32nd Barcelona Independent Film Festival «L'Alternativa»

Here, risk is not a label but an everyday practice. At L’Alternativa Oficials, the three competitive sections function as a permanent laboratory: feature films and shorts that allow themselves to doubt, experiment, mix languages, observe reality without turning it into a slogan and invent stories without fear of strangeness.

The Paral·leles extend that impulse: tributes that recover authors eclipsed by official history, premieres that arrive without fanfare but with their own voice, cinemas that rarely cross borders, and a family programme that understands that critical imagination can also be cultivated from childhood.

In the CCCB hall, the boundary between festival and city becomes blurred: free screenings, performances, spontaneous talks and a community that circulates, debates and meets. A cultural hotbed where films continue after the screen.

This year, the opening is led by El mensaje, by Iván Fund, and the closing is signed by Kontinental'25, by Radu Jude, always sharp in his reading of the present. Added to this are the new works of Hafsia Herzi, Jem Cohen, José Luis Guerin and Yrsa Roca Fannberg, the Satellites dedicated to Elena López Riera and Lois Patiño, and essential cycles on Lizzie Borden, René Vautier and Theo Anthony.

L’Alternativa once again positions itself where it has always wanted to be: on the threshold. Where cinema does not seek to please, but to activate. Where every screening is an invitation — or a provocation — to see the world differently.