Bueu, 14 August, 2026 – Ethics and politics, self-censorship, industry and cultural hegemony will take centre stage in four meetings featuring voices from film criticism, filmmaking, research and contemporary thought
Where are the limits of cinema? What can be shown, and who decides how to show it? Which stories are left out due to social, political or industrial pressures? And to what extent can we speak of cinematic diversity when films produced in very different contexts end up using increasingly similar narrative forms?
The 19th edition of the Festival Internacional de Cinema de Bueu (FICBUEU) will bring some of these questions to its Seminars, a space for reflection and debate around images and contemporary cinema. The programme will revolve around four major possible limits — ethical and political, self-censorship, aesthetic and industrial, and cultural — and will bring together specialists from film criticism, filmmaking, research and contemporary thought.
The Political Power of Images
The first conversation, featuring Oriol Erausquin, Layla Martínez and Ricci Galiano, will begin with a fundamental question: what happens when a camera decides what to show and what to leave out of the frame? Cinematic representation will be examined as a practice that goes far beyond aesthetic decisions and shapes the way we understand conflicts, societies and political movements.
The conversation will take two highly topical cases as its starting point. On the one hand, the representation of the Palestinian people, questioning a humanitarian perspective that can reduce their presence to the condition of victims and make resistance invisible. On the other, Donald Trump and the contemporary far right, exploring the limits of satire and whether caricature can end up concealing the economic and power structures that explain the rise of these movements.
Erausquin, a researcher specialising in far-right conspiracy theories and author of the essay La rabia es nuestra, will share the discussion with writer and thinker Layla Martínez, author of Carcoma and Utopía no es una isla, and actor, creator and researcher Ricci Galiano, who specialises in cultural and gender studies.
What We Stop Filming
Self-censorship will take centre stage in the second strand of the Conference. Film critic and writer Antonio José Navarro will address the often invisible mechanisms that determine which stories can be told and how, taking into account social pressures, critical reception, and the demands of the industry and the market.
The session will open up a debate on who can film or interpret certain stories, cancel culture and demands for identity representation. Rather than understanding censorship as an explicit prohibition, the meeting proposes reflecting on the limits that creators themselves may come to internalise and which ultimately determine what cinema comes into existence.
Where Does the Industry End and Independence Begin?
The director of Caimán Cuadernos de Cine, Jara Yáñez, will lead a third reflection on the increasingly blurred boundaries between industrial and independent cinema. A critic and researcher specialising in film history and analysis, Yáñez will address the tensions between formal freedom and market demands, as well as the role played by festivals, financing and distribution in shaping the cinema that ultimately reaches the screen.
The conversation will ask where this boundary lies today: in the budget, aesthetics, production or exhibition circuits. Through specific films and models, it will also examine the contradictions that emerge when works born on the margins end up becoming part of industrial dynamics, as well as the way festivals such as Cannes construct their own ideas of centre and periphery.
Diversity or Cultural Homogenisation?
The fourth strand will shift the debate towards the cultural limit, with the participation of Álvaro Peña, Yago Paris, Ariadna Cordal and Pepa Llausás. The panel will question the extent to which contemporary cinema is able to offer genuine resistance to centres of cultural power, or whether certain forms of activism can end up being assimilated by the very structures they seek to challenge.
The conversation will also address the progressive homogenisation of narrative structures: if works originating in radically different cultures and realities end up being structured according to similar dramatic models, it is worth asking to what extent genuine cultural diversity exists. Film critic and researcher Yago Paris, a lecturer at Rey Juan Carlos University and contributor to specialised publications such as Cine Divergente and El Antepenúltimo Mohicano, will be one of the voices taking part in this debate on symbolic colonisation, representation and cultural hegemony.
Chantal Akerman as the Closing Event
As the culmination of the Seminars, FICBUEU will screen Les Rendez-vous d’Anna (1978), by Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman, a work that brings many of the issues discussed throughout the Conference to the screen. With Les Rendez-vous d’Anna, Akerman challenges the limits of cinema through a minimalist and immersive approach, in which long takes extend the observation of everyday life and the aesthetic construction engages with the protagonist’s emotional disconnection. A subversion of traditional narrative forms that turns cinema into an intimate experience, bringing to the screen some of the reflections explored throughout the different meetings.
With these lines of reflection and the screening of Les Rendez-vous d’Anna, FICBUEU’s Seminars proposes looking beyond films to also question the conditions in which they are created, circulated and received. A space in which thinking about the limits of cinema ultimately means questioning the limits of the images through which we represent and interpret the world.
Seminars. Ethical, Cultural and Industrial Limits. How Far Can Cinema Go?
Saturday 5
- 10:30 AM Limits, Potentials and Paradoxes of Representation in Contemporary Cinema.
- 12:30 PM Self-Censorship and Cancellation in Cinema.
- 4:30 PM Blurred Boundaries: The Industry and Its Margins.
- 6:30 PM Audiovisual Colonisation and Performative Resistance in Contemporary Cinema.
- 8:30 PM Screening. Les Rendez-vous d’Anna, Chantal Akerman.
The Seminars will be streamed online and will be available on the FICBUEU YouTube channel.
