Facing South – Films – Visions du Réel

Mirando al Sur

Felipe López Gómez
Canada, Colombia | 2026 | 34 min
World premiere
Language : Spanish
Subtitles : English, French

The voice we hear comes from far off-screen, thousands of kilometres away from the vistas of Toronto unfolding before us. These are countless voicemails from Colombia left by the director’s loving grandmother. He listens to them silently, responding with images permeated with loneliness rather than words, looking around to delve into himself and his family history.

The voice we hear comes from far off-screen, thousands of kilometres away from the vistas of Toronto that unfold. These are countless voicemails from Colombia left by the director's loving grandmother. He listens to them silently, responding with images permeated with loneliness rather than words, looking around to delve into himself and his family history. Unfolding between the equatorial south and the chilly north is yet another universal story of uprooting and bonds tested by distance, shared by millions of other migrants and divided families along that same axis. Within the visual fabric, a photochemical dialogue spanning three generations adds a temporal fracture to the geographical one: alongside the 16mm footage of the modern Canadian metropolis, portraits of the woman appear, captured over the decades at the usual milestone family events and rituals. While those pictures condense decades of life, capturing vital private and social relationships, the footage dilates the impression of an atomised, immobile present, the inevitable result of the alien gaze of the stranger.

Sergio Fant

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