Documentary Pitching

What happens when a university enters a maximum security prison and invites prisoners and guards to study in the same classroom as partners? 13 doors narrates the events that occur during a school year living in this strange university, which will show us the lives of three characters who share: a prisoner, a guard and a teacher. The film shows his characters beyond the social roles that load and the change to carry on with this experience.

Ferley Vargas, a peasant boy of Caquetá, was five years old when he faced the violent death of his father and 13 when he was taken away from his mother. Soon after, the boy decided to join the FARC, where he was known, for several years, as “Wilfran”. Now twentyone-yeared old, “Wilfran” has again become Ferley, leaving the jungle behind and reaching the city, where he struggles every day to have a decent life, away from the war that always accompanied him.

A group of men reach the Antarctic to stay there the entire winter. Confined to a military base at the end of the world, they try to live through loneliness and the hostile weather, which constantly threatens their lives. Imprisoned in a frozen “Solaris”, they watch time pass, though time seems to have come to a standstill.

A group of young people with Down syndrome meet twice a week with a specific aim: to learn how to dance tango. They rehearse a choreography that is presented to the audience in an important tango festival. In this particular environment, with other renowned dancers, they will share an experience that will bring force to their affective relationships, and will swallow, at least for an instant, the pre judgments and discrimination that they usually live with.

Jonas has 11 years old and was born in a travelling circus. Last year, the clan fell apart: grandpa clown passed away, father clown started a job in a garage. To the dismay of Jonas, the circus dream was over. It was then when, using his creativity as a child, Jonas decided to set up a circus in the back yard of his house. So, inadvertently, he not only revives the memory of his family, but also the circus one, present in the childhood memories of each one.

Over the past 10 years I have been compulsively filming everything and everyone with no particular reason. Maybe this material is the only thing I have stored and label carefully. When my last boyfriend proposed I remained silent. I left the continent. I start hearing a silent question at every social gathering. Yet some of us just don’t follow the norm. Could I have gotten married to any of my boyfriends? To those who I see myself so happy with in the images I had shot?

The City of the Caesars is a mythical golden place that hides somewhere in Patagonia. Five hundred years ago it proved a very effective illusion to impel the Spanish conquerors further southward. Many people died opposing the biblical powers of nature and the hostility of its few inhabitants. Several expeditions were lost. But the illusion of a hidden paradise in these untamable lands has survived to our day. Dark forces threaten those who plan to conquer their own private utopia.

The Amateur Referee Federation is determined to update their work. For 80 years they have operated under the same by-laws, they need to renew their image and change the obsolete way in which they operate. They will have to face an election process that validates them among their peers. The documentary reflects on the fragility of an organization that wants to make changes, but lacks the necessary skills needed and valued today in order to get recognition.

Corporal Vidal was the first that broke the pact of silence. In September 1973, he and his police unit executed 19 workers, in complicity with the factory where they were working until that fateful day. In Laja remains the echo of that massacre, 38 years later, we hear the murderers version.

Jose Batista has been for the last fifteen years a lawyer for the rural workers in the legal processes for land reform. The paths of Batista will follow a juridical dispute between the Landless Movement and the Santa Barbara group, a consortium of bankers owning over 500.000 ha of land. For Batista, this process isn’t just an opposition between rich and poor, but also an allegory of Brazil’s current political moment. His challenge is guarantee peasant’s rights in a new Amazon’s conjuncture.

A thick layer of brightness covers the sky. One can barely make out the lights of a little village in the Uruguayan countryside. The silence of the night is crushed by the roar of speeding engines. Racing on their motorbikes, six boys are gambling their lives at every turn. They grew up in a small town where the monotony of everyday life becomes oppressive. In a profound exercise of observation, Los Gurises will portray their intimate life from the perspective of their relationship with their bikes.

A male to ten females and nine males with any one: seal’s life is unfair. This is the starting point of the documentary narrated in anthropomorphic parody tone examines the history life of this mammals. From the most important breeding site in the world, the steps of a seal from born to maturity, the natural selection and sexual mechanisms will build a nude relate of these mammals life with ones humans have so many differences and so many similarities.

In Colombian prisons it is required that female visitors wear sandals to prevent them from bringing inside weapons and drugs hidden in their shoe soles or heels. Therefore, outside these penitentiaries a peculiar business has developed: sandals rental; a curious but dangerous job that is not only exposed to bad odour. This female guild has lasted and endured itself throughout the years thanks to overcrowding of Colombian prisons. Now, it is going through the worst trouble in the history of an anonymous women society of flip flop renters.