Heaven Can Wait

The imaginarium of the afterlife has been a timeless source of fascination for artists and thinkers throughout the ages, inspiring numerous mythologies that continue to shape our understanding of culture until today. Drawing their symbolic force from various myths and iconographic traditions, the films included in Heaven Can Wait offer their viewers a glimpse into the realms of spirits and dreams, while commenting subtly, or at times humorously, on the role that spirituality can still play in our increasingly globalized and digitized world. In this program, spirits, magical creatures, saints and innocents co-exist with beings of flesh and bone, floating in a liminal state between Heaven and Earth, between dreams and reality, all searching for the paradise to come and its primordial serenity. (Oana Ghera)

YOU MADE ME SEE THE SKY

Luis Esguerra Cifuentes | Duration 20 min.

A group of friends decide to visit a forest on the city's outskirts, despite the warning and restrictions placed due to a strange moss that has recently invaded the area. The characters play, sing, and display their bodies freely in this place, where reality warps gradually and intertwines with their stories, fantasies, and dreams.

WHY ARE YOU IMAGE PLUS?

Diogo Baldaia | Duration 9 min.

In a small and poor village, a local Saint controls the realm of the abyss, making it impossible for dead people to talk to their loved ones who are still alive. Ima, a curious dead child, tries to meet the Saint, so he can let her talk to her beloved grandmother.

BIRDSONG

Anouk De Clercq | Duration 16 min.

Two birds in a weightless world. They summon the sun with a song until an eclipse brings out the stars. Birdsong is an attempt to see the beginning in the end, a meditation on a world without us, a postlapsarian paradise, a kind of love at last sight.

AQUERONTE

Manuel Muñoz Rivas | Duration 26 min.

On board a ferry, a series of passengers cross a river from one riverbank to the other. Cradled by the waves, their journey on the waters seems to expand, the destination shore is postponed, the magnitude of space is blurred. Motion itself is perhaps the only certainty.

ALEGRÍAS RIOJANAS

Velasco Broca | Duration 19 min.

An ophthalmologist's confession is interrupted when the priest who was attending him leaves in an emergency. After he is fatally hit by a car, his immortal soul is cast into a medieval-looking purgatory populated by grotesque creatures, blemishes and devils.