It’s uncomfortable; the uncanny ebb and flow of a cine-plex by the sea: The 24th Las Palmas International Film Festival

It’s uncomfortable; sitting next to someone in an otherwise sparsely populated cinema, me gutturally affected by the film, them gasping and gripping their trousers is dismay at what they will later tell me is “a piece of shit”. April (Dea Kulumbegashvili, 2024) is for sure divisive and there is a minefield of ethical questions to consider besides one’s reactive response. For me, it was painful in a personal way. Despite its Georgian specificity, there is something universal about the pain the women in the film experience. April focuses on the illegality of abortion, the absence of birth control, the lack of sexual education and protection of women and minors in a small Georgian village, with an ill-equipped hospital and an entire society built upon turning a blind eye. For the man next to me, showing bodies and experiences like childbirth, caesarean sections, and gynaecological examinations is clear exploitation: unethical and abhorrent. For me, there is an inescapable link to both personal trauma and unfathomable blessings; I’ve had two abortions due to bad luck (missed miscarriages both times) followed by two miracles (viable and successful pregnancies, but both of which ended in caesarean sections, and one of which gave me sepsis). I am forever grateful to the amazing medical professionals who saved my life and my babies’. Had I lived somewhere like the village where April takes place, I am all too painfully aware that the outcome would have been very different. 

Whatever your experience, the film is a lot. Whether you find the content gross, exploitative, familiar, or eye-opening, Dea Kulumbegashvili’s April is opening up conversation where it is sorely needed. Too often, everywhere, women are expected to shut up: don’t tell us about your abortions, your sepsis, your birth trauma. And yet those same women are expected to be lovers and carers. Refreshingly, April suggests you can’t have it both ways. Kulumbegashvili’s protagonist, Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili), tries to look after every woman and child in town, while also standing as a complex, sexual, and emotional woman. But her attempts to fulfil her own sexual and emotional desires are quite literally met with a slap in the face. There are, Kulumbegashvili’s film reminds us, still so many pockets of the world where women are seen as virgins or whores; sexless mothers or cold meat on the slab. Kulumbegashvili shows us each of those male “ideals” in her film, and the result is decidedly unpleasant. April is inarguably unsettling. And that is entirely the point. 

Nightshift

It’s uncomfortable; sitting in front of someone in an almost empty cinema, thoroughly enjoying and even feeling nostalgic for the aesthetic and arhythmic nature of Robina Rose’s Nightshift (1981) while they snigger, not at the inherent comedy, but at the dated aspects of the film. It’s 2025 and we’re in a multiplex. Rose’s film is intimate; its characters and framing cramped into the dark, brooding fleapit of the Portobello Hotel in Notting Hill. Filmed over five nights at the Portobello, where Rose worked at the time, the film centres on the proverbial nightshift clerk, played by Jordan, the UK’s then poster girl for punk (she worked at Vivien Westwood and Malcolm Maclaren’s London King’s Road boutique, Sex, and starred in Derek Jarman’s Jubilee, 1978). A significant piece of the British avant-garde puzzle, it was a delight to see Nightshift’s restoration, but also slightly surreal to watch it in a cinema nestled away in the top corner of a fashion mall, awkwardly adjacent to the also empty food court. 

The curious juxtaposition of envelope-pushing cinema in a mainstream venue is one of the unique calling cards of the Las Palmas International Film Festival, which lost its arthouse cinema venue in the post-Covid closedown that many Spanish and Canarian theatres experienced. For an island with consistently stunning weather and abundant beach offerings, an arthouse cinema fare is an understandably hard sell. There was a constant (if mostly one-sided) clash of crowds: locals queuing for Thunderbolts* (Jake Schreier) and badged festival-goers trickling in to see world cinema shorts and features. The contrast was stark and the culture of the multiplex overwhelmed the arthouse sensibilities of tote-bag-wearing tourists like the wicked midnight tide waiting just outside after every late night screening. A fitting locale to see the likes of Jia Zhangke’s Caught by the Tides (2024), or to experience any of the David Lynch retrospective, Las Palmas is a festival incarnation of the Freudian uncanny: whether it was laced with nostalgia, mourning or melancholy, there was a definite and resounding return of the repressed. 

In Andrés I. Estrada’s Audio y El Caimán (Audio & the Alligator), the repressed are the Indigenous people of Venezuela, whose oral histories have been replaced with colonial narratives. Audio (Audio Caña), a charismatic farmer who regales his family and friends with tall tales, is the film’s embodiment of the rich if now largely ignored history of Venezuela. His story about an alligator in the lake is laughed off, but he is resolute. Finding proof of their oral history is not only integral to maintaining his own social integrity; to pass this story on to his granddaughter is also a form of cultural survival. Awarded the short film jury prize, Audio & the Alligator deliberately blurs the boundaries between fiction and reality, myth and verisimilitude, legend and naturalism, in order to surface the deeply repressed yet fierce histories that dominant narratives would have us believe are now extinct.

Mohamed Bourouissa’s Généalogie de la violence (Genealogy of Violence, 2024) – originally an installation piece with physical sculptures to accompany the film that has already picked up several awards and accolades along the circuit, including the Grand Prize at last year’s Kurzfilmtage Winterthur – mixes live action with VFX. Taking the viewer out of an ordinary narrative view and into the literal interior of the body of a victim of police violence, Genealogy of Violence offers an immersive experience of a common immigrant encounter. Sitting in a car at night, a young man and a young woman chat. It seems as if they are going on a date, or maybe they are on one already – the conversation in the car, parked up, is intimate enough. The police stop them: why are they loitering, what is their intent, do they have papers…? These usual assumptions of guilt play out for the pair who are both nationals and immigrants in France. The visual transitions are stunning: pixels give way to raindrops as the liminal space between what we (re)present and what we are made of tells the story of repressed blood boiling, a sensory immersion that is so much more than skin deep. 

Man Number 4

Pixels also played advocate for obfuscation in Miranda Pennell’s Man Number 4 (2024), a desktop documentary that zooms in and out of a now infamous photo taken in Gaza in 2023. Slowing down, enhancing and blowing up our gaze onto the big screen, Pennell is asking us to reflect not only on the content of the image itself, but the modes of production and distribution: who is taking these pictures, and how do we receive them? A far cry from the jumble sale approach that doom scrolling Instagram or TikTok offer, looking at the image in this way, on a cinema screen, as a collective audience, and with focused vision, teases additional affect out of the scene – despite the initial distancing impact that the pixelation might elicit. In fact, the choice serves to highlight the incongruity of the experience of consuming horrific images at the pace and rate that social media and news cycles command. Most of all, Man Number 4 is a reminder that visual media can only be a liminal (re)presentation, imploring us to be critical in our viewing. It is not only the content of an image that can be repressed, and here the return is also semiotic. 

In this way, Othering, the short film programme collectively assembled, is not limited to human encounters; the medium itself can also have that effect. Miguel Alcalde de la Fuente’s Guille, 28 (2025) used voyeuristic framing and slow camera movement to elucidate the danger of “meeting” prospective sexual or romantic partners online. Two men – Mario and Guille – wet from the rain, talk in Mario’s apartment. As it becomes increasingly clear that Guille is not who he says he is, the audience is placed at a safe yet suspect remove: the camera has become physically distant, filming the pair through the framing of a doorway. Later, when things escalate and the encounter turns violent, the camera pans away from the direct action, the technology itself saving the viewer from bearing witness. 

Digital technology has an easier time manipulating and distorting, keeping pace with the rate of information in our highly mediated era, but what photochemical film canisters offer is a unique form of preservation. In Where Russia Ends (Oleksiy Radynski, 2024), the discovery of once lost reels reveals a geographical, cultural, and human repression. In the 1980s, a team of Ukrainian filmmakers filmed in remote Siberia. Using those reels to construct a contemporary video essay that blends reality and fiction, the stunning yet simple footage of foxes in the snow, Indigenous peoples on their land, and panoramic views of those landscapes become unassuming and still highly charged. Questioning Russian imperialism from its Tsars to the present day, Radynski’s film reminds us of the power of preservation, even as the re-presentation of an artefact is itself a new, complex, and inherently politicised act.

Liberation, emancipation, and a desire to challenge the status quo were present in several other short films in competition, giving the whole selection a real flavour of resistance. Selected by Andreea Patru, a critic turned programmer, who first attended the festival as a reporter for Senses of Cinema in 2018,¹ the films, when presented together, revealed clear curatorial intent. Beyond the experience of sitting in a cinema, often uncomfortably surrounded (or sparsely accompanied) by strangers, the moving images belong to an obtuse ecosystem. There is an entire industry behind the production and distribution of each of the films screened, and yet, hosted here, in the air-conditioned but still relatively empty multiplex in a shoreline mall on a hot summer’s evening, they are met with an uncanny silence. There exists, in Las Palmas at least, an enormous disconnect between the content of these films and the reality in and outside of the cinema. 

Extracurricular Activity

It is incredibly uncomfortable, I think; sitting in this cinema, feeling angered, annoyed or bewildered by what I am viewing, while the person sitting next to me is feeling the opposite. There is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ response, of course, but it is nonetheless unsettling that they should find predictability and safety in the narrative I am most moved by. Dean Wei and Xu Yidan’s Ke Wai Huo Dong (Extracurricular Activity, 2025) is an implausible story for them, but feels painfully reminiscent of teen girl trauma for me (not the exact situation but the gist of dealing with so-called “good mummy’s boys” at a sexually active age). Just as they find something lasting in the messy narrative and even messier filmmaking that characterises Xiwen Cong’s Banished Love – while I, at 40 minutes, find my patience tested, my weight shifting constantly in my seat. For them, the short is an expression of a unique vision, and one so rarely told by Chinese filmmakers. We are always at odds, together, watching the very same films.

There are, I tell myself on the final day of the festival, as I sit listening to the almighty roar of the stormy waves crashing against the manmade promenade, more stories and perspectives than any one maker – or viewer – might see. The festival in Las Palmas, for all of its uncomfortable and uncanny elements, is perhaps most strange for being set in an otherwise epic tourist town, where package holidays and resort life are the norm for visiting Brits like me. It’s not hard to see why cinemas are struggling to survive in the surroundings of Las Palmas. There are undoubtedly many unique stories to be told but here, the prevailing one is sun, surf, and sea.

Las Palmas Festival Internacional de Cine
25 April – 4 May 2025
https://www.lpafilmfestival.com/en/

Endnotes