8th Cines del Sur Festival

The eighth edition of Cines del Sur continues to establish Granada as a leading intercultural hub, strengthening its collaboration with the Alhambra Board, the Provincial Council, and the University to enhance the presence and accessibility of films from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. For seven days, films from Iran, China, India, Kenya, Palestine, Morocco, Argentina, and Colombia will be screened at various venues, with a special revival of open-air screenings in Plaza de las Pasiegas, creating a popular cinema celebration.

The heart of the festival remains the Official Section, featuring ten feature films—fiction, documentary, and experimental cinema—from the geopolitical South. This is complemented by 'Pantalla Abierta' (Open Screen), screenings on the Cathedral facade, and cycles at the Corral del Carbón. The festival also continues its tradition of retrospectives and auteur cinema with TransCine, dedicated to Ritwik Ghatak, as well as a strong presence from the Aljazeera International Documentary Film Festival, which contributes a selection of award-winning documentaries, many of which are new to Spain.

Among the thematic sections, highlights include “Amríka: Arabs in America,” which explores the impact of Arab diasporas in Latin American and Caribbean contexts, and “So Far, So Close,” a result of collaboration with the University of Granada, focusing on films from the Global South distributed in Spain but never premiered in Granada cinemas. The cinesdelsur.ext extension continues to bring significant festival films to municipalities in the province, emphasizing that access to culture should not depend on distance.

This edition is explicitly dedicated to the memory of Alberto Elena, one of the project's ideologues, reprinting his foundational text in the catalog on the need for a festival for "peripheral cinemas" or "cinemas of the South." In a context still marked by budgetary restrictions, the festival asserts itself as a tool for dialogue between cultures and as a platform for works that, far from major commercial circuits, offer complex, daring, and necessary perspectives.