The Punto de Vista festival unveils the programme for its Focus section and presents its new Ricercata section.

02/11/2026

Punto de Vista announces two of the sections in its forthcoming edition, to be held in Pamplona from 20th to 25th April. With this, the international documentary film festival of Navarre gives the first preview of its 20th anniversary with Miquel Martí Freixas as the new artistic director. This concerns its Focus, retrospective series centring on a concept of the work of one film-maker, and Ricercata, a new section that explores searching and experimentation in the language of film, as well as its dialogues with other artistic practices.

The festival, promoted by the government of Navarre and organised by the public company NICDO, proposes two themed Focus, entitled Amidst the Flies —a reference to the well-known observational documentary technique of filming as if the camera were a "fly on the wall"— and Permanence of the Ephemeral —which reflects on the new audiovisual realities resulting from the explosion of content portraying everything around us through social networks— and a third devoted to Welsh film-maker of Indian heritage Alia Syed. Also, the Focus on Permanence of the Ephemeral gives rise to the publication produced every year by Punto de Vista, which this time is to be edited by Inés Calero. 

As for Ricercata, it encompasses various programmes, including Forever Young: Cinema in Relief, a journey through the history of experimental 3D cinema programmed by film-maker Blake Williams, which audiences will be able to discover using up to four different types of 3D glasses; Cinema in Common, an initiative by the production company Hiruki Filmak, which invited the inhabitants of two villages in Navarre to create a film narrative about their community, and Termites, which brings together works from the emerging national scene.

Professionals, press and students can apply for passes now through the festival website. Tickets will be available for the general public in the weeks before Punto de Vista takes place.

 

Focus: Amidst the Flies

This Focus, programmed by researcher and writer Xavier Nueno, explores the ways in which the fly on the wall view has been deconstructed in a series of recent documentaries by the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard. Its founder, Lucien Castaing-Taylor —a film-maker and theorist of international standing— is to give a masterclass at the Museo Oteiza to flesh out the four programmes inviting us to break away from the ethnographic view to explore other ways of engaging with the world. From instant cities in China to the scars of armed conflict in Guatemala, taking in the relations between American explorers and natives of Hubula in Papua New Guinea, and the history of Palestine. The films screened will include the work of Daphne Xu, Parker Hatley, Ernst Karel, Veronika Kusumaryati, Diana Allan and Jumana Manna.

 

Focus: Permanence of the Ephemeral

Humanity today takes snapshots of itself, recording them on a daily basis on social networks. This Focus, made up of film-makers who have struggled with these contemporary paradigms, starts out from internet archive films. Work of an ephemeral nature that, in the course of several programmes, will seek to generate an image of today, making them an ongoing project. NEOZOON, a female artistic duo based in Germany, will be leading a session in which they will present extracts from films and a talk about their creative and working methods. In a dialogue with the audience, they will discuss the material they have found, as well as social, political and environmental narratives.

 

Focus: Alia Syed

Since the eighties, Alia Syed has produced a body of experimental film work combining the personal and the historical to explore gender, place, diaspora and colonialism, shunning linear narrative for superimposition and repetition. Trained at the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative, her work combines structural-materialist film with the contemporary feminist impulse to deal with identity, memory and alienation on the basis of her experience as a British woman of Welsh and Indian descent. This is the first exhaustive retrospective of her work in Spain, covering five decades in the field, from her first 16 mm films to recent work focusing on her Asian-Welsh upbringing, with a strong international profile, curated by writer and academic María Palacios Cruz.

 

Ricercata: Forever Young: Cinema in Relief

Over three programmes, American film-maker Blake Williams will take us through the history of experimental 3D film. The audience will have to use as many as four different kinds of glasses (Anaglyph, Pulfrich, ChromaDepth and Diffraction) to get the most out of these enjoyable sessions in which Williams will explain how the films were made, their visual peculiarities and the optical illusions viewers will see as they try the different glasses.

 

Ricercata: Cinema in Common

In 2025, the production company Hiruki Filmak —set up by Marina Lameiro, Garazi Erburu and Ione Atenea— embarked on two audiovisual projects, inviting the inhabitants of the towns of Aurizberri/Espinal and Lerga, in Navarre, to create two films showing the hidden parts of their communities. The results are the short films Ziarraize and KUKUAREN KANTA, which will be screened at this session, attended by their protagonists.

 

Ricercata: Termites

As in previous years, Punto de Vista opens up to the most diverse emerging Spanish documentary scene in Termites. It will include three programmes with films by Carlos Mora Fuentes, Anna Berkhof, Aitor Gametxo, Julia Mellen and Xiana do Teixeiro. Screenings will be accompanied by presentations by the authors about the creative and production process of their films and open to audience participation.