Friday 13 March kicked off with the presentation of the latest documentary by the Galician filmmaker, producer and researcher, Xiana de Teixeiro, Crías (The Young), a film that compiles an archive of teenage girls’ diaries.

Seeking out the spaces where writing and life intertwine, Xiana creates a feminist 'film-zine' that transforms personal shame through shared narratives, whilst coming to terms with the process of writing and rewriting life and creative work.

"Crías is more than a film; it is a range of emotions. Reading your own diary is already a big deal, so imagine reading someone else's. For me, reading these diaries in which I saw so many tenderness, hate, humour and so many feelings... It was an act of great intimacy", commented the filmmaker, while taking the opportunity to thank the many women who collaborated on the documentary and who attended the presentation at the Festival de Málaga.

"We don't have any books about how we transformed ourselves from teenagers into women, so I hope this documentary is a kind of collective 'counter-biography' that can represent what adolescence was like for so many women," said Xiana, who returns to the festival two years after receiving the Best Documentary award for her ecological essay Salvaxe, Salvaxe.

The second and last presentation of the day was given by the Sevillian artist, filmmaker and researcher María Molina Peiró, who premiered her feature film Como todo mortal

(Like All Mortals).

Como todo mortal interweaves documentary and science fiction to explore the layers of a landscape whose colonial past dialogues with theories about the early colonisation of life on Earth and the future of space colonisation. The film invites us to reflect on the complexities of life in which we are all entangled, questioning the human scale, the limits of life and our unquenchable thirst for progress, whilst blending the lyricism of science fiction with the everyday life of an Andalusian mining town.

Interweaving documentary, flamenco and science fiction, Como todo mortal excavates the social, historical and speculative layers of a landscape between exploration and exploitation, between Andalusia and Mars. On a distant planet, a robot scans the landscape for minerals and signs of life. Light years away, in one of the world's oldest mines, the local inhabitants live surrounded by villages buried under tonnes of mineral waste, while astrobiologists investigate a hidden biosphere that raises a disturbing evolutionary hypothesis.

"Well, it all started from the fact that I'm very interested in the subject of memory. I started to access memory from many perspectives, and in the end I ended up with geological memory, the memory of the earth. One day when I was browsing Google Earth, I came across a picture of the moon, which got me interested in space photography. I have also always been very interested in the history of industrialisation. I spent some of my childhood summers in Riotinto (Minas de Riotinto in Huelva), and I felt the need to go back there and talk about all these issues that interested me, about my Andalusian roots", explained the director, whose work analyses the connections between history, nature and technology.