• The programme includes a panel discussion on the circulation of audiovisual productions within the international circuit.
• Spanish short filmmakers Laura Pérez, Olivia Delcán, María Herrera and Christian Avilés will present their competition entries.

Tomorrow, 25 June, Cinema Jove moves away from the usual coming-of-age genre clichés with the competition feature film ‘When We Saw Each Other More Often’ by American director William Wrubel, who is based in Berlin.

Shot in evocative Super 16mm format, the film creates a lyrical composition of characters, places, moments and intertwined lives that share youth as their only common denominator. The final result bears the influence of the filmmaker’s training under renowned auteurs such as Kelly Reichardt, Peter Hutton and Angela Schanelec, who supervised his master’s thesis film.

Its carefully crafted aesthetic moves through fleeting moments and almost dreamlike textures that do not seek to build a story in the traditional sense, but rather to map an emotional geography across everyday urban spaces such as classrooms, cafés, stations and bars in a German city.

The filmmaker himself has explicitly described his intentions, stating that with this feature he sought “to make a film that owes less to the structures of conventional narrative and more to the accidental and unknowable movements of life itself: a series of loosely connected encounters and conversations, emotions without psychology, and actions without explanation”.

Wrubel explains that in both the editing and pacing of ‘When We Saw Each Other More Often’, “time lurches forward in sudden jumps; new faces replace old ones as circumstances change, and when a character leaves the frame, it is never clear whether they will be seen again.” His visual proposal is less “about the passage of time than about time that has already passed, and everything that can be lost between one moment and the next”.

A Professional Analysis of a Film’s Journey to the Screen

Among tomorrow’s industry activities is the strategic panel ‘The Journey of a Film: Three Industry Perspectives’, where Frédéric Boyer, Maria Ekerhovd and Isabel Ivars, members of the Official Feature Film Jury, will provide a multidisciplinary perspective on the complete life cycle of a cinematic audiovisual production.

The discussion will bring together complementary viewpoints from executive production, international festival programming and global sales strategies, offering attendees key tools to understand current market dynamics and the circulation of films on the international circuit.

Conversations with Spanish Short Filmmakers

The day will be rounded out by the festival’s regular curated short film programme, which tomorrow will feature many of its directors in attendance to engage in discussions with the audience.

Together, they provide a comprehensive overview of the emerging talent currently shaping Spanish cinema.

Following her debut short film denouncing stealthing, ‘El cuento de una noche de verano’, director María Herrera now explores women’s need to please. As a producer, she has worked on projects such as ‘Los días que vendrán’ (Carlos Marqués-Marcet, 2019), Marta Nieto’s short film ‘Son’ (2022), and ‘Arquitectura Emocional 1959’, for which León Siminiani won the Goya Award in 2023.

The stars of ‘El cuento de una noche de verano’, Olivia Delcán and Nacho Sánchez, make their directorial debut with ‘Instructions for Cooking a Chicken Underground’, a film about a relationship in crisis.

Following the international success of his previous work, ‘La herida luminosa’, which received distinctions such as Short of the Year at Clermont-Ferrand and awards at festivals including Cinema Jove itself, Christian Avilés brings a dreamlike atmosphere to a queer tale shot on sixteen-millimetre film in ‘Stallion and the Crystal Ball’.

Likewise, director Laura Pérez Gómez will present ‘A certa distància’, bringing together the talent of award-winning poet Elsa Moreno and acclaimed actress Sonia Almarcha.

Fear of Belly Buttons and Relationships Between Mothers, Grandmothers and Daughters

Among the international entries, Norwegian filmmaker Ingrid Runde Saxegaard explores family bonds in ‘Sand i tissen’, an intimate story about love and sex between a mother and daughter during a nudist outing on a deserted beach.

It is worth noting that the director served as coordinator of the art department for the Oscar-winning ‘Sentimental Value’ (Joachim Trier, 2025), and as production designer for Dag Johan Haugerud’s ‘Sex, Love, Dreams’ trilogy, whose final instalment won the Golden Bear at Berlinale 2025.

The programme will also feature contributions from Argentine filmmaker Denise Anzarut, whose ‘Doctor Miranda’ introduces a young woman undergoing an existential crisis; Romanian director Marian Fărcuț, whose ‘Drumul spre casa’ focuses on the experience of the Hungarian minority in Transylvania; and French filmmaker Elodie Beaumont Tarillon, whose ‘Les normales de saison’ is set during a summer in which a young woman takes care of her grandmother as she gradually loses her independence.

Finally, in the documentary section, Portuguese filmmaker Francisca Alarcão will present her documentary ‘O’, a film that she writes, directs and stars in, using irony and humour to explore her peculiar personal phobia of belly buttons.