Bueu, 28 August, 2026 – The Bueu International Film Festival (FICBUEU) will present its 19th edition at a press conference next September 1 at the Massó Museum.
The festival will bring together films from nearly thirty countries in a programme that will open on the opening day, Friday, September 4.
Before giving way to the competition, the festival will celebrate its opening with one of the fundamental works in the history of cinema, the science fiction short film La Jetée (1962), by Chris Marker. Music will also be present on this day with Chus Pazos Ensemble. Drummer Chus Pazos, with a career spanning more than twenty years on the Galician jazz scene, will perform in a trio format accompanied by Álex Touceda on double bass and Dani Font on guitar, a musician with an extensive international career who currently lives in Montreal, Canada. The ensemble will offer a repertoire in which original compositions will coexist with great standards of American jazz.
The selection of films that can be seen from Sunday, September 6 onwards includes an international journey through the cinemas of Europe, Asia, America and Oceania, bringing together some of the most stimulating proposals in contemporary short-form cinema.
Official Section
The Official Section will bring together 28 short films distributed across six programmes, which will be screened between Monday, September 7 and Saturday, September 12, with two daily sessions at 7:00 pm and 9:30 pm. The competition offers a broad panorama of current international cinema, with works from countries such as Portugal, France, Cuba, the United States, Mongolia, Australia, Ukraine, China, Canada, Armenia, Lithuania and the United Kingdom, in addition to a notable Spanish and Galician presence.
The selection covers very diverse themes and forms: family conflicts and care, war and displacement, identity, memory, old age, precarity, economic expectations and the search for a place of one’s own. It does so through fiction, documentaries and animation proposals that show the formal and narrative diversity of contemporary short-form cinema.
Galician cinema will be represented by three works. Ángel Suanzes will compete with Escala un cincuenta mil, set in July 1974 and centred on a woman whose personal transformation unfolds in parallel with the political changes approaching Spain; David Fidalgo will present Lucus, an animated piece set at the height of the Roman Empire in which a girl from Lucus Augusti has visions of the future destruction of her home; and Bea Lema will take part with El cuerpo de Cristo, an embroidered animated tale that approaches psychological suffering through “the soft and the beautiful”.
The international dimension of this section makes it possible, at the same time, to approach distant realities through deeply personal stories. In Unavailable, by Kyrylo Zemlyanyi, a young Ukrainian man loses contact with his mother, trapped in occupied territory; while Winter in March, by Natalia Mirzoyan, follows a Russian couple who leave their home driven by the helplessness and sadness caused by war.
Memory and belonging also run through a large part of the selection. The Canadian film Paradaïz, by Matea Radic, combines absurdist animation, archive material and the filmmaker’s childhood memories in Sarajevo to question the meaning of home; while Hasta mañana si Dios quiere, by Alejandro Egido, returns to a small Castilian village to establish a parallel between the fragility of the lives of its inhabitants and that of a place close to disappearing.
Other works focus on some of the tensions of the present. Correct Me If I’m Wrong, by Hao Zhou, addresses, through documentary, the conflict between queer identity, family and tradition in southwest China; and +10K, by Gala Hernández López, follows a 21-year-old man who dreams of living in Miami and earning €10,000 a month while consuming personal development discourse, following coaches on the internet and investing in cryptocurrencies.
Discoveries Section
The Discoveries Section is the space in which FICBUEU brings together some of the most daring and innovative proposals in the programme. Four co-productions from Croatia, Chile, the United States, France, Belgium, Brazil and Switzerland make up a selection shaped by experimentation and the possibilities of new cinematic languages.
The selection includes Opera, by Igor Zelić, an experimental film that transforms a single source of light to question perception and the ability of the image to conceal reality; Merrimundi, by Niles Atallah, which imagines a twisted utopia created by a sentient machine from the future; Tamashi, by Ashima Shiraishi and Jess X. Snow, where dance and climbing become a language for addressing the relationship between a father and daughter and transforming the traumas of the past; and O Rio de Janeiro continua lindo, by Felipe Casanova, which turns Rio’s Carnival into a territory suspended between personal memory and political resistance.
GZ_00
The GZ_00 competition reaffirms itself once again as one of the great windows for discovering contemporary Galician cinema. The competition includes Moon Safari, by Hugo Amoedo Canal; Furada Negra, by Berio Molina; BROOM BROOM FOLLAR, by SOHU; A voz de todas as cousas, by Daniel Pérez Silva; and A través, by Juan Lorenzo Loureiro, in its world premiere.
Five proposals that share a deeply personal view of the world: the intimate memory of an unexpected reunion, the exploration of territory and remembrance, the reappropriation of a Vigo urban legend through pop culture, a sensory journey through the sounds of the city, or the delicacy of encounters marked by time and landscape.
The quality of the selection is also reflected in its journey through some of the main national and international festivals, consolidating GZ_00 as a section that maintains its commitment to those works that explore new forms of audiovisual creation and contribute to expanding the limits of contemporary cinema.
FICBUEU once again makes short-form cinema a meeting point between cinematographies, generations and very different ways of looking at the world. A programme that combines the discovery of new voices in cinema and vindicates the capacity of the short film to experiment, take risks and expand the limits of cinematic language.
We look forward to seeing you from Friday, September 4 for this new edition!
