Bendita Tú is an international short film festival that promotes experimental, hybrid, and video essay cinema with a gender and queer perspective. Based in Argentina and Spain, the festival creates a space for encounter and dialogue to give visibility to emerging cinema within a diversity of identities and territories.
In its 8th edition, the festival chooses the Land as its central theme, a concept that opens the door to multiple meanings. It is, at the same time, the planet we inhabit and the soil that sustains life, as well as a network of relationships where the human and the non-human intertwine in a web of interdependence. From a poetic and broad perspective, the Land is conceived as a medium that evokes displacements, migrations, and diasporas, but also as a ground laden with scents, textures, and memories, where the organic and the inorganic merge. As Gaston Bachelard (1994) said, “the Land is a memory that can be touched,” an idea that gives it both sensory and symbolic resonances, transforming it into a space of reinvention, mourning, and resistance.
The festival proposes a dialogue around the interconnections situated in relation to this element. From indigenous worldviews, which understand the world as a living and sacred being (Shiva, 2005), to contemporary approaches that highlight the agency of the non-human (Bennett, 2010), with the aim of reflecting on how the Land territorializes and, at the same time, territorializes us, redefining notions of belonging and home in a context marked by profound geological and atmospheric transformations.
Entities considered “non-living” —the substrate, stones, sand— emerge as fundamental actors in narratives of displacement. As Ingold (2011) suggests, “life does not occur on the Land, but within its folds and textures.” Thus, through diverse audiovisual approaches, this edition is an invitation to feel the thickness of the Land, to listen to its multiple voices, and to recognize that, even in the most distant grounds, there are traces of life that connect us with other beings and with other temporalities, acknowledging that we are part of a constant flow of lives and materials that precede and will succeed us.
The 8th edition will feature a selection of short films included in the Official Competition and the Roots Section.
