Pequeñas voces

The origins of the Colombian drug trade, through the epic story of an indigenous Wayúu family that becomes involved in the booming business of selling marijuana to American youth in the 1970s. When greed, passion and honour collide, a fratricidal war breaks out that will put their lives, their culture and their ancestral traditions at stake. «A film of both gangsters and spirits. A family film, an ensemble story of strong, intuitive, resilient and powerful women, who wait at home for unconscious, impulsive, fearful men, as they talk, they negotiate, they run around. Intuition vs reason, innocence vs vengeance, word vs honour. All in telling the great tragedy that would curse us forever. The great taboo that we are not allowed to discuss. Told, for once, in an intimate, personal way. Our own way. That soft breeze that seemed to come to refresh, and became the ravaging storm that showed us the true face of capitalism, its purest form. Our Jayeechi, our birdsong.» Cristina Gallego/Ciro Guerra

Gazing over the rooftops of her hometown, the city of Medellín, 22-year-old Paula relives recent events: Her politically engaged father gets shot by two motorcyclists as they drive home together. Paula recognises one of murderers, but the local police shows no interest in investigating the case. When a few months later, she coincidentally comes across the man, she makes a drastic decision. Caught between fear, fascination and compassion, she takes cautious steps ever closer to her father’s contract killer – a path that brings her from her middle-class family home into the hillside slums of the Colombian metropolis. Director Laura Mora’s captivating, social realist thriller harks back to her own traumatic experiences as a child and acts as a vent to deal with her long-standing wish for revenge and justice.

Embrace of the Serpent tells the epic story of the first contact, encounter, approach, betrayal and, eventually, life-transcending friendship, between Karamakate, an Amazonian shaman, last survivor of his people, and two scientists that, over the course of 40 years, travel through the Amazon in search of a sacred plant that can heal them. Inspired by the journals of the first explorers of the Colombian Amazon, Theodor Koch-Grunberg and Richard Evans Schultes.

Patagrande, Rambo, Leidi, Sueca, Pitufo, Lobo, Perro and Bum Bum. Eight stray teenagers, each bearing a code name, form a paramilitary squad on a remote hilltop. They are instinctively drawn towards hedonism and ferocity. A messenger delivers instructions from the Organisation: they are to look after a dairy cow called Shakira and an abducted woman from the USA known as Doctora. But their carefree time comes to an end when death pays them a visit and their position is compromised, forcing them to relocate deeper into the jungle. Alejandro Landes and co-writer Alexis Dos Santos have created a disquieting take on the war film and survival thriller. Theirs is a work of scant explanations but of visceral emotions. Heightened by Jasper Wolf’s piercing cinematography, Mica Levi’s superbly tense score and uncannily sharp editing by Yorgos Mavropsaridis, Ted Guard and Santiago Otheguy, Landes’ exhilarating third feature impresses by zooming in on the shifting allegiances and power struggles of an adolescent, primal tribe.

Alfonso is an old farmer who has returned home to tend to his son, who is gravely ill. He rediscovers his old house, where the woman who was once his wife still lives, with his daughter-in-law and grandson. The landscape that awaits him resembles a wasteland. Vast sugar cane plantations surround the house, producing perpetual clouds of ash. 17 years after abandoning them, Alfonso tries to fit back in and save his family.