Meet the Programmers!

Like last year, we’ve asked our programming advisors to get their act together. What film has particularly impressed them? Which one are they dying to recommend? If you like the D’A vibes, don’t miss these writings from this group: they’re pretty much responsible for a splendid program! Let’s pass the word on to Xavier Arnaiz, Carlos Losilla, Alba Cros, Eulàlia Iglesias, Oskar Fernández, Violeta Kovacsics, Tariq Porter, Marc Barceló and Flor Clérico.

Keep his name: Kohei Igarashi. With Super Happy Forever, the Japanese filmmaker delivers a melancholic work about grief and its consequences that plays at reconstructing the past through a story that, despite everything, becomes luminous. The film follows two friends on a trip to a decadent coastal resort where, five years earlier, one of them met his future partner. With the memory of a red cap as an almost spectral Macguffin, the film offers a narrative game that flows without frills, and where past and present end up blurring. The director already stood out with a film like The Night I Swam (filmed together with Damien Manivel, who acts as a co-producer here), and with the splendid short Two of Us, which somehow connects with this magnificent Super Happy Forever with which he reveals himself as one of the authors to watch in new Japanese cinema.

Xavier Arnaiz is part of the D’A team. He also works at the Serielizados Fest in programming and press tasks and collaborates as a critic in various media. In his career he has worked as a producer at Eddie Saeta, communications at Fabra i Coats or as a cultural journalist at the magazine butxaca.

INVASIÓN PEQUEÑA

For D’A, this is Miguel Ángel Blanca’s year. First, because there’s one of his films in the Direccions section, where he rubs shoulders with Hong Sang-soo and David Cronenberg, among many others. And second, because there’s another in Un Impulso Colectivo, no less distinguished for being shorter. In this last one, beautifully titled Invasión pequeña, he simply follows someone he feels is worthy of observation, which isn’t very common these days. He’s a peculiar person, a character who doesn’t exactly lead an ordinary life, but who at the same time couldn’t be less extraordinary. And he films it with humility and pride, another strange combination, for that is Blanca’s art: making strangeness something we can accept as normal, because everything has become so strange that “normal” is called into question. For all these reasons, Invasión pequeña is one of the great films of Spanish cinema this year.

Carlos Losilla is a writer, translator, and professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra and at ESCAC, besides being the curator of our Un Impulso Colectivo section.

TÊTES BRÛLÉES

Têtes brûlées is Maja-Ajmia Yde Zellama’s debut film, a luminous and tender portrait of a process of mourning and assimilation. The protagonist, a 12-year-old girl, faces the death of her older brother while observing how her group of friends, all of them Muslim men, also go through this loss. The film is moving for its simplicity and honesty: it does not seek grand speeches, but invites us to feel beyond words. Vulnerability is central, both in the family intimacy and in the masculinity of the group of friends, which is shown with an unusual delicacy on screen. Straddling reality and fiction, Yde Zellama constructs a device that sensitively captures the gesture, the gaze and the silence. A debut that shines for its humanity and that has deserved a special mention at the Berlinale 2025 in the Generation 14plus section.

Alba Cros is a film director. She is on the board of directors of the Catalan Film Academy and is an associate professor in Audiovisual Communication studies at Pompeu Fabra University.

VIET AND NAM

On the 15th anniversary of D’A, Viet and Nam represents the spirit of the festival very well when it comes to putting the most stimulating names in contemporary cinema on the radar with a proposal that also includes the legacy of its predecessor competition, the BAFF. The new feature film by Truong Minh Quy (it is worth recovering his previous The Tree House) delves into the past, present and future of a country marked by wars through the love story between two young miners, one of whom is about to flee in search of new horizons. The film delves into the deep wounds of a territory while extracting to the surface the sensorial beauty of a clandestine passion. A demonstration that queer cinema can also propose new frameworks in addressing historical memory and its traumas pending repair, but also in the representation of current violence against migrants.

Eulàlia Iglesias Huix is a film and television critic (Ara, Caimán Cuadernos de Cine, Fotogramas, Rockdelux…), professor (URV) and programmer (D’A, Seminci).

DELIRIO

Delirio, the second feature film by Costa Rican director Alexandra Latishev Salazar, is a modest, small film that grows in its scant hour and a quarter, portraying three generations of women living together in a single space. It exposes us to crucial themes such as grief, mother-daughter relationships, and caring for the elderly, without falling into sensationalism or melodrama, and even has a small touch of the fantastic that rounds out its hypnotic plot.

Devourer of music, literature and cinema, Oskar Fernández works as a translation and subtitling coordinator and has been a programming advisor and editor of D’A since its inception. He is also a programmer of the Eufònic —sound and visual arts festival.

RETARGUARDIA

The films of Ramón Lluís Bande constitute a certain gesture of resistance. First, for their vindication of history as a tool for critically understanding the present; second, for their political and class commitment to the history of Spain in the context of the Civil War; and third, for their willingness to express all of this through radical forms of mise-en-scène. Retaguardia is all of this and more: it is the exploration of a historical moment, that of 1937 from the Republican perspective, of which there are hardly any moving images. Unable to work from the lost films, Bande chooses to remake these films, using photographs and other materials that have survived. This cinematic act is in itself a gesture of resistance, both to explain Republican resistance and to resonate in an era, our own, in which this stance is once again necessary.

Violeta Kovacsics is a film critic for Caimán Cuadernos de Cine and Finestra Indiscreta on Catalunya Ràdio. She is a professor at ESCAC.

MOSCAS

There are many ways to tell a story, and many stories that can be told or not. In Moscas, debutant director Ester Paganini starts from the simple but stimulating concept of isolation in an urban environment. And if this story is worth listening to, it is, above all, because of how it is told. Moscas is a small film with a great pictorial sense, vignettes where the image plays an essential role and where sound is not an accompaniment but an equally important narrative asset. Narrative and sensorial: it is not so obvious that the intrusive sound of traffic that we do not see transmits social alienation in a context, the city, that what it implies is quite the opposite. It is not so obvious the presence and meaning of clocks that no one looks at, nor that we have to perceive the dialogues of the protagonists —when they are there— as in a silent film, based on posters, literal language. Moscas is a proposal as sad in what it is as funny in how it is, and breathes the same air, gases and formal vocations as the beloved Roy Andersson. You can find it in the (magnificent) short film session Ciutat refugi, ciutat infern.

Tariq Porter is a filmmaker, critic and programmer. He has directed several short films, has written about cinema for media such as Serra d’Or or Dirigido Por and is currently a programmer at D’A.

EL TERCER PAISAJE

A fungus has poisoned the painted forest of Oma, in the Basque Country. With these three elements: forest, fungus and art, Julen Etxebarria creates a fascinating audiovisual suite. Without becoming a vegetarian film, measured in its duration and with a luminous grace, El tercer paisaje pursues the antagonist, the fungus, in order to turn it into an ally and jump into the void. Etxebarria places himself in that genre so nostalgic and primitive capable of dreaming and speaking with music. As in Disney’s Fantasia, the excellent choice of Grieg and Rossini play synchronized with the cuts, movements and lights. Unapologetically. You can watch this short film in Els ressons d’un lloc program.

Marc Barceló is an independent researcher and curator. Trained at ESCAC and Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola, he works as a film journalist at the San Sebastian Festival Journal, advises on the selection of short films at D’A and teaches in workshops or art and thought initiatives such as Sinclètica.cat

SUEÑOS DE VIERNES

Sueños de viernes is the chronicle of a great journey that is not yet over. A journey full of idealizations, frustrations and injustices, but which, at this stage, finds a breather. Here, the protagonists stop, play, learn and, through the camera, manage to explain, reflect and express what they feel. This short film is, at the same time, the result of a workshop that was also a journey. However, it had a beginning and an end. It was a team journey, where everyone shared their experiences and knowledge, accompanying each other in a process of creation and discovery. This short film is part of the Ciutat refugi, ciutat infern program.

Flor Clérico is an Argentine producer. She has participated in several editions programming the Nest section of the San Sebastián Festival. This year she is a selector and tutor at the Ikusmira Berriak project residence.