The 40th edition of the Guadalajara International Film Festival (FICG) announces the Official Selection of films in competition for the Maguey Award, a section that reaches its fourteenth edition and awards the categories of Best Acting, Special Jury Prize and Best Film.
These productions come from Portugal (guest country at FICG40), Germany, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Spain, the United States, France, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Uruguay.
Premio Maguey is an award to the seventh art that disseminates and promotes audiovisual stories in the context of an open and diverse sexual orientation, which celebrates the best of LGBTQ+ filmmaking in the world within the framework of the Guadalajara International Film Festival.
SELECTED
Hardly good things (2025)
Daniel Nolasco
Brasil
Catalão, Brazil, 1984. The rural region of Batalha dos Neves is made up of extensive crop fields, a few farms and is divided by the São Marcos River. Antonio lives alone and isolated, taking care of his small farm until the day he meets Marcelo, a lonely motorcyclist who has an accident while crossing the region. Antonio heals Marcelo's wounds. Both fall in love and live a story that transforms, destabilizes and tears them apart.
The nature of invisible things (2025)
Rafaela Camelo
Brazil | Chile
Gloria, a ten-year-old girl, spends her vacation at the hospital with her mother, a hard-working nurse. While exploring the facilities, Gloria meets Sofia, a girl convinced that her great-grandmother's deteriorating health is due to her hospital admission. United by their shared desire to leave, the two find solace in each other's company. Faced with the imminent departure, the girls and their mothers head for a retreat in the countryside to spend the last days of an unforgettable summer.
Duas vezes João Liberada (2025)
Paula Tomás Marques
Portugal
João, a Lisbon actress, stars in a biopic about Liberada, a gender non-conforming young woman persecuted by the Inquisition in 18th century Portugal. Although the director of the biopic seems to have a predilection for portraying violence and suffering on screen, Liberada's story is ultimately one of strength, resilience and rebellion against established gender roles. João clashes with the director over how to portray Liberada's legacy. These tensions deepen as the ghost of Liberada begins to haunt João in his dreams.
Chroma (2025)
Manuel Abramovich
Argentina | Germany | Austria
In a chroma green studio, a group of people ask questions and gather to imagine other ways of being together. In this green space, the norm is suspended. A project about the characters we play to present ourselves to others. An invitation to rewrite the scripts of our lives.
Hot Milk (2025)
Rebecca Lenkiewicz
Reino Unido
Set in the scorching heat of the Spanish summer, the film follows Rose and her daughter Sofia as they travel to the coastal town of Almeria to consult Gomez, an enigmatic healer who may hold the key to Rose's mysterious illness, which has forced her to use a wheelchair. Sofia, trapped until now by her mother's condition, begins to become uninhibited as she becomes attracted to the magnetism of a free-spirited traveler, Ingrid. Sofia's growing freedom proves too much for her controlling mother and their relationship becomes filled with repressed resentment and bitterness, threatening to break the fragile bonds that unite them.
The Innocents (2025)
Germán Tejada
Peru | Mexico
Cara de Ángel (14) is a boy of androgynous and seductive beauty who lives in terror of Colorete and the pack of the violent neighborhood where he lives. In his quest to prove his manhood, he is confronted by his uncontrolled hormones and his desire to belong to the gang. They rob him, humiliate him, make him masturbate in public. His masculinity is always put to the test in a repressive context whose release valve is punk, transgression, his drawings, masturbation and zombies. To gain his acceptance, Angel Face proposes to participate in a house robbery.
La Joia: Bad Gyal (2024)
David Camarero
Spain
The ins and outs of Bad Gyal's dizzying rise as a generational icon. The release of her first album, ''La joia'', was postponed for more than a year, forcing her to make an exercise of resilience within the industry and with herself. Lights and shadows of the emotional journey of a cheeky diva, aware of the traps of the business, struggling to stay the course and polish herself like a diamond.
Lesbian Space Princess (2025)
Leela Varghese, Emma Hough Hobbs
Australia
In this heartwarming and hilarious space opera, a space princess is thrust out of her safe life and on a galactic quest to save her bounty hunter ex-girlfriend from the Straight White Maliens.
Rain on Babel (2025)
Sun Gala
Colombia | Spain | United States
In this version of Dante's Inferno, a series of characters will cross La Flaca, death personified, in the mythical Babel bar, weaving an epic and amusing story of love, betrayal, death and redemption.
Far Away (2025)
Gerard Oms
Spain | Netherlands
Sergio travels to Utrecht with his family to attend a sporting event. Before taking the flight back to Barcelona, he suffers a panic attack and decides to stay in Holland. Unable to give a logical explanation to his family, he cuts off contact with his past. From that moment on, he will have to survive without money, without friends, without a home and without speaking the language, until he is able to find himself.
The last blue (2025)
Gabriel Mascaro
Brazil | Mexico | Netherlands | Chile
Tereza (77) lives in an industrialized city in Amazonia, until she receives an official order from the government to report to a housing colony. It is a faraway place where the elderly are taken to "enjoy" their later years, freeing the younger generation to concentrate fully on productivity and growth. But Tereza refuses to accept this imposed fate. Instead, she embarks on a transformative journey through the rivers and tributaries of the Amazon to fulfill one last wish before her freedom is taken, a decision that will change her destiny forever.
Queer as Punk (2025)
Yihwen Chen
Malaysia | Indonesia
Faris is the transgender singer of Shh..Diam!, an openly queer punk band from Malaysia. Together with his bandmates, Yon and Yoyo, they use their music to fight for LGBTQI+ rights in a country where human rights and freedom of expression are severely restricted by a conservative Muslim society. Faced with increasing discrimination, Yoyo decides to leave Malaysia. Despite the difficulties, Faris decides to stay, determined to continue using his music as a platform to advocate for freedom and equality, refusing to let societal pressures silence his voice.
Sabar Bonda (2025)
Rohan Parashuram Kanawade
India , United Kingdom , Canada
Anand, a thirty-something city-dweller forced to spend ten days mourning the death of his father in the rugged countryside of western India, forms a tender bond with a local farm girl who struggles not to marry. When the mourning ends, forcing him to return, Anand must decide the fate of their relationship, born under duress.
They always come back (2025)
Sergio De Leon
Uruguay | Argentina
Emilio is not prepared, after the death of his mother, to manage at the same time an accursed inheritance, the promiscuity of his desires and the discovery of a love. At the age of 18, he will be disconcerted to realize that destiny sometimes hangs on something as fragile as the flight of a dove.
On the waves (2025)
Horacio Alcalá
Mexico | Spain | France
On an imaginary island, Gloria Zamora, a working mother, brings out her true personality with the arrival of money and power in her life. With the submission of the town priest, Don Marcario, purveyor of the word of God in vain, she will succeed in bringing an entire town under her feet. The family's daughter, Trinidad, acts as narrator with her own inner monologue, guiding the viewer in her reverie and judging her mother's malice. In Spain, Rocio Aldama, the personification of Sara Montiel. An actress with a single dream: to succeed. Two worlds and a mixture of coincidences and misfortunes.
A world for me (2024)
Alejandro Zuno
México
Tras recibir la noticia de que el sexo de su bebé no se puede determinar debido a un desorden del desarrollo sexual, María y Nico se sumergen en la incertidumbre. Él aboga por seguir el protocolo médico y asignar quirúrgicamente un sexo a su bebé, mientras ella emprende un viaje de investigación y autodescubrimiento. A medida que María conoce más sobre la intersexualidad, empieza a considerar la posibilidad de que su bebé crezca con su cuerpo como es. Enfrentando la decisión más difícil de sus vidas, la pareja se cuestiona sus ideas sobre el género y la identidad, mientras abren sus ojos a un mundo nuevo para ellos: la intersexualidad.
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