Lucia Madriz (Costa Rica)
Tell Me When to Smile / 1:30
A self-portrait in a ridiculous, photographic, teenager-like pose that satirizes the usual icons associated with the canons of feminine beauty (according to make-up, creams and smiling faces.) Women must be beautiful in almost every personal and social activity and in the chauvinis- tic context of our stereotyped, sexist societies.

Priscilla Monge (Costa Rica)
Make-up Lesson / 2:30
A convincing and effective allusion to violence against women in the kitsch space of a hair salon, presented through the ambiguous meaning of make-up as a diffuse and equivocal element of physical embellishment and/or concealment.

Hugo Ochoa (Honduras/Costa Rica)
Tales on Blindness and Depths / 8:00
A dense and metaphysical animation in an almost unreal and minimal space, yet saturated with yellow tones. This animation assembles multicultural religious icons (Christian, Buddhist) with famous cartoons of Disneyí­s mass media in promiscuous and shocking relationships.

Alejandro Ramirez (Costa Rica)
Lullaby / 2:00
At the crack of dawn, with a Brahms lullaby as the background music, a pathetic and moving exploration around the marginal zones of the city of San José in which many poor people sleep, covered with small cardboard boxes and newspapers. In their degrading and extreme need, they somehow open for discussion the myth of an egalitarian Costa Rica, full of opportunities, a kind of Latin American paradise or Central American Switzerland, as some insist on calling it.

Joaquí­n Rodriquez (Mexico/Costa Rica)
Water, Wind, Stone / 3:00
Rodriguez divides the screen into a triptych of parallel, vertical images. A poem by Octavio Paz moving from nature to metaphysics serves as reference for the argument of his work. Agua, Viento, Piedra sets an interesting contrast between the possibility or search of the individual experience arising from the poem which generates interior calmness, spiritual peace and an almost mythical blending with Nature- versus the bombing, the manipulation and the mass-media saturation to which we are constantly exposed in our virtual, contemporary societies. This work won the Third Prize in the Concurso Centroamericano de Videocreación - Inquieta Imagen (Costa Rica, 2002).

Alvaro Sanchez (Guatemala)
Dolls / 5:30
A ludicrous and witty animation that recalls and pays homage to the silent comedy, and to the melodrama of humorous situations. Its main characters are childrení­s icons of western beauty, Barbie and friends. Inside a terrible but funny conflict of infidelities, adultery and betrayed friendships, they end in a savage, uncivilized tragedy of despair, blood and death.

Patricia Villalobos (Nicaragua/United States)
Short Circuit / 9:20
Blending the image of her own body and face with a voice of strong emotional and poetic content into codes of existential self-reference, Patricia Villalobos includes us in the subdivided fragments that make up her identity, hybrid and split in essence. It is both in her corporeal and mental spaces where fragments are printed and remembered.

Rodolfo Walsh (El Salvador/Guatemala)
My Crazy Life / 9:00
Narrated as a documentary, this is a harsh reference to the violent phenomenon of gangs of adolescents and children in Central America, usually called maras. It is all presented by a simple, sincere and straightforward testimony, in which the dramatic force is concentrated-- in which misery and the most shocking sincerity are assembled together with the desire of exorcising that infinite spiral of irrationality that absorbs gang members, compelled to come together, to break the law and alienate themselves in secret associations. All this can be attributed to the conditions of marginality and extremity, of social inequality that they face from birth in our exclusionary and unequal societies.