LA EMULSIÓN DEL TIEMPO; UNA Y MIL VECES

Program:

LA EMULSIÓN DEL TIEMPO (The Emulsion of Time)
Pablo Wong, Costa Rica / Nicaragua, 2026, short documentary
WRITTEN BY, CINEMATOGRAPHY Pablo Wong, Victor Vargas, Noel Poltronieri, Joshuan Arce, Jimena Salas | EDITING Pablo Wong, Victor Vargas, Ayerím Villanueva | FEATURING Rubén Wong, Saushang Wong, Mayra Wong
13 min | Color, Spanish with English subtitles, DCP

In the semi-darkness of a darkroom, an image begins to materialize. It is the face of the filmmaker’s grandfather—a Chinese photographer who emigrated to Nicaragua over seventy years ago and whom Pablo Wong never met. Starting with a single photograph and fragmentary memories, the director embarks on a journey from Costa Rica to Jinotega, the village where his grandfather once lived. As he teaches, films, and travels along the road, he frequently speaks by phone with his mother and uncles, who help him reconstruct a family history defined by absence.

Jinotega appears as a place frozen in time. The filmmaker wanders through the town center and the sites where the family home once stood, eventually reaching the cemetery—only to find that his grandfather’s grave is nowhere to be seen. In their conversations, his uncles confess the pain of never having been able to say goodbye. We return, time and again, to the darkroom, where that single image slowly develops—a symbol of the gradual, physical, and emotional process of bringing him back.

The search takes a new turn with the arrival of Don Pancho, a member of the local Chinese community who knew the grandfather personally and remembers him with great affection. As he describes him, we see the director taking photographs and interacting with others, discovering an invisible legacy within his own practice. In the final shot, the picture is complete. His uncle tells him: “I never doubted that you look a great deal like him.” *La emulsión del tiempo* is an intimate portrait of migration, memory, and legacy, showing how self-discovery can also offer a new way—a new light—through which to view those who came before us.


UNA Y MIL VECES
Ernesto Fontan, Nicaragua / Uruguay / Argentina, 2024, Documentary
SCREENPLAY Ernesto Fontan, Marcos Coria, Bruno Scarponi | CINEMATOGRAPHY Bruno Scarponi | EDITING Sebastián Frota, Ernesto Fontan | SOUND Julián García Reig | MUSIC Juan D’eramo | FEATURING Alice Altesor, Ana Elena Gómez Haedo, Ana Olivera Pessano, Daniel Muzio Lladó, Diego Altesor, Enobardo Argimón, Enrique Souto, Fernando Butazzoni, Fernando Mazzeo Sena, Gerardo Caetano, Guillermo Romano, Ivan Altesor, Jorge Selves, José Benigno Cruz, Juan Carlos Gomez Haedo, Marcelo Estefanell, Mayra Pérez Campos, Miguel Ángel Ortiz, Nancy Carbajal, Natasha Soca, Osvaldo Ronqui, Paula Altesor, Víctor Estradet Cabrera
68 min | Color, Spanish with English subtitles, DCP

They were young, they were Uruguayan, and they had lost everything: their homeland, their security, their future. In the 1970s, as a civil-military dictatorship tightened its grip on Uruguay, exile forced dozens of militants to travel—via Argentina and Chile—to Cuba. There, amidst the heat of the Caribbean and the chill of the Cold War, they underwent political and military training. But then, something extraordinary happened: 52 of them—acting of their own volition and without any direct orders from an organization—chose to travel to Nicaragua to join the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) and fight against the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza. It was a revolution that was not their own—and one for which some of them gave their lives.

More than four decades later, the film returns to these men and women. It lets them speak for themselves—sharing their voices, their memories, and their scars. There is the pain of losing Héctor Altesor, known as "El Meme," who fell just three days before the revolution’s victory. There is a quiet sense of wonder at how ordinary people—laborers, teachers, office workers—suddenly became guerrillas. And then there is the uncomfortable question the film poses to them all: Would you do it again? Director Ernesto Fontan notes that the most moving discovery was realizing that these were individual, voluntary choices, driven by deep commitment and altruism. His documentary is not an epic tale of heroism, but an intimate, profoundly human portrait of a generation that acted out of a radical ethic of solidarity—an ethic that seems almost unimaginable today. Through a blend of archival footage, family photographs, and the faces of the survivors, a vision of a utopia emerges—one that did not fail, but has simply ceased to be understood. It is a film about courage, loss, and the question of what remains of our ideals as the world keeps turning.