This Tuesday, the Andalusian Tourism and Sports Hall hosted the screening of the short films 'El Soldao' and 'Um mergulho em agua sangre'; and the feature films ‘Landría’ and ‘Nada sobre meu pai’. Four seemingly different titles, but with something in common: the importance of emotional memory in the formation of one’s character.

The session began with the brief presentation of 'El soldao', a short film directed by Alejandro Cabrera, from Barcelona. Delving into old home recordings on Super 8, Alejandro Cabrera offers an intimate and personal story where he investigates rural depopulation while trying to discover how places that already only exist in memories build a person's personality. 'It is a tribute to these childhood places where times intertwine and everything happens simultaneously,' said the director who attended the Festival de Málaga accompanied by his family, the guiding thread of the documentary.

Continuing the day, those present in the Tourism and Sports Hall were able to learn about the unknown legacy of Nicolás Guillén Landrián, the first black director of Cuban film and subject of the documentary directed by filmmaker Ernesto Daranas Serrano. An approach to the life and work of whose avant-garde films were censored, while he himself was subjected to prison, psychiatric confinement and finally exile.

'Everything happened accidentally. I went to look for and rescue what I could of his work and discovered that everything was about to be lost due to a political problem,' Daranas recalled the beginning of the project that involved the essential collaboration with Gretel Alfonso, Landrián's widow. In the words of the director, Gretel was fundamental in the life of the late Cuban avant-garde: 'It is interesting because she did not want to appear in the documentary, but in fact she was essential in Landrián's life. She was the living memory of him and indeed, Landrías would have died much sooner if it weren't for her.

Concluding this Tuesday’s screenings, the in competition Documentary Section showed the works of two directors: the Portuguese Raquel Marques and the Brazilian Susanna Lira, directors of the films 'Um mergulho em água frida' and 'Nada sobre meu pai', respectively.

Starting from her grandmother's old photo album, filmmaker Raquel Marques claims the importance of these memories in building her identity: ‘It was an imaginary world, of people and places that existed before me. A kind of trip to the past that I did not know but that I inhabit today’. With poetic language and from a feminist perspective, ‘Um mergulho en águacol’ highlights the need to keep these family memories alive.

It is precisely this lack of this family memory that motivates Susanna Lira in her documentary 'Nada sobre meu pai'. The tape reveals her search for the story of her father, whom she never met. The daughter of a young Ecuadorian guerrilla who came to Brazil to fight against the military dictatorship in the 1970s, goes to Quito, her father's hometown, and tells her story to dozens of Ecuadorian press. In the form of a road movie, she meets potential parents who respond to advertisements in the press. 'This documentary is an exhibition of my being, of things that I kept for many years. I was very afraid of rejection and facing all this was very hard,' the Brazilian director told the audience in attendance at the colloquium.