In The Labyrinth (El Laberinto), French-Colombian filmmaker and artist Laura Huertas Millán explores the concept of narcocapitalism and its place in Colombian history and popular imagination. Drawing from ethnographic filmmaking traditions, The Labyrinth examines the Colombian drug trade’s legacy of violence and human tragedy while experimenting with structure and narrative to blur the distinctions between fiction and reality, memory and history, imagination and experience.

A cloud of brightly painted pigeons cross the sky in Southern Spain; below them are their trainers, men equally as fascinating albeit in more muted tones. With minute attention to detail, Spanish filmmaker Elena López Riera’s Those Who Desire (Los Que Desean) is an affectionate portrait of the local tradition of ‘colombiculture’, wherein brightly-painted male pigeons compete for the attention of a female mate. Riera foregrounds the poetic choreography of the competition while exploring the complex themes of masculinity and courtship that underlie this age-old custom.

The Years (Gli Anni) is Ligurian director Sara Fgaier’s sensuous and poetic reinterpretation of French writer Annie Ernaux’s lauded memoir of the same title. Fragmentary and elusive, the film is a highly personal collage of home movies in which the two women’s lives seem to interweave. Celebrating the rich materiality of cinema and the rituals of photography and filmmaking, The Years is a sensitive meditation on the nature of time, identity and memory.

Programme:

£14 full, £12 concs.

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