In addition to presenting the most recent works in its competitive programmes, the festival continues to promote the rediscovery of figures from the past while opening up a space to support projects in development, reinforcing its role as a key platform for Galician cinema.
The Tui International Film Festival will celebrate its 22nd edition from April 29 to May 3, reaffirming its commitment to cinema made in Galicia. Once again, Play-Doc establishes itself as a key meeting point bringing together different generations of filmmakers, fostering a dialogue between memory, contemporary creation and projects in development.
Galicia Competition
This year’s Galicia Competition brings together a selection of films that reflect the formal and thematic diversity of contemporary Galician cinema. Spanning essay, non-fiction and hybrid forms, the works map out a landscape in which the intimate and the collective coexist, as do personal memory and history, territory and its displacements.
In this context, Crías, by Xiana do Teixeiro, draws on the opening of personal diaries to explore adolescent writing as a space for the construction of the self. Meanwhile, Ursúas, by Roi Fernández, unfolds as a contemporary drift across Europe in which fiction, documentary material and visual essay converge, in dialogue with historical narratives of exploration and failure.
Journey and distance also emerge in Despois das cidades, by Xacio Baño, where a solitary displacement becomes a space of intimate inquiry, while Fomos ficando sós, by Adrián Canoura, shifts this search to the family sphere, exploring the relationship between father and son through their shared experience at sea.
Memory and archival material also run through other works in the section. Ás apalpadelas, by Cristina Souto, interweaves historical narrative and personal testimony through archival materials, while Moon Safari, by Hugo Amoedo, is built around evocation and the re-emergence of a voice from the past.
From other perspectives, O corpo de Cristo, by Bea Lema, explores the boundaries between experience, belief and perception, while Furada negra, by Berio Molina, offers an immersion into the imaginary and the historical uses of caves as spaces of memory, refuge and violence. The programme is completed by De brisa y de sol, by Chloé Lecci López, which constructs a portrait shaped by migration and intergenerational transmission through music, bringing together voices of different ages and backgrounds within a shared territory.
The Galicia Competition jury will be composed of producer and filmmaker Leire Apellaniz, filmmaker Eloy Enciso, and Portuguese programmer and academic Daniel Ribas.
Sombras 03: Rafael Luca de Tena
Sombras, the section curated by Galician screenwriter and producer Pepe Coira, dedicated to the recovery of the pioneers of Galician cinema, continues its work with a session devoted to Rafael Luca de Tena, a key figure in amateur filmmaking in Galicia alongside José Ernesto Díaz Noriega.
Luca de Tena’s work, developed over more than six decades, represents a singular case within the history of Galician cinema. A pharmacist by profession and a filmmaker by vocation, he worked exclusively in substandard formats—from Pathé-Baby to Super 8 and video—developing an independent practice that allowed him to move freely between home movies, documentary, fiction and formal experimentation.
The session offers an overview of a broad and heterogeneous filmography that includes works such as Impromptu (1960), Miña aldea (1964) and Sever Odnum (1964), alongside documentary pieces such as Inauguración del Aeropuerto de Peinador (1954) and his recordings of postwar Vigo. Across these works emerges a gaze attentive to the everyday, capable of capturing gestures, spaces and ways of life that rarely occupied the centre of the narrative.
Far from industrial circuits, his cinema operates from the margins, from where it constructs a visual archive of great value on life in Galicia throughout the 20th century. His work, preserved at the Filmoteca de Galicia, remains an open field for research.
The screening will feature live musical accompaniment by teachers and students from the Professional Conservatory and Music School of Tui.
Play-Doc would like to thank the families of Rafael Luca de Tena and José Ernesto Díaz Noriega, as well as the Filmoteca de Galicia, for their collaboration.
Coming Soon: Galician Projects in Development
Play-Doc hosts a new edition of Coming Soon, a section dedicated to works in progress in which filmmakers share working materials and reflections on their films with the public prior to completion. The section provides access to early images, formal decisions and lines of inquiry that run through contemporary Galician cinema, fostering direct exchange between filmmakers and audiences.
This year’s edition will present three projects. Todo é cárcere, by Eloy Enciso, is set in the final days of the Spanish Civil War and addresses the memory of the defeated through an epistolary relationship reconstructed from the present. De túa man para a miña, directed by Fran Rodríguez Casal and Coral Piñeiro, reflects on community, memory and territory through letters and postcards connecting different generations.
Meanwhile, A terra das viúvas dos vivos, by Melanie Pereira, delves into the mountains of Castro Laboreiro to portray the disappearance of transhumance practices in a context shaped by climate change, rural abandonment and the passage of time.
These activities complement the previously announced retrospectives dedicated to Viola Stephan and Eduardo Coutinho, as well as the festival’s training and industry programme, which includes a new edition of VENTURA, professional encounters on international co-production, artificial intelligence and sound in cinema, and a new edition of the community filmmaking workshop. Additional initiatives include Cinema Tours and screenings in the church.
In the coming days, the festival will continue to unveil the rest of the programme for this new edition.