The Mexican film Earth Altars / La tierra los altares by Sofía Peypoch was the winner of the top prize, the City of Lisbon Award, for Best International Competition Film at the 21st edition of Doclisboa. The film was also the winner of the New Talent Award – TVCine Channels Award for Best First Feature-Length Film (over 60 minutes).
In Earth Altars, the filmmaker returns to the site of her kidnapping. Amid the darkness and silence, her hands search underground for traces of a buried memory. Others replicate this chimerical gesture. The earth is an immutable witness that refuses to forget. In a statement, the jury commended the film for its “ability to finely interweave personal history, big History and ancestrality, in a movement in which archaeology as a science lends historical depth to the director's excavation of intimate trauma.”
Peypoch is a visual artist that combines film, photography, ceramic sculpture and found objects in her work. at the core of her practice is the sensual experience, expressed through the observation of nature, drawing parallels between the body and the woods. Her practice resides at the interstice of personal memory and collective thought, conceiving memory as a tangible space where its meaning is not in remembering, but rather in being witness to the experience of the present as a perpetual web of occurrences in constant transformation.
Other Latin American films awarded at Doclisboa are Hormigas perplejas by Nicaraguan-Spanish director Mercedes Moncada Rodríguez, winner of the Healthy Workplaces Film Award; and the Argentine film The Trial / El juicio by Ulises de la Órden, which received an Honorable Mention in the Rights and Freedoms Award.
The 21st edition of the Doclisboa Festival took place October 19-29 in Portugal.
