The sacred caves that served as a refuge for the filming of Conan the Barbarian in Almería awaken with the visit of steel that seems to summon him. Cinema leaves traces. Sometimes they are material, but more often they linger as ghosts in the landscapes, in the memory, in the way we look at a place that was once filmed.
+ Dreams for a Better Past
Friday
15/05
20:45 h
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CCCB | Auditori
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Festival de Málaga 2026
While two politicians prepare for Barcelona’s mayoral campaign in an office, outside, the Brigades de Confusió Popular exorcise the ghosts of Olympic urban planning. Filmmaker Àlex Sardà documents the first Interferència de Teatres de campanya, created by artist Marc Salicrú and carried out at Nova Icària Beach in Barcelona on September 21 and 22, 2024.
A collage made of memories, family conversations, songs, found footage, and attempts at other films. While a film student shoots his first shorts on Super 8, he laments not having a single moving image of his parents. “Only the rich make films.”
The poalets, some “harmless” buckets meant to improve recycling, have polarized a town. A multitude of banners and graffiti reading ‘No to the poalets’ flood balconies and streets. Countdown to the elections. The ballot boxes will decide whether this delirious polarization prevails and manages to alter the town’s fate.
Behind the orchard that surrounds the squatted neighbourhood of Errekaleor, the city of Vitoria-Gasteiz grows with the construction of tall, new buildings. While its inhabitants resist the threats of eviction creating a collaborative network, other species grow in the orchard and begin a dialogue with the community.
In the dead of night in Havana, the little light that illuminates its streets is powered by an unreliable electrical supply, the same one used to run the sound systems at raves. A group of young people, witnessing the lack of all energy, wander through the city amid delirious conversations, conspiracies and apathy, as the city grows darker and darker.
Isolated during COVID, Xavier films the hypnotic flights of starlings, which awaken memories of his HIV diagnosis and a longing for connection. Through voice messages with his lover in Brazil, early AIDS activism in New York, and Afro-Brazilian Candomblé rituals, the film becomes a meditation on grief, survival, and collective resilience.
A photograph, a silent legacy of power and ideological battles that resonate through several generations. Looking between the fragments of the past, I glimpse what we choose not to see, which escapes through the fissures of our consciousness. How do we inherit what we cannot understand, forcing ourselves to repeat the same gestures over and over again?
Three years after the eruption of the volcano on his native island, La Palma, Pedro Tomás explores the world with his unique view and relays what he sees: the jungle, ducks, God, flowers. He also stops off in the strange black desert that was left after the Cumbre Vieja volcano exploded. A man who explores the world.
Following the supporters of Club Deportivo Palestino, a dialogue unfolds between Chile and Palestine around identity and return, bringing both territories together in a shared space of celebration, where dreaming of victory becomes a way of imagining possible futures.
Everything is a contested narrative: family, nature, the village, the city. From the most intimate sphere to the collective identity of a city, these films attempt to portray what is absent, yet defines us: from the absurdity of everyday life to foundational images and spaces. Their directors seek to understand themselves and the world they inhabit, in a gesture where filmmaking becomes an act of resistance against oblivion, manipulation, and emptiness.
Retales, Juanjo Giménez
Pedro Tomás explica el mundo, Kornelijus Stučkus
No als poalets, Laura García Andreu
Promeses i accidents. Teatres de Campanya – Interferència 01, Alex Sardà
A program of short films about dreams that we do not only imagine, but that inhabit us and shape who we are. Technological, collective, inherited dreams, or dreams embedded in the landscape, that redefine what we understand as reality and memory.
Baisanos, d’Andrés Khamis Giacoman and Francisca Khamis Giacoman
Dreams for a Better Past, d’Albert Kuhn
La cueva de Conan, de Jorge Castrillo and Artur Pol Camprubí
like moth to light, de Gala Hernandez
Cyclical crises, dances that return, generations of young people in a constant state of alarm. Synergistic movements that respond to the need to escape a situation in a state of putrefaction. When a dance represents more than a dance and a murmur is more than a solitary voice. Three echoes of yesterday, today, and tomorrow, more urgent than ever.
A short film session programmed and moderated with the collaboration of the Young Programmers Moving Cinema.
Habana industrial, Ainhoa Ordoñez
Murmurations, Xavier Marrades
Utopías y otras especies, Júlia Izaguirre
A woman talks to us from inside a machine that records her brain activity. She describes a mental labyrinth combining an old amusement park called Dreamland, 19th-century dream photographs, contemporary experiments in mental decoding using AI, and Prophetic, a start-up whose goal is to control dreams. But what do our dreams see when they look back at us?
