Las Palmas de Gran Canaria International Film Festival, directed by Luis Miranda, is now in its 21st year. The festival will take place between 22 April and 1 May, and it will open, celebrating the unique experience of going to the cinema, with the special screening, accompanied by live music, of a film that this year turns one hundred years old: Nosferatu, by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau. This classic is part of a selection of silent films that, with different ensembles, make up the Camera Obscura section, together with Nanook of the North, by Robert Flaherty, a film that also turns one hundred years old, and The Passion of Joan of Arc, by Carl Theodor Dreyer, released in 1928.

The Canary Islands festival is also dedicating a cycle to the French director, screenwriter and producer, Lucile Hadzihalilovic, a member of the jury in the official section. This retrospective means the public will be able to discover Evolution [+leggi anche:
recensione
trailer
scheda film] (France/Belgium/Spain), Special Jury Prize at the San Sebastian Film Festival in 2015; De Natura (Romania/France); Earwig [+leggi anche:
recensione
trailer
intervista: Lucile Hadzihalilovic
scheda film] (UK/France/Belgium), Special Jury Prize San Sebastian 2021; Innocence (France/UK/Belgium); La Bouche de Jean-Pierre, a medium-length film from 1996, and the short Nectar (2014).

Ten feature films (and twelve short films, listed on the festival’s website) make up the official section: Nuclear Family (USA), a road movie about the couple Erin and Travis Wilkerson; Pilgrims [+leggi anche:
recensione
intervista: Laurynas Bareisa
scheda film] (Lithuania), a drama about grief by Laurynas Bareisa; Shared Resources (USA), a docudrama by Jordan Lord; Memoryland [+leggi anche:
recensione
trailer
scheda film] (Vietnam/Germany), stories about death by Kim Quy Bui; The Line [+leggi anche:
recensione
trailer
intervista: Ursula Meier
scheda film] (France/Switzerland/Belgium), a family conflict narrated by Ursula Meier; Coma [+leggi anche:
recensione
trailer
intervista: Bertrand Bonello
scheda film], fears about the harmful influence of the internet on teenagers according to Bertrand Bonello from France; the Argentinean production La edad media, and the absurdity of life in lockdown through the eyes of a girl, by Alejo Moguillanski and Luciana Acuña; Geographies of Solitude (Canada), an environmental documentary by Jacquelyn Mills; Children of the Mist (Vietnam), by Ha Le Dien, about the clash with tradition for young Asian women; and Father’s Day, in which Kivu Ruhorahoza explores the crisis of fatherhood in Rwanda.

The most adventurous cinema is featured in the competitive section Bande à Part. According to one of the programmers, the critic and professor Antonio Weinrichter, the developments in this section are based on “the first-person essay and the processing of archive material, two formats that often support each other to the point of forming the same protean category”. Competing for the €5,000 prize are the short films Screening Room, directed by Jessica McGoff (UK); Nazarbazi, by Maryam Tafakory (Iran/UK); Sine die (Spain), by Camila Moreiras; Una planta en el desierto, by Spaniard Claudia Sánchez; and Metaleptic Attack, by Johannes Binotto (Switzerland); and the feature films A Night of Knowing Nothing [+leggi anche:
recensione
intervista: Payal Kapadia
scheda film], a film produced between India and France by Payal Kapadia; Freedom from Everything, a film by the Canadian Mike Hoolboom; Rewind & Play [+leggi anche:
recensione
intervista: Alain Gomis
scheda film], by Alain Gomis (France/Germany); and The Timekeepers of Eternity, by Aristotelis Maragkos (Greece/UK).

Finally, in the Panorama Spain section, competing films include, They Carry Death [+leggi anche:
recensione
trailer
intervista: Samuel M. Delgado e Helena…
scheda film], Lullaby [+leggi anche:
recensione
trailer
intervista: Alauda Ruiz de Azúa
scheda film], Wan Xia and Los caballos mueren al amanecer [+leggi anche:
recensione
trailer
intervista: Ione Atenea
scheda film]; while The Freakiest Night section will screen Everyone Will Burn by David Hebrero.