The Las Palmas de Gran Canaria International Film Festival heads into its 25th edition with a lineup that plays to its long-established strengths: auteur discovery, film buff rigor and a programming vision that keeps new work and film history in constant dialogue and gives an originality to the Canary Island festival.
Running April 23-May 3, the Canary Islands event returns with more than 100 titles spanning competition, retrospectives, live-score screenings and special focuses.
That underlying idea is also how director Luis Miranda describes the festival.
“We are recognized for having good instincts when it comes to putting the spotlight on films and filmmakers that somehow define the state of the art, often from a certain periphery,” he says. “And more and more, what motivates us is to approach that from the position of film history.”
Essentially, he says, “more than an editorial line as such, what moves us is cinephilia,” an impulse that runs through the whole edition.
Programming as Argument
Las Palmas is not treating film history as a secondary layer added onto newer work. It is using restoration, retrospectives, silent film with live accompaniment and current festival titles as parts of a single programming proposal.
The Official Section remains the center of that design. This year it comprises 10 features and 15 shorts, all Spanish premieres, with the festival framing the selection around identity and belonging.
Still, Miranda’s explanation of the lineup is less thematic than instinctive.
“What interests us is not really the representation of topics or styles or genres,” he says. “What ends up making us choose certain films is the feeling that there is a genuinely sincere effort there.”
That distinction also helps explain how Las Palmas reads the contemporary festival scene.
Miranda spoke openly about what he sees as a growing standardization in prestige cinema, where financing patterns and festival expectations can push filmmakers toward recognizable, already sanctioned forms.
“For years now, we’ve been worried by a certain domestication of creativity,” he says. “There is too much festival-school cinema, films that seem made out of excessive respect for already prestigious forms, and that has become too model-based, too repetitive.”
The result is a selection strategy built less around familiar festival markers than on the force and specificity of each film.
The Bi Gan Focus
The anniversary edition’s highest-profile special focus is reserved for Chinese filmmaker Bi Gan, who receives the Lady Harimaguada de Honor.
The accompanying “Bi Gan Blues” sidebar includes “Kaili Blues,” which won Las Palmas’ top prize in 2016, “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” and his latest feature, “Resurrection,” which Bi Gan will present in person from April 29.
“If there is one film that represents what cinema can do today, it is ‘Resurrection,’” Miranda says. “It is really a love song to cinema.”
Bi Gan’s celebration also includes two titles he selected: Fei Mu’s “Spring in a Small Town” and Jia Zhangke’s “The World.”
Rethinking Panorama España
One of this year’s most concrete changes comes in “Panorama España,” a section that already existed within the festival but has been reformulated for 2026. It has opened itself to titles already shown elsewhere in Spain or internationally, provided they have not screened in the Canary Islands. It will also be judged by a Young Jury.
Together, the two changes suggest a festival putting less emphasis on premiere status and more on access, local relevance and audience-building.
“Quite simply, the objective is that they can be seen here,” Miranda says.
The initiative has practical consequences. It broadens the field of choice for the section and allows the festival to bring significant recent Spanish films to island audiences even when those titles are no longer new by strict premiere logic.
That same push toward audience renewal also shapes one of the edition’s most visible gestures: free screenings for people who are 25, or turning 25, this year.
The move is partly symbolic, but it also reflects a real difficulty many festivals are facing in bringing younger viewers into the fold.
“It was an idea that also comes from a kind of self-defense,” he says. “We are concerned about younger attendance.”
Miranda considers that younger viewers consume huge amounts of audiovisual material, but often feel more distant from the cinephile and historical narratives that shaped 20th-century film culture.
The idea suggests a broader concern about audience renewal and the need to bring younger viewers into the fold.
Other sidebars deepen that conversation. Camera Obscura opens the festival with F.W. Murnau’s “Faust” accompanied live by psychedelic band GAF y La Estrella de la Muerte. The section also takes in Japanese silent titles with benshi performance by Ichiro Kataoka and newly composed music.
Déjà Vu, mounted this year as a restored treasures program in collaboration with the Film Heritage Foundation, turns toward South Asian classics, including works by Satyajit Ray, Bimal Roy and Shyam Benegal.
Banda Aparte, historically the festival’s most radical section, has also been restructured. It is no longer competitive and this year combines a retrospective devoted to Chilean filmmaker Ignacio Agüero and, under the banner “Presente Indómito,” a grouping of experimental titles including the Spanish premieres of Michal Kosakowski’s “Holofiction” and Isabel Pagliai’s “Fantaisie.”
Panorama continues to serve as a current-viewing window onto the auteur circuit, while Canarias Cinema returns with four features and 14 shorts tied to the archipelago.
The festival’s opening days also make room for direct industry conversation, as Jornadas del Oficio Cinematográfico returns for its sixth edition with conversations and panels featuring high-profile film auteurs and actors such as Oliver Laxe, Javier Cámara, Laia Costa, Asier Etxeandia, Alberto Rodríguez and Albert Serra.
For Miranda, the essence of a festival still lies in “the desire to talk about cinema.”
At 25, Las Palmas is refining the qualities that have long defined it: building a program where current work, restored cinema and repertory titles illuminate each other, and where selection itself is treated as a form of montage.
“What we want is for everything to interact with everything else,” he says. “A festival is a kind of montage of films.”
If the festival’s broader identity is built through the interplay of retrospectives and sidebars, the Official Section remains its most distilled statement. What follows is a closer view of the 10 features in competition.
“17” (Kosara Mitić, North Macedonia, Serbia, Slovenia)
Sold by Paris-based Totem Films, “17” follows a teenage girl carrying a secret who witnesses the sexual assault of a classmate on a school trip. A Berlinale Perspectives player, the film centers on silence, complicity and survival in the wake of that event. The project had already drawn industry attention at Sarajevo’s CineLink Work in Progress.
“Everything Else Is Noise” (“Todo lo demás es ruido,” Nicolás Pereda, Mexico, Germany, Canada)
Set around a composer giving a furtive TV interview at a friend’s house, the film unfolds through power cuts, interruptions and unexpected presences. It turns on prestige, marriage and female friendship, in line with Pereda’s long-running work between fiction and documentary. Structured as a tri-country co-production, it premiered in the Berlinale Forum.
“Forest Up in the Mountain” (“Bosque arriba en la montaña,” Sofía Bordenave, Argentina)
Revisiting the 2017 killing of young Mapuche Rafael Nahuel by Argentina’s Naval Prefecture, this documentary, which premiered in Berlin, uses archival material to place the case within a longer history of violence against Indigenous communities. Bordenave’s previous work includes “The Good Night” and “Red Star.”
“How to Divorce During the War” (“Skyrybos karo metu,” Andrius Blaževičius, Lithuania, Czech Republic, Luxembourg, Ireland)
Winner of Sundance’s World Cinema Dramatic directing award, the third feature from Blaževičius is set as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine alters everyday life. It follows a couple trying to separate while the pressures of war reshape their private circumstances. A multi-country European co-production, the film is sold by New Europe Film Sales.
“If I Go Will They Miss Me” (Walter Thompson-Hernández, U.S.)
Moving between 1992 and the present in South Central Los Angeles, the film follows a boy who mythologizes his absent father. The feature expands Thompson-Hernández’s 2022 short of the same title, which won Sundance’s short-film jury prize. The feature premiered at Sundance before later screenings in Miami and Palm Springs.
“Lucky Lu” (Lloyd Lee Choi, U.S., Canada)
The film, that follows a New York delivery rider over 48 hours after his bike is stolen, brings together migrant experience, family pressures and gig-economy work, expanding Choi’s short “Same Old.” After premiering in Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight, it went on to win three Golden Horse Awards in Taipei Festival, including best new director. Sold by The Festival Agency.
“Nina Roza” (Geneviève Dulude-de Celles, Canada, Italy, Bulgaria, Belgium)
Winner of the Berlin Silver Bear for best screenplay, it turns on Mihail, a Bulgarian-born Montreal art expert sent back to his home country for the first time in nearly 30 years to assess the work of Nina, a viral child-painting prodigy. The return reopens family ties and unresolved memories. Dulude-de Celles previously won Berlin’s Crystal Bear for “A Colony.” Produced by Montreal-based Colonelle Films.
“Remake” (Ross McElwee, U.S.)
Built around the death of McElwee’s son Adrian, “Remake” reshapes personal footage into a film about grief, memory and family history. McElwee is widely known in nonfiction cinema for earlier works including “Sherman’s March.” MetFilm Studio handles sales. It won Venice’s Golden Globes Impact Prize for Documentary.
“Songs of the Forgotten Trees” (Anuparna Roy, India)
Winner of Venice’s Orizzonti best director prize, this feature debut is set in Mumbai, where a young migrant aspiring actor sublets to a call-center worker. Their shared apartment becomes the setting for a story of urban precarity and changing personal circumstances. Celluloid Dreams handles sales. The film premiered in Venice before later playing in São Paulo, London and Philadelphia.
“Trial of Hein” (“Der Heimatlose,” Kai Stänicke, Germany)
Winner of the Teddy Jury Award in Berlin, “Trial of Hein” follows a man returning to his North Sea island after 14 years away, only to be treated as an impostor and forced to prove his identity before the local community. Produced by Germany’s Tamtam Film, the feature is sold by Heretic.
