© 2025 · Instituto Multimedia DerHumALC
Director
This year, the 21st FICDH focuses on Borders—not only as geographic, political or legal boundaries where dominance, exploitation and dispossession are intensified, but also as territories of social transformation marked by the emergence of popular resistance, which redefines power dynamics and gives a new meaning to cultural identities.
Borders not only divide, but also create unity among diversity, building a common identity with the other through mutual perception and acknowledgement in a dynamic and problematic process of resistance and creativity. This middle ground between the interaction of opposites produced in the time plane –called taypi in the Aymara worldview– allows us to settle in the contradiction without rejecting it.
Under this worldview, the 21st FICDH has two focuses, Trans Identities and Palestine, which reveal how different types of borders—internal and external, visible and invisible—demonstrate their multiplicity and expansion. While geopolitical borders become blurrier, symbolic, cultural, racial, and social barriers are reinforced by fear; prejudice and the need for control prevail strongly, becoming more visible through acts of violence and discrimination.
With film and critical reflection as tools, the Festival—alongside local and international guests—invites us to rethink borders as spaces of contact and intercultural exchange, where new subjectivities and possibilities can emerge. These perspectives question exclusionary narratives while promoting a respectful and plural understanding of identity.
For all these reasons, we have translated our motto “Opening Borders” into a powerful visual symbol—one that invites us to inhabit the present differently, as a fertile convergence of past and future. In the form of a spiral that evokes the Mapuche concept of Taíñ Kiñe Getuam (“to be one again”), and becomes an imprint shaped by the infinite multitude of the collective power that sees itself as a unified force.
Are you going to open your borders and embrace the multiple possibilities that unity holds?
Our society still can’t yet grasp the contribution that Madres de Plaza de Mayo (Mothers) made to the concept of “human rights.” Us, women, had been fighting for many years. At one point, we realized that we couldn’t continue with an individual claim. A comrade told me ‘I do suffer. The things that they did to me when I was a child!’ But there was a system to confront—patriarchy and capitalism—that affected all of us. That’s when we understood that we had to become political subjects. We had to know how to challenge others and, at the same time, learn.
This is what the conversation between Lohana Berkins and Hebe de Bonafini sounded like after the Gender Identity Law was passed in 2012. Lohana, what we call a Traviarca (a Spanish portmanteau blending the terms ‘travesti’ and ´martiarca’), had many reasons to see the fight for human rights as not her own. Even after democracy was reinstated, the police continued their usual operations. Through trafficking, torture, and murder, they carried out the greatest genocide of our community during those early years of democratic transition—something that only changed when, in 2012, that Law finally made us first-class citizens.
That milestone was only possible because Lohana, alongside our community, understood that Madres’ fight was our fight, too. That their pain was our pain. Madres also learnt from the community; they came to see that democracy had not reached them yet. Neither recognition nor reparations for their children’s deaths made their struggle whole. The heart of this fight drove them to push further.
Today, more than ever, I believe in the depth of this conversation. The advancement of the libertarian government projects onto countless communities under attack. Through the logic of a permanent crisis, they attempt to isolate us, ignore our demands, deny our existence, and ultimately suffocate us.
From this conversation between Lohana and Hebe, this mutual learning that shaped them as political subjects, the concept of another possible “us” was born.
Let the images, sounds, voices, and words that emerge from this Festival be like that conversation: a form of learning. Let them redefine the space we inhabit when we call ourselves “us”. Let them—always—remind us of the heart of our fight.
© 2025 · Instituto Multimedia DerHumALC