Fragmented attempts to describe a sensation. Acts of hypnosis disturbing familiar spaces. …It’s like you’re underwater and alone and everybody else is on land and together, only we’re inhabiting the same space having to witness each other like idiots. (Sam Drake)

I read in the writings of one painter that, for him, the Polish landscape seems to constantly draw our gaze to the ground, making us look not over the horizon but under our feet, at the bones buried beneath each step. The film shifts between a portrait of my eighty-year-old grandparents and my view on the elements and imagery of the national Catholic narrative in the Polish landscape. The title, Ashes By Name Is Man, is borrowed from a church notice board in Nowa Grobla, in Roztocze. At the centre of my explorations is the range of hills Roztocze, while Krakow and Lviv form the boundaries of the area in which I was shooting. (Ewelina Rosinska)

On the 200th anniversary of Simon Bolivar’s liberation journey across Colombia, Bicentenario reflects on the far-reaching consequences of the liberator’s legacy, a legacy kept alive through a wide range of intentional and unintentional rituals of remembrance. Summoning Bolivar’s spirit in the exact landscapes that witnessed the battles, Bicentenario reveals the contemporary social rituals that perpetuate the ongoing violence residing deep within the social and political unconscious. Two hundred years after his campaign, Simon Bolivar’s spirit has become a mix of political mysticism, unquestioned doctrine, and enigma—or perhaps a curse that has fixed itself in the collective imaginary of an entire continent. It is this curse that Bicentenario seeks to invoke and perhaps exorcise. (Pablo Alvarez-Mesa)

English subtitles