This is where the festival plays its game, the DNA of D’A in its purest form! The competitive Talents section, dedicated to emerging filmmakers with a maximum of two feature films in their filmography, brings us eleven Spanish premieres this year, eight of which are debuts. The section shows the festival’s commitment to new talents, new voices and the cinema of the future, those names that must mark contemporary authorship in the coming years. And it also shows the vision of the programmers and the D’A 2026 team: stories from all over the world, with themes ranging from identity to postcolonialism, from the interior landscape to the exterior, from voluntary to forced migration, from young to old. In addition, among the eleven selected films, the majority are women behind the camera, with eight directors. Talents will feature films from France, Slovenia, Poland, Belgium, Greece, Mexico, Algeria and Germany, as well as two Spanish films and a co-production from Spain and Peru.
Affection Affection, the new work of the creative duo formed by Maxime Matray and Alexia Walther (authors of Bêtes blondes, seen at D’A 2019), premiered worldwide at the Locarno festival. The feature film debut of the renowned editor Cristina Rosselló with Érem una gran família, a passionate work that is also a videographic archive about Spain in the second half of the 20th century. Estados generales, by Mauricio Freyre is a film premiered at the FidMarseille Festival, the director’s first work, with a visually striking film that explores contemporary neocolonial structures. Barcelona’s Pep Garrido (co-director of Bustamente Perkins, a film awarded at the In-Edit festival) presents Tanit, a tender and fantastic fable with a soundtrack by Clara Peya.
Slovenian filmmaker Kukla makes her debut with Fantasy, a fascinating work about the complexities of gender and desire, which went through the La Cinef laboratory at Cannes. Kingdom, by Michał Ciechomski, is a hypertestosteronic dystopia that is as believable as it is disturbing, coming from Poland. Also in the section is the shocking L’Enfant bélier, by Marta Bergman (Belgium), a cross between social drama and thriller, in a film that takes a close look at the migrant phenomenon. Forced migration in reverse is what we find in Nomad Shadow, by Eimi Imanishi (Algeria), a film that has been through the festivals in Toronto and Tallinn and that talks about the deportation of a young Sahrawi woman.
Director Amerissa Basta makes her feature film debut with Life in a Beat, an energetic work, awarded by the Thessaloniki audience, which has made her one of the revelations of current Greek cinema. Also a big surprise is The Plant from the Canaries, by the Chinese director living in Germany Ruan Lan-Xi, a reflection on the diaspora, premiered in the Cineasti del Presente section of the Locarno Festival. Finally, Nuestro cuerpo es una estrella que se expande, by the Mexican brothers Semillites and Tania Hernández Velasco, a splendid and sensorial film about the concept of identity, premiered at IDFA.