness.

In a world where technological progress is conceived as an arrow pointing forward, why do some people insist on continuing to work with equipment others refer to as obsolete? Analog Thinking answers that question by documenting the meticulous work of those who choose that path. The screen becomes filled with wonderful objects—optical toys, cameras, projectors, film stock cans, moviolas… And the testimonies from those creators invite us to discover a universe that has a lot to do with both craftsmanship and the collective experience—an instance of thinking with your hands that is only possible with curiosity and patience. And among the words, practices and artifacts, Analog Thinking also saves a place for the images that are born from all of that. And it reminds us that, even in this digital age, they still have a lot to teach us about waiting and making mistakes, surprise and beauty.

In 2019, millions of Chileans rose up in a popular revolt that resulted in radical change: the call for an assembly that will change the constitution imposed by the Pinochet dictatorship and its economic neoliberal model, referred to as ‘The Brick’. This change is seen through the eyes of two Chileans from opposing sides of the political spectrum. They experience a year of turmoil as protests give way to transformation. On the one side Ramiro, a wealthy businessman, and on the other side Mariana, a lower middle-class teacher. Historical conflicts that were long thought resolved come to light as the assembly process draws closer, showing how the wounds of a brutal dictatorship are deep, lasting and must be reconciled at all costs.

From the DAC Foundation we have carried out the Argentine Cinema Goes to School program since 2014, bringing national cinema to young people who are pursuing their secondary education throughout the country. The work with the CEPT (rural educational establishments in the province of Buenos Aires) arose from getting to know them within the framework of our activity, and that is how we set out to make this film to publicize this peculiar type of teaching and the exchange that occurred. with our program.

F, an 18-year-old boy, immerses himself in the world of the Drag Queen where he begins to build his identity despite family and social mandates, which impose on him to be afraid and ashamed of being who he is.

Carlos returns to Huamantla, Mexico, the dreamy town where he was raised. During those years, his grandma was his support: she encouraged him to move forwards. The road was not easy. He had to organize concerts himself, with the financial help of local businesses. He is eternally grateful to them and will perform for the people of the town who helped him.