Among the highlighted proposals is Un poeta, a Colombian production directed by Simón Mesa Soto. This film is truly unclassifiable and unexpected, not only because of the rarity of seeing Colombian cinema in these parts, but also because of its plot, tone, aesthetics, and theme. The film portrays the story of a poet, the most lamentable and pathetic one can imagine, serving the director to create an implacable portrait of the hypocrisy of the cultural world when faced with certain realities.
Un poeta begins as a dark and grotesque comedy, but, without ceasing to be so, it becomes tragic and desperate, drifting towards stark social class issues. However, it escapes the clichés of costumbrismo or 'pornomiseria', offering a critical look at the representation of inequality and raising the question of what poetry is and where to find it amidst today's chaos. Formally, the film is rough, harsh, and ugly, shot on super 16mm to maintain the dirtiness of the frame and the coarse grain.
Another major proposal is Espejos nº 3, the most recent film by the renowned German director Christian Petzold. This film, with a mysterious title, tells the story of a woman who, after an accident, decides to live with a stranger, unwilling or unable to return to her previous life. The work explores the author's recurring themes, such as identity games, coexistence between strangers, the fragility of relationships, and the unpredictable consequences of trauma.
Petzold's seemingly conventional staging creates rarefied atmospheres and unsettling sensations of danger in everyday environments, even when everything is shot in broad daylight. This growing strangeness and the unease that invades the viewer are related to the ability to recognize deep aspects of one's own existence in the characters' actions and silences, offering an example of seemingly simple cinema, but of great psychological complexity.
Finally, from Germany also comes El sonido de la caída, the second feature film by Mascha Schilinski. The director builds her film on the idea that places have memory and that the traces of those who preceded us reach us. The film follows in a non-linear and almost anti-narrative way four girls (Alma, Erika, Angelika, and Lenka) who lived in the same place in Germany at different times, from World War I to today.
Childhood curiosity, the discovery of the world (including violence and pain), the birth of sexual desire, and fear or pleasure, unite these young women and intertwine the sequences through emotional tone or sensory effects, rather than through narrative logic. The film nullifies temporal distance, making everything seem to happen at once, and reflects another aspect that unites them: patriarchy and violence against women. It is a complex and radical narrative conception, with fascinating staging, full of texture changes, menacing sounds, and points of view that invite reflection.
