This showcase of contemporary film from Spain presents features and shorts as well as a master class. A couple film highlights:

Sueñan los androides (Androids Dream)
In the year 2052, a nameless man silently travels through semi-completed high-rise apartments and grocery stores, assassinating random civilians without warning. More intimate scenes of the city’s inhabitants socializing—but never discussing the elephant in the room—underscore the absurd context of his violence. As the story shifts to the openness of the countryside, all action is eventually and surprisingly rendered futile.  Based on the same Philip K. Dick story that inspired Blade Runner.

África 815
The Super-8 film could be a generic film of all families: on a beach with seagulls overhead, a man holds a baby in his arms. Today, this baby, now a woman, films her father sleeping. Based on the memoirs he wrote and photos of his trips to North Africa, Pilar Monsell revisits the past of this Spanish army doctor. Posted to a North African colony in 1964, he writes about “the increasingly erotic relationships between patients and doctors”. This life-changing experience was to become the model for a series of great homosexual passions in his life. The film never puts the revelation of this family secret on show: when it is turned into a film, desires have already been felt, spoken, written. Working on the sea and desert as her father’s inner landscapes and giving a voice-over “reading” of his life, Pilar Monsell draws a portrait full of empathy.

Los Angeles: May 20 - 22. Full lineup and details here.