DocsBarcelona 25

Guillermo F Florez pitched his feature doc Lord Take Me Soon as a Rough Cut in Barcelona in 2024. This year the finished work world-premieres in Official Selection. The film concerns 86-year-old Carmen - previously a nun and the taker of several lovers – who wanted to end her life through euthanasia. ““Thanks to Carmen’s personality, it’s mostly a life-affirming story, and a portrait of a Quixotesque woman who suffered the oppression of an extremely conservative society, especially of women,” Florez tells BDE.

“This film is stitched to my heart and soul. There is blood in it – family - and roots that go back decades, tangled with the lives of the communities who welcomed us not as filmmakers, but as kin,” director Alejandro Valbuena (Curare Films, Canada/Columbia) tells BDE ahead of his rough-cut presentation of The Wind’s Thirst at DocsBarcelona Industry.

Homesick explores the personal journey of a Korean adoptee raised in a troubled Danish household. Tanja Inwol deploys visuals, imagination and considering writing skills to revisit her memories and peel back the intricate layers of transnational adoption. “Tanja and I have worked closely together since the beginning of her career, and our long-standing creative collaboration is one of the project’s key strengths,” producer Rikke Tambo Andersen tells BDE.

“Perhaps it was a final journey. A desire to remember the bond and love between a father and a son, just as despair was beginning to take hold,” producer Carlo Alpeggiani suggests the motivation behind Giacomo Boeri’s new film, about his father’s descent into Alzheimer’s. That said, it is his father’s quirky approach to life that helps the director tell the story of Alzheimer’s from both sides, Alpeggiani adds to BDE.

Hot on the heels of its Impact Days and Movies That Matter pitches (March), the First Hand films-produced Kalari Kid tells of the eponymous Indian martial art that is taking on greater significance for women within a society where gender-based violence is commonplace. “Raising awareness is essential to spreading the clear message of zero tolerance for all forms of violence against women and girls,” First Hand Films’ Daniel Schneider tells BDE.

The highly cinematic feature project Jaripeo offers a queer perspective on the titular jaripeo, a central Mexican style of rodeo known for its traditional cowboys and displays of machismo. “The film utilizes verité, Super-8 and abstracted sequences to walk the line between the real and the subconscious,” says co-director Efraín Mojica. “As a twinkly little kid, I didn't really fit into this macho of fantasy. As a teenager though, I mean, who doesn't like to see hot cowboys?”

In her new feature documentary Only on Earth, selected for DocsBarcelona Official Competition, Danish director Robin Petré isn’t observing the wildfires in southern Galicia from a safe distance, zooming in with telephoto lenses. Instead, she is at the heart of the inferno. “We are actually inside those fires,” the director extinguishes any idea that she and her team were staying back as the heat rose. She explains more to BDE.

Enric Miralles was the visionary Barcelona-born architect whose commissions included the Scottish Parliament Building in Edinburgh and the Igualada Cemetery, famous for the way it seems to merge into the landscape. He died of a brain tumour aged only 45. The fact that he had died young and was buried within his own architecture touched director Maria Mauti emotionally. “From that moment it seemed to me that his life and his work were inextricably linked,” the filmmaker tells BDE.

German production and sales maestro Heino Deckert was handed the 2025 Docs d’Honor Award during the opening ceremony of the 28th DocsBarcelona. The festival is screening two of his films, the Oscar-nominated Rabbit à la Berlin by Polish Bartosz Konopka, and Heimat is a Space in Time, the final film of Thomas Heise, who passed away in 2024. It is the film Deckert is most proud of. “When this film is shown even in 50 years time, people will understand the whole of the 20th Century when they watch it.”

In their film selected for DocsBarcelona Competition, Iranian filmmakers Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni chronicle the ebbs and flows in the life of their main protagonist, Sara Shahverdi, the motorcycling former midwife from a remote Iranian village who took the leap into local politics. “From the very beginning, we knew the motorcycle would be like an essential character in the film,” Khaki says, not least because it is a symbol of Sara’s freedom and her defiance.