Oliva Oliva

Reminiscences of a trip to Čáslav

"In A MILLION IN DEBT IS NORMAL, SAYS MY GRANDFATHER, Gabriele Mathes traces the consequences of the decline of her father’s furniture factory via her family’s Super-8 footage(..)" (Viennale)

The biggest, most populated, and frantic city in South America. While Cariocas are like tropical birds, Paulistas are like frenetic ants. Distances are longer and they're always in a hurry. A busy journey through this beautiful Brazilian beast which cannot help but beating irregularly.

‘VIGO 1972’ narrates the events which took place in Vigo in September 1972, when the firing of five Citröen auto workers resulted in the largest general strike in the history of Galicia — with over thirty thousand workers — all of this during the Franco dictatorship in Spain.

Indifferent landscapes, refracting light, some lonely bird and the window to the sebum-laden living room made of patterned wallpaper and trivialities. Cut. Tenacious sequences inflate moments to cliff-hangers and shatter their tremulous spectatorship. Thundering leitmotifs – in constant intoxication by German disinterest – with no backrest or lederhosen. Black-red-gold at full mast, the cinema is dead.

An attempt to create a bridge between the different political positions that coexist, sometimes violently, in the Basque Country, in northern Spain.

A short documentary project that attempts to encapsulate what it looks and feels like to be an American Teenager in 2022.

This experimental short traces the lifespan of the graffiti and murals present at the occupation of NYC’s City Hall in June and July of 2020. The encampment formed to demand the abolishment of the NYPD and the reallocation of its resources to housing, education, and other social programs.

One thing to know about Newfoundland Honey, it's some of the cleanest in the world. There's no comparing it to what you're going to find on the shelves.

The chronicle of the process, ten long years, that led to the end of ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna), a Basque terrorist gang that perpetrated robberies, kidnappings and murders in Spain and the French Basque Country for more than fifty years. Almost 1,000 people died, but others are still alive to tell the story of how the nightmare finally ended.

For three and a half centuries, from the same day that Diego Velázquez (1599-1660) applied his last brushstroke to the canvas, the enigma of “Las meninas, o La familia de Felipe IV” (1656) has not been deciphered. The secret story of a painting unveiled as if it was the resolution of a perfect crime.

Told through performances, TV interviews, home movies, family photographs, private letters and unpublished memoirs, the film reveals the essence of an extraordinary woman who rose from humble beginnings in New York City to become a glamorous international superstar and one of the greatest artists of all time.

This short experimental diary film reveals my struggles with mental illness in my adolescence and queer adulthood while simultaneously reflecting upon my joyous childhood experiences. I investigate when and how my depression began and explain that my relationships with the people I love have supported me through my harder times. The film incorporates footage shot over May and June 2023 and archival home videos. Overall, I aim to resolve my "growing pains" through the medium of diary film and by reconnecting with my younger self.

Eerie images of landscapes after the Fukushima nuclear disaster shot on black and white 8mm.

Piaf intime

The day with the sky neither too blue nor too grey. With a hint of red. The train crowded and the backpacks between the feet. The loves on every corner, the ones we pretend not to see.

The history of Bruguera, the most important comic publisher in Spain between the 1940s and the 1980s. How the characters created by great writers and pencilers became Spanish archetypes and how their strips persist nowadays as a portrait of Spain and its people. The daily life of the creators and the founding family, the Brugueras. The world in which hundreds of vivid colorful paper beings lived and still live, in the memory of millions, in the smile of everyone.

The amazing story of Cifesa, a mythical film production company founded in Valencia by the Casanova family that managed to dominate the box office during the turbulent times of the Second Spanish Republic, the carnage of the Civil War and the hardships of the long post-war period and Franco's dictatorship — and survive until the sixties, when Spain was timidly beginning to change.

10/26

A personal documentary questioning the ways in which family imposed narratives force us into roles that we spend our lives either rebelling against or conforming to.