“I’m also obsessed about how we negotiate our intimacies and dissidents within a collective, and how we can share common spaces with radical alterities. Thus naturally, I have integrated nonhuman presences in my films, and some gestures to communicate with them. And I try for each film to immerse in the specific environment that I am trying to represent, to be sensible to the historical complexity and specificity of each context. Which is, at the end of the day, a process resembling anthropology’s fieldwork.”

“As with Rouch, Huertas Millán’s decision to portray events through staged or improvised scenes—and, à la Baillie and Strand, to complicate or frustrate the legibility of the ethnographic gaze through unconventional framing and editing—is not intended to overwrite the lived experiences of the subjects, but to zero in on the textures and details of those experiences, capturing them in a way that a more distant, observational, “neutral” gaze might not. La Libertad opens slowly, with hypnotic cuts between tightly framed and precisely composed shots of textiles, water, food, and fragmented body parts, emphasizing the sculptural element of the plastic arts.”

“Millán’s work is varied and singular, a developing practice that has a basis in anthropology and documentary filmmaking but borrows freely from visual art (often rejecting the conventions of all three). Her films mix modes willfully, blending fictitious devices with more traditional documentary techniques, and all hold a strong regard for aesthetics, foregrounding formal concerns while emphasising the role of the camera, and indeed, the filmmaker too.”

“La Libertad is a poignant encapsulation of the fluidity particular to Huertas Millán’s work—she moves from the section on women and craftwork to one in which a male painter presents folkloric images of sexual scenes, featuring ribald group sex and bestiality—thus again emphasizing the unexpectedly subversive aspects of traditional arts—and then just as fluidly, to a part in which museum conservators examine a 19th century post-colonial textile, hinting at the duality that crafts inhabit in our world, between the more humble traditionally women’s crafts, and the male-dominated museum space that privileges formal discourse.”

“Colombian director Laura Huertas Millán’s Black Sun, winner of a Special Mention for Best Competition Film, is a medium-length work that mixes memoir and melodrama. The film drifts between a rehab clinic, a dinner table, an abandoned theater, and a barren, twilit outcropping, playing with themes of trauma and therapy, familial estrangement and various modes of healing, training, and catharsis. Between these two spaces are three women: Antonia, an opera singer and, it seems, a resident of the clinic; her estranged older sister, who scrolls through Antonia’s Facebook page for clues about her life; and the filmmaker herself, daughter of the latter sister, who serves as interlocutor and medium. Her intervention seems to provide the necessary link to bridge the film’s many fragmented locations and states of being—in an effort, as her mother later says, to “conserv[e] the family link but without the cord of sorrow.”

“Perhaps unfiction is the word: embodying the kind of narrative and textural space in which FID, at its best, specialises, Sol Negro is extraordinary filmmaking, even before its astonishing coda – in which Antonia belts out a heart-swelling aria in a disused theatre space. Huertas Millán and cinematographer Jordane Chouzenoux manage to light and frame the proscenium in such a way that, until the protagonist appears, I thought it was a miniature set – the kind that would show up, say, in a British-era Hitchcock picture.”