The Veiled City

Director: Natalie Cubides-Brady

Year: 2019

A hybrid documentary about the decommissioning of a nuclear plant in Scotland. Concerned with landscape and time, myth and technology, the film explores the nature of ruins, and asks what environmental scars our generation will leave behind for the future. Official Selection Visions du Réel 2019 - World premiere

Director: Natalie Cubides-Brady

Year: 2016

Filmed around the time of Hugo Chavez’s last presidential election, this film focuses on the life of Carmen, the filmmaker’s aunt, who works as a shop assistant in Caracas, Venezuela. Combining observational and poetic documentary techniques, the film follows Carmen’s everyday life in the city in the run up to the election, against a backdrop of rousing political speeches and grand social promises. Offering an intimate portrait of both Carmen and Caracas, the film reflects on the gaps between the rhetoric of Chavez’s government and ordinary lived experience. At its heart, Carmen Waits is a meditation on the ways in which myth, religion, faith and death interact with Chavez’s politics.

Director: Lilyana Torres, Carlos Morales

Year: 2027

When filmmaker Lilyana Torres learns that her grandfather hired hitmen to nearly kill her father, she sets out to confront him in Tamaulipas, Mexico, and force an apology. The attack left her father with cracked ribs, a broken nose, and loose teeth. Its architect was his own father. Like much of Lilyana’s family history, nobody spoke of it again. So she begins planning his murder. In darkly comic fictional reenactments, Lilyana trains for revenge with the help of a retired detective. Some methods are efficient, others grotesque, all adapted to an ageing man. Against these fantasies, family home videos reveal a more unsettling contradiction: birthday parties, tenderness, and a grandfather who once appeared devoted to his son and granddaughter. How could a parent put their own child’s life at risk? Before Lilyana reaches him, her grandfather dies peacefully in bed, taking every explanation with him. Determined to complete the film, she casts an actor named Perfecto to play him and kills him on screen, again and again. But the performance exposes the question she cannot escape: what does revenge actually resolve? Lilyana confronts the possibility that the violence she wants to destroy may already live inside her.