IndiFest, Barcelona Indigenous Film Festival

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Film still from "Chicharras," directed by Luna Marán (Mexico, 2024).

IndiFest, Festival de Cine Indígena de Barcelona gives indigenous peoples a voice on the creative scene, allowing them to bring their demands for compliance with their internationally-recognized human and political rights to a wider audience. It advocates for political and social mobilization, with activities that range from audiovisual projections to workshops, talks and more, giving local residents the opportunity to discover the different perspectives, problems, struggles and proposals for change that impact indigenous communities.

The 2025 edition is dedicated to borders, those imaginary lines that delimit territories, identities, languages ​​or mental states. Linking borders with indigenous peoples references, first and foremost, colonial subjugation and the territorial distribution between metropolitan countries, indifferent to the peoples who previously inhabited these lands. The different lifestyles and imaginaries of indigenous peoples dismantle all kinds of real and symbolic borders: the borders between nature and culture, between animals and humans, between men and women, between city and countryside, between nomadism and sedentarism.

Cinema captures this ambivalence between the rejection and the construction of borders, and ultimately makes us doubt what a border without nuances is. Indigenous cinema is one of the areas where border spaces are contested, between documentary and fiction, between myth and reality, between realism and magic, etc.

2025 Program

This year's festival open with Luna Marán's Chicharras (Mexico, 2024), a film that navigates between fiction, documentary and experimental cinema that offers an authentic view of rural communities in Mexico, highlighting the social and political complexities that arise when the government tries to introduce significant changes without a total consensus. Other films on the agenda include Zacharias Kunuk's Wrong Husband (Canada, 2025), a captivating arctic fairy tale about an arranged marriage set in an Inuit community 4,000 years ago; Segundo Fuérez's Puka Urpi (Ecuador, 2025), a film inspired by an Ecuadorian oral tale that tells the adventure of a five-year-old girl who must move from the city to the countryside to live with her grandmother after her mother dies; and Yuyaymanta (Ecuador, 2024), a moving documentary about the June 2022 indigenous uprising in Ecuador that intertwines archive and memory to document physical wounds, emotional consequences and the dignity of resistance.

Films are screened in original version with Catalan or Spanish subtitles.

Venues

Most films are screened at Cinemes Girona with additional showings at Ateneu del Raval, Filmoteca de Catalunya, Nau Bòstik, Ágora Juan Andrés Benítez, El Mercat Cultural de Vallvidrera as well as Cinema Catalunya in Terrassa, MAC Museu d'Art de Cerdanyola in Cerdanyola del Vallès and Sala Santa Llúciain Reus. Tickets are free, but a donation is requested, and you can get them on the festival website.

October Film Festivals in and around Barcelona

October’s calendar is packed with an impressive list of film festivals in and around the city. Check out our article October Film Festivals in and around Barcelona where you'll find gritty investigative documentaries, hair-raising fantasy and horror flicks and everything in between!

For more events check our online events calendar.