Shorts Program 2: Making Contact

Q&As with Nicolás Pereda and Pedro Neves Marques on Oct. 4 & 5

The Bite / A Mordida
Pedro Neves Marques, Portugal/Brazil, 2019, 26m
U.S. Premiere
In Pedro Neves Marques’s atmospheric, sci-fi-tinged fiction set against the backdrop of a crisis-stricken São Paulo, a team of biologists attempt to thwart a viral outbreak through the use of genetically modified mosquitoes, while, in a parallel story, three lovers living in rural seclusion resist the reactionary politics of a newly appointed conservative government. Marques imagines an anxious present in which the promise of a better tomorrow relies on new conceptions of intimacy, identity, and reproduction.

My Skin, Luminous
Gabino Rodríguez and Nicolás Pereda, Mexico/Canada, 2019, 39m
U.S. Premiere
Having lost the pigment in his skin, Matias, an infirmed orphan at a Michoacán primary school, has been quarantined from his classmates; however, the presence and words of novelist Mario Bellatin offer the prospect of healing. Moving from classroom to countryside to a local monastery, My Skin, Luminous is a shape-shifting docufiction that weaves its real-life subject into a subtly unfolding drama, and which speaks to the wider ongoing reforms to Mexico’s public school system.