Recreations
Recreations of a conflicted past
This year, La Inesperada presents a thematic focus: Recreations of a conflicted past. An eight-film programme that explores distant historical events from a non-fiction perspective and, paradoxically, from viewpoints detached from realist representation. Through devices such as reenactment, animation, or the rediscovery of landscapes, these films invite us to reflect on distant conflicts at a time when, unfortunately, we are surrounded by conflicts close to home. The screenings will feature Sylvie Ballyot, Fida Bizri, Carlos Balbuena, Maria Riera and Mireia Iniesta.
FIUME O MORTE!
Director: Igor Bezinović Country and year of production: Croatia, Italiy, Slovenia, 2025 Duration: 113′ Language: croat, italian, fiumano Version: VO subt. cat. Place: Filmoteca de Catalunya
Date: Thursday 19/2, 18:00, festival opening. Saturday 21/2, 20:30.
Synopsis: Screaming “Fiume o morte!” Croatian director Igor Bezinović reconstructs a forgotten yet relevant episode of pre-fascism: the occupation of the city of Fiume (now Rijeka) by Gabriele D’Annunzio and his followers in 1919. A spectacular reenactment, as entertaining as it is liberating, born from historical knowledge, that allows the collective and anachronisms to resonate with a memory that feels more relevant than ever.
Awards: Best film and FIPRESCI award Rotterdam 2025, Best Documentary European Film Award, Best filmmaker Pula Film Festival, Best Director festival Mediterranean Montpellier, Best Documentary IFFI Innsbruck, Best film Dokudoc Maribor, among others.
Festivalss: CPH:DOX, Shanghai IFF, Guanajuato IFF, Melbourne IFF, San Sebastian IFF, Sao Paulo IFF, Mostra Front, Porto/Post/Doc, MajorDocs, Vancouver IFF, and others.
DOUBLE SESSION: CENIZAS, TAL VEZ LA NIEBLA
This session features two of Carlos Balbuena’s medium-length films that examine León’s mountain ranges and the consequences of the Civil War and the post-war period from two very different cinematographic approaches that are, at the same time, harmonious.
Date: Friday 20/02, 18:00. Duration: 120′ Place: Filmoteca de Catalunya. Q&A with the presence of Carlos Balbuena.
CENIZAS
Director: Carlos Balbuena Country and year of production: Spain, 2014 Duration: 60′ Language: Spanish
Synopsis: When a man comes back to his birthplace in León, old memories and feelings start to flow through him: trees casting otherworldly shadows, the river, the scents, the textures, and the old houses… Carlos Balbuena explores the passage of time and the feeling of displacement through an atmospheric visual exploration, walking through the ashes of historical memory and the intangible and oneiric legacy of a land with a strong mining tradition, shaped by resistance and repression.
Festivals: D’A film festival, Seminci Valladolid, Visual Cine Novísimo Majadahonda and others.
TAL VEZ LA NIEBLA
Director: Carlos Balbuena Country and year of production: Spain, 2026 Duration: 60′ Language: Spanish
Synopsis: This film emerges from a long research project focused on León’s Montaña Central region and on testimonies from relatives and people close to those persecuted by the Franco regime in the area. Closely connected to other works in the León-born filmmaker’s filmography, such as Coto privado de caza, the film unearths words and revives the spaces where those considered enemies of the regime were detained, tortured, murdered, and buried.
DOUBLE SESSION: BALENTES, LA DURMIENTE
This session features two films that approach past conflicts through imaginative and oneiric forms of representation, ranging from drawing and animation to the free rewriting of history.
First screening: Friday 20/2 at 21:00, Filmoteca de Catalunya. Second screening: Saturday 21/2 at 17:45, Zumzeig Cinema. Duration: 90′. Both sessions will be attended by Maria Riera Peris, producer of La Durmiente.
Buy tickets Filmoteca
Buy tickets Zumzeig
LA DURMIENTE
Director: Maria Inês Gonçalves Country and year of production: Portugal, Spain, 2025 Duration: 20′ Language: Portuguese, Spanish Version: OV catalan subt. Catalan premiere
Synopsis: During a dynastic crisis in 14th-century Portugal, the ten-year-old infanta Beatriz is forced into a marriage to become the new queen of the country. Her destiny, tragically sealed, is now revisited through the lens of filmmaker Maria Inês Gonçalves, who proposes a reenactment of these events by a group of children of a similar age to the future monarch. Through a fascinating staging, the children’s imagination will tear at the seams of faithful representation, reinterpreting distant conflicts from a contemporary perspective.
Festivals: IFFR Rotterdam, IndieLisboa, FIC Gijón, ZINEBI, RIGA IFF, Hong Kong IFF, GIFF Guanajato, FIC Cartagena de Indias, and others.
BALENTES
Director: Giovanni Columbu Country and year of production: Italy, Germany, 2025 Duration: 70 min Language: Sard Version: OV catalan subt. Catalan premiere
Synopsis: The naïveté of youth confronts the brutality of war in this sombre story set in Sardinia in 1940, when two boys plan to free the island’s horses after realising the animals will be sent to the front. Giovanni Columbu creates a singular animation made up of around 30,000 brush drawings on paper, combined with cut-out masks, that conveys powerful meanings, from the majesty of the horses to the premonition of tragedy.
Festivals: Annecy International Animation Film Festival, DOK Leipzig, Festival de Cine de Sevilla, Bolzano FF, among others.
GREEN LINE
Director: Sylvie Ballyot Country and year of production: France, Lebanon, Qatar, 2024 Duration: 120 min Language: Arabic, French Version: OV catalan subt. Spanish premiere
First screening: Saturday 21/2 at 17:30, Filmoteca de Catalunya. Q&A with filmmaker Sylvie Ballyot and protagonist Fida Bizri. Consecutive translation.
Second screening: Sunday 22/2 at 17:45, Zumzeig Cinema. With the presence of Fida Bizri.
Buy tickets Filmoteca
Buy tickets Zumzeig
Synopsis: Linguist Fida Bizri comes back to the Beirut of her childhood, a city immersed in the so-called “red hell” during the Lebanese Civil War. Along with filmmaker Sylvie Ballyot, she reconstructs a forgotten and harrowing past with the help of a huge map of the city and miniature figurines that bring missing images back to life, as well as through a search for former soldiers and snipers, confronting them with questions they have carried since childhood, when the trivialisation of death cast doubt on the value of life.
Awards: Young Juyr Award and MUBI Award Locarno 2024
Festivals: Cinéma du Réel, São Paulo IFF, Marrakesh IFF, DMZ South Korea
DOUBLE SESSION: LEJANO, COTO PRIVADO DE CAZA
This session features a short film and a medium-length film by León-born filmmaker Carlos Balbuena who, through the revisiting of spaces and landscapes marked by Civil War repression in the region, constructs radical and enduring images, open to the passage of time and historical memory.
Date: Sunday 22/2, 18:00. Duration: 65′ Place: Filmoteca de Catalunya. Conversation between Carlos Balbuena and Mireia Iniesta.
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LEJANO
Director: Carlos Balbuena Country and year of production: Spain, 2024 Duration: 25′ Language: Spanish OV
Synopsis: Pozo Ibarra’s headframe, located at the heart of a mining valley in León’s Central Mountain Range, is nothing more than a landscape until we know what lies beneath it. The filmmaker Carlos Balbuena approaches this landscape with a critical eye, searching for the ideas for which, eighty years ago, thousands of people ended up in mass graves. The same convictions that, in other historical moments, turned miners into a paradigm of popular resistance.
Festivals: D’A film festival
COTO PRIVADO DE CAZA
Director: Carlos Balbuena Country and year of production: Spain, 2025 Duration: 40′ Language: Spanish OV
Synopsis: The Spanish Civil War, the post-war period, and the repression can be filmed in many ways. The least conventional of them may be the one chosen by Carlos Balbuena in this film, which returns to the places where everything happened to confront what remains, allowing collective memory to emerge. León’s Montaña Central thus becomes a land of ghosts that helps us live by the ideas they once defended.
Festivals: D’A film festival
