IndiFest, Barcelona Indigenous Film Festival
Film still from "Standing Above the Clouds" directed by Jalena Keane-Lee (USA, 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.
Thia year's edition is dedicated to dreams. In many indigenous worldviews, dreams are much more than individual experiences: they are spaces of knowledge, communication and orientation that connect the past, present and future with the spiritual, ancestral and territorial. Sharing and interpreting them collectively can help make decisions, anticipate threats, and guide actions that affect the community. In contexts of defending the territory, dreams can acquire a particularly significant political dimension: they become a source of orientation and legitimacy for struggles in the face of external projects or actors that threaten land, natural resources and community life forms.
The dreamlike territory is also a space of belonging, identity and cultural resistance. Through dreams, land, rivers, mountains, ancestors and the beings that inhabit them can be perceived as presences with which it is necessary to maintain a relationship of respect and care. In this way, dreams question the Western separation between the individual and the collective, between the eve and the spiritual world, and become a tool to preserve knowledge, strengthen the community and sustain the defense of the territory. They are shared territories where knowledge, identity, community and also forms of political resistance are built.
2026 Program
The festival opens with Verenice Benítez's Nunkui, a film that takes us to the heart of the Ecuadorian Amazon to narrate the awakening of a young shuar in the middle of a disputed territory. Other films on the agenda included Jalena Keane-Lee's Standing Above the Clouds, a story of inter-generational women activists, who call themselves Ku Kia'i Mauna, or guardians of the mountain; Inuk Silis Høegh's Sumé: The Sound of a Revolution, the story of a rock band that sparked a revival of Greenlandic culture and identity and paved the way for Greenland's self-government; and Ana Ts’uyeb's Li Cham, a film that offers profound insights into the concept of the "body-territory," labor, and the various forms of patriarchal and structural violence in Chiapas.
Films are screened in original version with Catalan or Spanish subtitles.
Venues
Most films are screened at Cinemes Girona with additional showings at Cinemes Zumzeig, Ateneu del Raval, Centre Cívic Pati Llimona, Nau Bostik and Paral·lel 62, as well as Cinema Catalunya in Terrassa, Ateneu de Cerdanyola and Ateneu juvenil de Cambrils. Tickets are free, but a donation is requested, and you can reserve 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.