official selection | 2026
Films participating in the Official Selection:
jury
Official Selection
official selection presentation
Several years have passed since the last edition of Granada’s beloved Cines del Sur. In 2018 the Festival lowered its curtain following an 11th edition that was full of hope yet ultimately insufficient to sustain an event destined to become one of the great beacons of international cinema. Since its inception in 2006 (with the first edition held in 2007), the Festival has always had a clear and necessary purpose: to learn to look at the other. Understanding difference not as a boundary but as a mirror in which to recognize ourselves.
Films arriving from different latitudes and continents came together under a word loaded with symbolism: south. A term that maps tend to place at the bottom, even though some of the most luminous, free, and urgent voices in contemporary cinema reside there. Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Arab world found in Granada a space in which to tell stories that had long been relegated to the margins. Cines del Sur thus became a window onto other cultures, but also a place from which to illuminate shared conflicts, wounds and hopes.
In a present marked by an environmental crisis that no longer distinguishes between north and south, the unanimous choice of the Mexican film La reserva, by Pablo Pérez Lombardini, felt inevitable. The film takes us to a small community of coffee growers whose survival is threatened when various corporations begin to ravage the nature reserve in which the coffee farmers live. Shot in stark and striking black and white, each frame seems to resist the advance of destruction, as if it were the last tree standing before the final felling.
There are stories that need to be told again and again so that new generations understand the price of freedom and the danger of forgetting. Brazilian director Flávia Castro knows that territory very well: exile cut through her childhood and eventually became the emotional core of her cinema. From that wounded memory emerges As Vitrines, a film that places us inside the military coup carried out by Augusto Pinochet in Chile in 1973. While hundreds of Latin American left‑wing activists seek refuge in the Argentine embassy, on the other side of the windows the city is bleeding out between gunfire and persecution. The people inside, hanging in the balance between fear and hope, survive by dreaming of a freedom that never seems to arrive.
Returning to the present, we could not ignore the echoes of the war in Ukraine that resonate through Early Winter, by Turkish director Özcan Alper. This road movie follows Ferhat, who recently became a father, and Lila, a woman of limited means who has taken a job as a surrogate mother. Over the course of their journey, the film explores biological bonds, social fractures and the most vulnerable corners of the human soul, making its main characters face up to decisions that might alter the course of their lives forever.
Elegant and enveloped in sepia-toned cinematography with flashes of burnt orange, Exile, the second feature by Tunisian filmmaker Mehdi Hmili, turns pain into narrative momentum. After losing his best friend in a workplace accident, Mohamed embarks on a path of revenge that soon ceases to be personal and instead becomes a fight against a system that keeps pushing him closer and closer to the edge.
In The Sun Rises On Us All, by Chinese director Cai Shangjun, viewers are invited to reflect on sacrifice, guilt, and the moral limits of love: a man takes responsibility for a crime he did not commit in order to protect his girlfriend. She, unable to bear the weight of that gesture, decides to leave and start a new life far from everything they once shared. But the years cannot erase certain scars and fate eventually brings their paths together again, as if some emotional debts can never truly be settled.
In 2026 Cines del Sur returns with a dual proposal, championing the courage to create from a place of precarity while also highlighting the difficulty of being oneself in societies that are increasingly competitive and exclusionary. On the one hand, Crocodile, a co‑production between Nigeria and New Zealand directed by Pietra Brettkelly, portrays a group of young Nigerians who, armed only with their imagination and minimal resources, build handmade science‑fiction universes. Cinema crafted from scrap metal, ingenuity, and dreams: small galaxies born on the margins.
On the other hand, Funky Freaky Freaks, by Korean director Han Chang‑lok, takes us to a city frozen in time, where urban renewal seems to have rusted before it even began. There, three high school friends live with obsessions and frustrations that slowly distort their way of seeing the world, as they grapple with the weight of a society that turns difference into a reason for exclusion and violence.
The Festival is back. And naturally its return is marked by the heterogeneity and vitality of a cinema —that of the South—that breaks through like a sea breeze in the middle of an ocean of sand.
