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A short documentary focused on Agustina, an elderly woman living in the Mexican countryside. She lives in a small home with her husband, tending to her flock of sheep. She tells the story of the three men she loved during her lifetime, the last of which is her husband beside her.

When one of the young ones asks her if, when you are older, love is still the same, she answers yes, that she still kisses her husband every time she comes home, still feels love in her heart at the sight of him again. Then, with the sun on her face, she distractedly sings a song about love and yearning.

Just a lovely film, like getting to sit at the feet of Agustina herself.

Marisol, a loveable but corrupt politician, is living up the last days before her arrest in a hotel room, partying, snorting coke and bevvying. An older woman with movie star shades, a coiffured do, and bling on her fingers, she’s like AbFab meets Del Boy.

Amparo is the only one not out her tits, and draws Marisol aside when the political staffer bros decide to take their circus outside for some food now the sun’s up. Amparo tries to plead with Marisol sincerely to run. She suggests a plan where Marisol can lay low in a friend’s hotel in Mindanao in the Philippines.

Marisol is hilarious, still talking shite while marockless. As she slowly comes round to face the subject, she demurs that she’ll have no one in the Philippines. Amparo says she’ll come with her. Marisol caresses her cheek tenderly and says she couldn’t destroy her life, ask her to give up everything to live in hiding with her.

Besides that’s not who Marisol is. And she wants to go on as herself, even if she is afraid of what’s to come. To that end, she asks Amparo to come downstairs and have breakfast with her in the hotel restaurant. Who cares who will see them? What does it matter now? They go down, arm in arm, as the lovers they clearly are, and Amparo faces what is to come with Marisol, both of them as themselves.

Brilliant deadpan comedy about a man who checks into the Lovebirds Hotel at the height of the pandemic.

Beautifully underplayed to highlight the surreal situation, Nicola Pedrozzi stars as Francesco, the lone holidaymaker. This is clearly meant to be a couples resort, and while he tells the single remaining member of staff that he expects to be joined later on, it is clear that is either an outright lie, or an unlikely possibility.

The hotel has only 3 other guests, a tan-tastic, leopard-print clad, middle-aged couple, and a solitary fat man, whose eagerness for company only makes Francesco avoid him more. The hotel is cavernous for the few remaining guests. Without the sounds of other human beings, the background tweets of the namesake nesting lovebirds becomes a foregrounded cacophony.

The loneliness of the main character in this normally romantic setting is externalised in the alienating environment of the hotel. He eats alone in a vast canteen from a plastic tray wrapped in clingfilm. The bronzed couple always put on their masks whenever they see him, despite the wide distances that separate them in this huge resort. The staff has been reduced to just one chipper staff member who is desperate not to lose more revenue by having anyone leave, so tries her utmost to keep everyone engaged, despite how laughable that is under current circumstances.

Francesco is persuaded to go to the hotel’s club night, to tempt him out of his shell. There, a keyboard stands alone on an unmanned stage, cycling through programmed tunes. The solitary staff member overcompensates for the total lack of atmosphere by making quirky cocktails served in coconuts full of sprigs of tinsel and umbrellas. The same 4 people sit, not speaking to each other, as you can literally hear the sounds of footsteps across the dancefloor.

When the keyboard finishes its cycle, and clawing silence fills the company, Francesco finally stirs from his solitude and indifference, and mounts the stage to play something for the room. In doing so, he makes the night a little bit brighter for himself, and others.

Hilariously understated, reflective of the surreal and isolating nature of our times.

A Love Song In Spanish is a portrait by the filmmaker of her grandparents.

Her grandmother lives in a simple but pristinely kept home. She carries herself with dignity as she cleans and tidies and shells beans for cooking. Although she is old and her body is now vulnerable with age, she still stands firm and steady. When she wants to dance, she puts on her face and pins a flower in her hair, makes herself presentable with sure and deliberate sweeps of blush. She seems solid and certain in who she is.

Yet there is always a sense of waiting. She is shown sitting alone at her table, as though she is expecting to be joined, but no one comes. She dances in her livingroom, but with no partner, and returns to glancing out the window when the song ends.

Their house is haunted by the memory of her husband, the filmmaker’s grandfather. Their story is not narrated in a detailed linear history, but told in flakes of monologue from her grandmother. The film uses archival and contemporary footage of military marching chants in place of her grandfather’s voice. He is silent in this portrait, just as he is absent, what speaks for him is what consumed him, the military.

For her grandmother, there is no need to tell or explain the Panamanian military dictatorship, she “lived it in my body”. Her husband went for training in Israel and came back traumatised. He was controlling, would fly into jealous rages, and could enact violence. Her grandmother tells how she wasn’t even able to sit outside, for that was seen as enough justification for his paranoia. When she took a ride home from the shops in a neighbour’s car, her husband had the man lifted and tortured.

Comparing the military dictatorship’s effects on the country, and the military dictatorship of her grandfather in his own home, this personal portrait speaks to a wider collective trauma. One which still struggles to be articulated.

What her grandmother describes reminds me of what the old school feminists called father-tyranny. The patriarchy enforced through the strata of large social institutions down to the nuclear family unit. The father as absolute ruler of the home and in complete control of the women therein.

And yet. The pain of these violences is in the ambivalence with which we endure them, the faith we place in the betrayer. As she whispers her prayers, she asks of her husband, her god, herself, “Why did I have to love you?” When she dances alone, it is him she reaches her hands out to. When she stares out the window, it is him she is looking for. When she sits at her table, it is him she is waiting to be seated.

The love between them has been warped, and abused, and truncated in abrupt and unresolved parting. It is a haunting. She is growing old together with his ghost.

Criatura is the kind of short film you should feel, rather than figure out. Intense orchestral music, vivid colour, and shots evoking disjointed memory or dream, combine to give a sense of a character’s inner journey.

It opens with the narrator saying that a monster entered her, created a void within her, and thus “you were torn from my body”. The ‘you’ the narrator is talking about is open for discussion. Is it a part of the main character’s self? As the visuals show two women meeting, and falling in love, are they referring to their lover as the other half of their soul?

The mixed images add to that state of confusion, as the couple seem to break up, perhaps because the main character cannot tell if she is trying to interact with another person or a projection of her fractured self. The imagery and music seem to reach for a healing of one’s self after division being experienced both within and without.

An interesting sensory journey.

This short film is about the filmmaker’s marriage, the part that is the struggle for government recognition and the part that is about loving intimacy. Only 6 minutes long, it features thousands of images of their joined life, snapshots, wedding photos, documents and paperwork, all frenetically flashing up on screen, like a strobing fast-forward effect. Breaking through this wall of never-ending documentation and justification, is a rotoscoped animation of him and his husband immersing themselves in water, their gestures gentle, loving, and intimate.

Mikveh is a ritual bathing done by brides-to-be. It is cleansing and purifying. The husbands’ bathing is similar, providing breaks from the helter-skelter stress of the bureaucratic merry-go-round that seems set on doubting and invalidating their relationship. They float, freed from the weight of having to prove anything. The reality of their love self-evident. And these intermissions are restorative, grounding, and bring peace.