Programme 3

Crías
Xiana do Teixeiro, Spain, 2026, 122 min, DCP, Galician, Spanish, Spanish subtitles and electronic English subtitles.

From an unpublished archive of intimate diaries written in solitude by dozens of teenagers emerges a collective autobiography, an overflowing choral voice that challenges the inherited images of female youth. A filmed book, a living archive, a silent manifesto, and a shared secret.

Introduction by Xiana do Teixeiro (filmmaker) and Ekhiñe Etxeberria (film programmer).

Through different narrative layers and a structure that combines strategies of classic documentary with forms typical of essay and critical thinking, Crías unfolds as a reflective, political, and committed film. The work is constructed without great artifice. It is a small and simple production, in the best sense of the word — and that is precisely where its strength lies. Xiana do Teixeiro avoids didactic explanations and closed conclusions and lets the testimonies —whether written in children’s and teenagers’ diaries or transmitted orally— sustain the film.

As it progresses, those initial thoughts grow with those who wrote them. The girls become teenagers, then adults. These are no longer innocent messages, but voices that confront a biased and patriarchal society, and who find in writing a space to express what cannot always be said or heard. Sequence after sequence, the women begin to recognise each other and feel represented, occupying public space for a time through words, bodies, and shared experience. There is no need for embellishment. The discreet and deeply sensitive honesty of each voice is enough in and of itself.

Ekhiñe Etxeberria