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In Messina, the final week of the XXIV edition of the Horcynus Festival, promoted by the Horcynus Orca Foundation with the artistic direction of Giacomo Farina and Franco Jannuzzi. The program will open on Monday 27 July with Mare di Cinema Arabo, the section directed by Erfan Rashid dedicated to the cinematography of the Mediterranean and the Middle East.
Following this, from 28 to 30 July, the Festival will host La Nueva Ola – Spanish and Latin American Film Festival, before the final events scheduled until 2 August. After the 19th edition in Rome, La Nueva Ola – Festival of Spanish and Latin American cinema returns to Messina for the eighth consecutive year with a new summer stage created in partnership with the Horcynus Festival.
In the evocative setting of the Horcynus Orca Park in Capo Peloro, the festival directed by Iris Martín-Peralta and Federico Sartori (Exit Media) offers a selection of works that tell the vitality of contemporary Spanish and Latin American cinema, alternating feature films, short films and new forms of audiovisual narration.
The guest of honor of the edition will be the Catalan director Judith Colell, one of the most authoritative figures of contemporary Spanish cinema and current President of the Acadèmia del Cinema Català. On Tuesday 28 July at 9.00 pm he will present the Italian premiere of his latest film “Frontera” (2025), an intense historical thriller set in the Pyrenees in 1943. The film, winner of the 2026 Gaudí Award for Best Film, tells the story of a group of inhabitants of the border who defied the Franco regime to help refugees fleeing from Nazism, bringing to light a little-known page of European history through an extraordinary story of courage, solidarity and civil resistance.
Alongside Frontera, the program offers on the evening of Wednesday 29 July “Runa Simi” by the Peruvian Augusto Zegarra, awarded at the Tribeca Film Festival, which tells the extraordinary story of Fernando Valencia, a young activist from Cusco who challenges Walt Disney to dub The Lion King in Quechua, giving rise to a collective, emotional and full of irony battle for the recognition and protection of the Andean language and culture. And therefore, on Thursday 30 July, La Furia by Gemma Blasco, an award-winning first work supported by the extraordinary interpretation of Ángela Cervantes, nominated for the Goya Awards, which tells the story of a young actress who, after having suffered an attack without being able to identify the culprit, refuses isolation and finds in the staging of Medea a form of processing the trauma, transforming pain and anger into creative energy.
The program is completed by the short film “Effetà”, produced by the Institut de les Arts de Barcelona and promoted by the Choreoscope Barcelona Dance Film Festival, a work that explores the dialogue between dance and cinematographic language, and the series of animated films “Anatomy of Anxiety” by the young Peruvian artist Rocío Quillahuaman, an ironic and brilliant portrait of the small and large anxieties of contemporary society.
The Messina stop confirms the itinerant vocation of La Nueva Ola, for years a point of reference in Italy for the diffusion of Spanish and Latin American cinema, and renews its commitment to the valorisation of authors who narrate the present through innovative languages and an attentive look at the great issues of our time.
The initiative, organized by the Horcynus Orca Foundation and EXIT MEDIA, is carried out with the support of the Spanish Embassy in Italy, the Instituto Cervantes in Palermo, the Peruvian Embassy in Italy, the Spanish Tourist Office in Rome and Acción Cultural Española (AC/E). All films will be screened in their original version with Italian subtitles.
The final week of the Horcynus Festival will continue with the other events on the calendar: the activities of the Horcynus Summer School, dedicated this year to the conservation and restoration of contemporary works of art; Arcipelago Laterali, with a selection of short films from the Laterale Film Festival; the presentation of the volume “Sicily is a feeling” (Touring Club Editore) by Antonio Spadaro, scheduled for August 1st at 8 pm; The Design Jurnates, dedicated to the themes of planning, social innovation and territorial development, which will accompany the event until the final event on 2 August at Palazzo Biscari in Mirabella Imbaccari.
All events are free to enter.
Until 6.00 pm and until all available spaces are available, it is possible to book a free parking space at the Torri Morandi ATM.