¿Dónde están? Where are they? Where are the missing? And where are the missing images? With these questions in mind, I’ve prepared a program of short films from Latin America that are all, in one way or another, looking for someone or something. Missing women in Mexico, desaparecidos in Argentina, Kawéskar natives kidnapped from their home in Tierra del Fuego, an arrested child whose family has been murdered in Paraguay, the missing in Peru’s period of violence, and the missing images in Ecuador’s massacre of protesting workers in 1922. Missing people, missing images. A missing cinema, now found: a cinema made of fragments, of traces, of archival pieces, of what remains, of the ruins, of what has not been able to be completely erased. Because something always remains, no matter how small, no matter how difficult to find or to see or to hear. As these films remind us, it’s a matter of making visible the invisible, which is to say that it’s a matter of seeing but also of listening (“listening to images” in the words of scholar Tina Campt). It requires a certain practice, a certain opening, a certain desire to know, a certain desire to connect the present with the past. To learn how to see the ghosts, to feel their presence, their longing, the life that they could have lived, the lives that were cut too short, the images that have found their way to us, despite a systemic history of violence and erasure. Conceived as a constellation of films in dialogue with my own archival film titled 1922, these films open unhealed wounds of the past through experimental practices of reproduction and reappropriation to remind us of the fragility of human life and of cinema and that the future and survival of both are more than intertwined.
- Libertad Gills
Se busca (en el mar) [Missing]
by Annalisa D. Quagliata
2 min
2016
A short film that illustrates a harrowing truth: the overwhelming numbers of missing women in Mexico. The film is composed of fifty images of disappeared women, all of them re-photographed from their “missing person” notice.
Annalisa D. Quagliata Blanco, born in 1990, Veracruz, Mexico. She is a graduate from Massachusetts College of Art and Design where she studied a double major in Film/Video and Studio for Interrelated Media. Her work has been exhibited internationally. Her first feature film Aoquic iez in Mexico! (2024) won Best Feature Film at Festival FICValdivia, Valdivia, Chile (2024) and won the Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker at the 63rd Ann Arbor Film Festival (2025).
Strata of Natural History
by Jeannette Muñoz
12 min
2016
Archival images often resemble faint echoes of history. This film is a personal journey through the invisible yet persistent traces and layers that resonate in a place like echoes. In the film, there are echoes of the Kawéskar natives from Tierra del Fuego, photographed in Berlin in 1881 and exhibited in the Berlin Zoological Garden; a Greater Rhea (a flightless bird) from Tierra del Fuego at the Berlin Zoological Garden; bathers at the Fuente Alemana (German Fountain) monument in Santiago de Chile; and the city of Berlin.
Jeannette Muñoz was born in Chile and is based in Switzerland. As an independent artist-filmmaker, she makes 16mm films since 2001 that circulate primarily in a non-fiction film context and art galleries. Her films have been exhibited in many festivals and venues including; Centro de Bellas Artes Madrid, S8 Mostra de Cinema Perisférico, l-e Tokyo Japan, New York Film Festival, Rotterdam FF Spektrum, Images Film Festival Toronto, Media City FIlm Festival Ontario Canada, Arsenal-Berlin, Ourense Film Festival, Festival Punto de Vista Pamplona, CGAI Centro Gallego de Artes da Imaxe, Xcèntric CCCB Barcelona, Palais de Glace Buenos Aires, Festival Internacional de Valdivia, Videoex Zürich, and many others.
Valeria
by Colectivo Los Ingrávidos
9 min
2017
Colectivo Los Ingrávidos is a film collective from Tehuacán, Mexico which was founded in 2012 to dismantle the commercial and corporate audiovisual grammar and its embedded ideology. The collective is inspired by the historical avant-gardes and their commitment to using both form and content against alienating realities. Their methods combine digital and analog mediums, interventions on archival materials, mythology, agitprop, social protests, and documentary poetry. Their radical experimentations on documentary and cinematographic devices produce images, both visual and auditory that are political possibilities in their own right.
Familiar
by Paz Encina
9 min
2017
The dictatorship / 35 years / The Agrarian Leagues / The denunciation / The Caaguazú case / The police / The taking of a bus / The repression / The denunciation / Apolonia / 12 years / 10 dead, 6 arrested and 4 fugitives / Apolonia / The denunciation / 5 gunshots / Apolonia / 12 years… / A society… Alien … and Familiar…
Paz Encina was born in Asunción, Paraguay. In 2006, she premiered her first feature film, Hamaca Paraguaya at the Cannes Film Festival, where she was recognized with the FIPRESCI Critics' Prize. In 2016, she premiered Ejercicios de Memoria at the San Sebastián Film Festival, and in 2022, Eami at the Rotterdam Film Festival, where she received the Tiger Award. In 2020, she was invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences of the United States. In 2022, she was awarded the Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard University, where she began developing THE ONLY TIME, a project she is currently working on.
La huella (The Imprint)
by Tatiana Fuentes Sadowski
18 min
2012
From archival photographs that testify to years of political violence in Peru, the film builds an analytical narrative that combines the artist's memory and that of José Pablo Baraybar, head of the Peruvian team of forensic medicine.
Tatiana Fuentes Sadowski is a Peruvian filmmaker whose work bridges experimental and documentary cinema, exploring themes of memory, colonial histories and collective healing, reflecting her commitment to addressing historical wounds through a poetic cinematic lens. She studied Performing Arts in Perú and Film and New Media at Le Fresnoy—Studio National des Arts Contemporains in France. Her first short film, La huella (The Imprint) won an award at the 2013 Doclisboa Festival and has been screened at more than 30 festivals and art centres internationally. Her latest work, The Memory of Butterflies was presented in the Forum Section of the 75th Berlinale Festival, where it won the Fipresci International Federation of Film Critics Award and the Special Jury Mention for Best Documentary.
¿Dónde está Marie Anne? (Where is Marie Anne?)
by Yaela Gottlieb
6 min
2022
In a world that promises a perfect life, Marie Anne tries to escape. At that point, all trace of her is lost forever. Found footage made from advertisements recovered by the Museo del Cine de Buenos Aires from the years 1976-1983.
Yaela Gottlieb is a Peruvian filmmaker and educator with a degree in Communication Sciences and Film Directing from the Universidad del Cine de Buenos Aires. After living in Argentina for 10 years, she moved to Germany to pursue a Master’s in Fine Arts at HFBK Hamburg thanks to a DAAD scholarship. She has curated special programs for the CC. Spain (Lima), Museum of Contemporary Art of Buenos Aires and Fundación OSDE (Argentina), Sinema Transtopia (Berlin). Her films have been showcased at the international film festivals including Punto de Vista, Berlin Critics' Week, FICValdivia, FICViña, Lima Film Festival, BAFICI as well as in museums such as MAR Museum of Contemporary Art, Fundación Proa, and MACBA, among others. She's received awards such as the Juan Downey Award for Latin American creation (2022), Bienal Arte Joven (2019), CineAr Award (2023), Fondo Nacional de las Artes Grant (2019, 2022), and Berlinale Talents BA (2020). Yaela has produced films like Film is dead (24 Thessaloniki) and Esa casa amarilla (39 Torino Film Festival). In 2021, she released her first feature film No hay regreso a casa, which received recognition at various film festivals.
Las fotos del obrero
by Mario Rodríguez Dávila
23 min
2024
A photographer is asked to document a protest that ends in a massacre. Now, he and his material are both in danger.
Mario Rodríguez Dávila (Guayaquil, Ecuador, 1978). Filmmaker, cultural manager, artistic researcher. His works move between archive and documentary fiction, as well as in the search for memory and poetic-political singular and collective history, the protagonists being not only people, but landscapes and exterior and interior geographies.
ABOUT THE CURATOR:
Libertad Gills is a filmmaker, researcher, writer, and Lecturer of Videographic Criticism (Film Studies) at the University of Leeds. Her films have screened at Prismatic Ground, Cámara Lúcida, and Transcinema, among others, and her videographic works as well as writing on film have appeared in Senses of Cinema, Short Film Studies, and desistfilm. She has published two books on Latin American film and experimental cinema and recently co-edited a double issue of Academic Quarter on academic filmmaking. Gills holds a Ph.D. from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, with a focus on experimental archival cinema. She has also contributed as programmer for Berlin Critics Week, UltraCinema Mexico, Bogota’s Cinemateca, and Switzerland’s Fresh Festival.
