KEYS OF THE SOUTH | 2026
Films participating in the KEYS OF THE SOUTH Section:
Jury
Llaves del Sur Selection
KEYS OF THE SOUTH section presentation
Eight years after its last edition, Cines del Sur returns, and it does so opening new doors and drawing new maps. Among the Festival’s major innovations is a new section, Keys of the South, conceived as the natural extension of the Official Section: six films never before screened in Spain, each functioning as a small key able to unlock territories, memories and realities far removed from the usual exhibition circuits.
All the works share a revealing trait of contemporary cinema: they were made as co‑productions with European countries, confirming how transnational alliances not only sustain film production but also allow deeply local stories to cross borders and resonate in other geographies. Cinema thus becomes a bridge connecting distant shores, an underlying current linking human experiences that seem worlds away.
The selection brings together two documentaries, four fiction features — three of them debut films directed by women — and one production signed by four filmmakers. Brief as it may be, the program sketches a diverse and deeply representative map of the Global South: Latin America, North Africa, East Africa, Southern Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia appear here not as abstract categories but as living territories shaped by social tensions, historical wounds, and desires for transformation.
Each film seems to delve into the same question, expressed in different languages: how does one build an identity in contexts that condition, limit, or expel? The stories gathered in Keys of the South explore intimate processes of personal change, but they also speak of memory, belonging, uprootedness, and resistance. Some do so by placing the social context at the center, as an inevitable presence shaping the characters’ destinies; others let it breathe at the margins, like a background noise that slowly seeps into every gesture.
The former is the case in Nawi: Dear Future Me and All My Sisters, where cultural and social conflicts cut through the protagonists’ inner lives. Conversely, films such as Becoming and Where the Wind Comes From place those same contexts in a secondary narrative plane, allowing the focus to fall on the emotions, uncertainties, and inner fractures of their characters.
Cinematically, the section moves primarily within the realm of drama, though some films come very close to being social cinema while others turn to archival material and documentary as a way of preserving memory against the passage of time. All share a common intention: to observe reality without artifice, to linger on what the gaze tends to overlook.
Equally significant is the plurality of voices that give form to this new Keys of the South: five women and four men are the filmmakers behind the selected films. This balance broadens the perspectives from which questions of gender, community and belonging are addressed, enriching the dialogue between the works.
Two documentaries launch this section of the Festival. Para vivir. The implacable times of Pablo Milanés (2025), by Fabien Pisani — the festival’s opening film — offers an intimate portrait of the legendary Cuban singer‑songwriter. The film interweaves the artist’s everyday fragility with the cultural and political memory of an entire era, as if the life of Pablo Milanés also contained the emotional soundtrack of several generations.
As for the other documentary, All My Sisters (2025), by Iranian filmmaker Massoud Bakhshi, follows the lives of three sisters over eighteen years, building an impressive emotional archive on family, time, and the condition of women in Iran. The film achieves something extraordinary: portraying an entire country through the silences, conflicts, and affections that inhabit a single household.
The program also includes three debut features directed by women, each observing the world from distinct geographies and sensibilities. In Becoming (2025), Kazakh filmmaker Zhannat Alshanova depicts the passage into adulthood of a teenager marked by an unstable family environment, forced to imagine a possible future in post‑Soviet Kazakhstan. The film turns personal growth into a long‑distance race in which every step seems to challenge the weight of the past. Laundry (2025), by South African director Zamo Mkhwanazi, transports us to Johannesburg in 1968 to explore the scars of racism and the ways oppressive systems end up contaminating even those who suffer under them. Violence appears not only as a political structure but as a shadow that slowly settles into people’s most intimate spaces. In Where the Wind Comes From (2025), Tunisian filmmaker Amel Guellaty portrays two young people caught between the weight of tradition and the urgent need to imagine another future. The film breathes uncertainty, as if its characters were constantly walking across ground that cracks beneath their feet.
Closing the selection is Nawi: Dear Future Me (2024), directed by Kenyan filmmakers Apuu Mourine and Vallentine Chelluget together with German directors Kevin and Toby Schmutzler. The film follows the journey of a thirteen‑year‑old Kenyan girl who decides to break with her village’s traditions and fight for her right to choose her own destiny. Her path becomes an affirmation of freedom in a world that seems to have decided her future in advance.
Taken together, the films of Keys of the South confirm that vast cultural differences do not prevent us from recognizing shared emotions. The films speak with each other across widely different geographic and political contexts, yet all share the need to interrogate the present and explore what unites us: fear, memory, loss, the desire to belong, and the enduring search for a place in the world. Like small lights sparkling at distant points across the planet, these stories ultimately form a single constellation.
