Program

When a young Mexican politician loses his presidential bid, he retreats with his wife to their countryside estate. There, their lust for power festers, and they reinvent themselves as monarchs; ruling over their employees with cruelty, delusion, and decadence

This year's Hecho en Tejas Competition celebrates Texas filmmakers capturing lives rarely seen on screen. Intimate, urgent, and rooted in real communities, these films ask what it means to survive, remember, and resist. The films in this showcase are eligible for both an Audience Award and a Jury Award, presented in partnership with the Texas Archive of the Moving Image (TAMI). Meet the directors, cast your vote, and stay for the party!

Azucena, a woman in her thirties, approaches Julio, a teenage boy living in a group home, for reasons he doesn’t understand. As they spend time together, an uneasy closeness grows, changing the shape of a bond neither expected to find.

From the jungles of Guatemala to the borderlands of the US Southwest, this year's Narrative Shorts Competition gathers fiction filmmakers who prove that the short form is anything but small. These are complete worlds, told with intention and precision: love, loss, resistance, and the everyday courage of ordinary people.

Rafaela, a young nun in a precarious congregation, is haunted by a recurring dream. When she is sent to a nearby town in search of the new archbishop, she encounters people whose struggles with faith, wealth, and purpose mirror her own. Each meeting pulls her closer to — or further from — her path. A quiet, spiritual journey through a broken world in search of something sacred.

Twenty years after Mi vida dentro (2007), filmmaker Lucía Gajá revisits Rosa Estela Olvera's story. Vidas en la orilla portrays the flaws of the criminal justice system in the United States and the tragic consequences of a wrongful conviction. Two interconnected narratives revealed what Rosa Estela Olvera (My life inside, 2007) had to endure in prison for 18 years: a psychoemotional exploration of the loneliness of confinement; and the long and arduous legal battle to clear her name.