Hot Docs Made In Spain Program: Powerful, Topical Films from a Vibrant Nation

By Liam Lacey

Since 2003, the Hot Docs International Film Festival has had an annual “Made In” program sidebar, focusing on recent documentaries from specific countries.

Last year’s Made in Ukraine, linked to the Russian invasion, yielded two urgent films: AP journalist Mstyslav Chernov’s 20 Days in Mariupol— which scored the 2024 Oscar for Best Documentary Feature — and Roman Liubyi’s Iron Butterflies, about the 2014 downing of Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine.

Wild Gleaming Space

This year, the chosen country is Spain, a nation that, despite living for 36-years under a brutal dictatorship, has a rich documentary history. In the past few years, Hot Docs has screened such films as the refugee documentary Welcome to Spain (2021), Magaluf Ghost Town (2021) and the powerful The Silence of Others (2019), about people still seeking restitution for the crimes of the Franco regime. For devoted Hispanophiles, it’s somewhat disappointing that three of the five features in the program aren’t set in Spain at all.

This year’s highest profile film is Peter Porta’s The Click Trap, a fast-paced, television-friendly film shot in England, France, the U.S., and Canada. It warns of the social dangers of the internet and social media, not exactly new ground.

Still, Porta’s film is solidly supported with interviews with leaders of non-profit agencies and academics (including Toronto Metropolitan University’s Craig Silverman) who have the hard evidence to show how search engines and social media promote hate and dangerous disinformation and abuse private data, all bolstered by ads for some of the world’s best-known media companies.

Wild Gleaming Space is a first-person film by Italian director Mauro Colombo who, after witnessing the death of his father — and briefly reviving a young man he finds lying on the road in the Panama jungle — wants to know where consciousness goes when the body dies.

Colombo goes on a sailing trip with an old friend who had a near-death experience, travels to a Chilean astrological observatory to talk about black holes, and interviews a cardiologist, an Italian mystic, and the mother of a teenager who died in his sleep. Those of a skeptical bent will find much of this a bit too woo-woo though the camera work and editing are beautiful.

Marta Gomez and Paula Iglesias’s Flying Hands is an inspirational film about Aniqa Bano, a teacher in a remote area of northern Pakistan. She gave birth to a deaf daughter and decided to fight against the pervasive stigma against deaf children, who were often so stigmatized they were not even given a name. Within the film, her daughter Narvis, who got cochlear implants at five, reads her mother’s diaries to narrate the story of how Aniqa and her husband established a school for the hearing impaired. The “flying hands” of the title refers to sign language.

Patricia Franquesa’s wry and disturbing My Sextortion Diary takes place in Spain, or perhaps more precisely on a smartphone. Running just over an hour, the film uses onscreen text and the narrow rectangle of phone in portrait mode, showing glimpses of the filmmaker.

The director recounts how, when sitting at a lunch counter with an ex in Madrid, she had her laptop stolen. Shortly after she received an email threatening to send three partially nude photos which were on her hard drive to everyone on her contact list unless she pays a hefty ransom. As Franquesa texts with friends and exchanges emails with her extortionist, tries and fails to get police help, she maintains a folder called “Digital Vagina” chronicling her experiences along with research into the phenomenon of sex extortion, leading to this timely film.

For a real dose of Spain, past and present, the best bet may be Carlota Nelson’s Eyes of the Soul-Cristian García Rodero, about the celebrated photographer now in her seventies, best known for her images of traditional fiestas, pageants, and religious rituals. While Rodero sits, uncomfortably, for an interview, much of the film is on the fly, as the irrepressible Rodero plunges into crowds with an unerring instinct for capturing the dramatic moment.

The highly worthwhile shorts program offers plunges into the mythic and melancholic side of Spanish culture:

Joana Moya’s spooky, flickering Salt Covers All involves muttered poetry and dark images of Basque women weaving fishing nets, evoking the Greek myth of the Fates and the Loom of Destiny.

Aqueronte (Spanish for Archeron, one of the rivers in Hades in Greek mythology) in which director Manuel Muñoz Rivas follows a group of travellers on a ferry across the Guadalquivir River, from a pea soup fog, through daylight and night, as a metaphor for the journey toward death.

Miriam Martín’s Back to Riaño combines the repartee of a couple of sportscasters watching a contemporary bicycle race through the in northern Spain with archival footage of the destruction and forcible evacuation of the town and, along with six other villages in 1987, to build a hydroelectric dam. The title of the film puns on the annual Spanish multistage bicycle race, Vuelta ciclista a España, or the Tour of Spain, and “vuelta” meaning return.

Aitana, a family film and meditation on memory, is one of those short films one wishes could be longer because it tells a part of a long story. Set in Havana, it features the director Marina Alberti and her elderly bed-ridden mother, Aitana Alberti, who worries about her loss of memory.

Aitana is the daughter of the writer María Teresa León and the poet Rafael Alberti, contemporaries of Federico Lora. On a metaphoric level, Aitana is about Spain’s deep wound, the loss of historical memory during the years of dictatorship and exile.

The Hot Docs Festival runs April 25 through May 5 at multiple theatres across Toronto. Details here.

We have previews dozens of films screening at this year’s Hot Docs. Click here and here for mini-reviews.