Laura Baumeister’s What Follows Is My Death, Alvaro Brechner’s La piel de león and Pablo Stoll’s Dad Is No Punk Rocker feature among fifteen projects set to be unveiled at San Sebastián’s 2025 Europe-Latin America Co-Production Forum, the Spanish festival’s biggest industry centrepiece. 

Eleven of the fifteen projects are first or second features. That said, 2025’s lineup may be the most powerful to date. Counting producers and directors, the lineup features an Oscar winner – Spain’s Tornasol Media – a co-writer of an Academy Award nomination – Jacques Toulemonde and at least five directors and three producers who have had titles at Cannes, including multiple winners. 

Baumeister’s second feature after Daughter of Rage, a high-profile Toronto player and San Sebastián winner, What Follows Is My Death is a “transgender story, narratively speaking: risky and entertaining,” she says.

Pablo Stoll’s Whisky won Cannes Un Certain Regard Original award. Brechner’s debut Bad Day for Fishing screened at Cannes’ Critics’ Week while his Mr. Kaplan won Latin American Film at Mar del Plata. With his debut, La Jauría (2022), Ramírez Pulido scooped the Grand Prize at Cannes Critic's› Week.

Toulemonde co-wrote the Academy Award nominated Embrace of the Serpent and Cannes Directors’ Fortnight hit Birds of Passage. Hijas del agua weighs in as the biggest proposition being brought on the market at the Forum, a sports-set drama-thriller set up at Colombia’s 64A Films and Lago Films.

The Co-Production Forum features another large-canvas title, Not a River, a big screen adaptation of the Selva Almada novel, shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, reuniting Mexico’s Caponeto Cine and Argentina’s Ajimolido Films.

A closer look at the titles:

El atletismo y el amor (Alejandra Moffat, Chile)

Moffat presents excepts from her family home movies, shot from the 1930s over thirty years by her great great uncle, often of Chilean high and long-jump champion Ilse Barends, or of his wife hipnotizing rural labourers. A portrait of Chile’s leisured aristocracy and implicitly, a near century later, also of telling privilege which would have large consequences.

The Boa and the Bamboo (La boa y el bambú, Maitane Carballo Alonso, Spain, Switzerland)

Set-up at Gariza Films, the Bizkaia-based prodco behind not only 20,000 Species of Bees but also Lara Izagirre's Nora, broadcast by HBO, Netflix, ETB and TVE. The helming debut by sound specialist and documentary film editor Carballo Alonso earned this year €40,000 ($46,589) aid from the Basque Government for international co-development.

Dad Is No Punk Rocker (Papá no es punk, Pablo Stoll, Uruguay)

Based on a novel by Federico Ivanier, it follows a 14-year-old boy who embarks on a journey to discover who his father is, as his mother refuses to tell him. Inés Peñagaricano and Stoll produce at Temperamento Films. Cast include Julieta Zylberberg (Relatos salvajes, Mi amiga del parque) and Néstor Guzzini (Kaplan, Tanta agua). The project has won script and production awards from Uruguay’s National Film Agency.

Do Not Let Me Die Alone (No me dejen morir solo, Francisco Rodriguez Teare, Chile, Belgium)

The second feature by Rodriguez Teare whose Otro sol won Latin American Feature at Mar del Plata. Here a miserable delivery boy gets by disposing of mummies recovered in Iquique, North of Chile. “The Chinchorro mummies emerge as figures that guide the characters› journey,” says producer Rodrigo Díaz. Project teams Chile›s Axolotl and Mimbre Films with Belgium’s Michigan. 

Hijas del Agua (Jacques Toulemonde, Colombia, Spain)

A coming-of-age story directed by Jacques Toulemonde about a group of women who find a way out of the Colombian slums through synchronized swimming. “A large scale project with international reach about fighting for your dreams,” 64A Films Diego F. Ramírez has said.

An Illusion of Paradise La Ilusión de un Paraíso, Valeria Pivato, Argentina)

Pivato’s first solo feature after Cannes Un Certain Regard player The Desert Bride and Mar del Plata best Argentinean film winner Surfacing, a potential rural psychological thriller in which Elvira and Joaquín retire to the mountains where she begins to discover her husband’s dark nature, Pivato and Leonel D’Agostino (A Ravaging Wind) co-write.

Mother of Gold (Mãe do Ouro, Madiano Marcheti, Brazil, Germany)

Produced by Daniel Pech at Multiverso (A Common Crime, Prison in the Andes), also a high-flying distribution exec at Relato, and directed by Marcheti, whose first feature film Madalena bowed in Rotterdam’s Tiger Competition in 2021. Mother of Gold turns on Jaci who starts having mysterious dreams after illegal miners take over the hill near the town where she lives, in a remote corner of the Amazon. A title to track.

La piel de león (Alvaro Brechner, Uruguay)

Re-teaming Brechner and Oscar winner Tornasol Media (The Secret in Their Eyes) after Venice Horizons screener A Twelve-Year Night, which won Brechner an adapted screenplay Spanish Academy Goya.

Not a River (No es un río, Diego Martinez-Ulanosky, Mexico, Argentina)

A teenage boy joins two old friends of his late father for a fishing weekend on the river island where he died, “A lyrical Western about brotherhood and the ghosts we carry, I’m developing a film that spans from the ’60s to the ’90s, where memory, guilt, and nature collide with a present full of unspoken words,” says Martinez-Ulanosky. 

Patrimony (Patrimonio, María Astrauskas, Argentina)

An Argentine co-production by Pablo Giorgelli Cine and Juan Pablo Miller’s Tarea Fina. Toni, a truck driver woman working for a stone granite quarry in Tandil, learns of a debt owed by her deceased father, being forced to reconnect with a lost time and world. “Set in the heart of the Argentine Pampas, Patrimony tells, with some comedic tone, the tensions Toni experiences as she faces a labyrinthine and outdated bureaucracy and technological transformations,” Astrauskas comments about her feature debut.

Praise For Crime (Elogio del crimen, Andrés Ramírez Pulido, Colombia) 

Produced by Johana A. Susa at Valiente Gracia, Ramírez Pulido’s sophomore feature follows a police officer in a remote Andean town where no crime has been reported for over a decade. If crime doesn’t return on its own, someone will have to bring it back. Ramírez Pulido reflects on violence from a perspective of drama and thriller, with hints of dark humor.

Sublime Pact (Pacto sublime, Ignacio Juricic, Chile)

Continuing his exploration of Chile’s queer memory, Juricic notes, and set up at Isabel Orellana’s Araucaria Cine (Immersion), Sublime Pact is inspired by the real-life romantic relationship, begun in 1992, between 70-year-old writer and poet Matilde Ladrón de Guevara and 38-year-old homosexual criminal Patricio Egaña Salinas, “questioning sexuality and punitive justice in a way that is still radical and provocative to this day,” Juricic notes.

Victoria in the Clouds (Victoria en las nubes, Ana Endara, Panama, Chile, France)

Reuniting Chile’s Paulina García, a Berlin Silver Bear winner for her turn in Sebastián Lelio’s Gloria, with Panama’s Endara after their multi-prized Beloved Tropic. Set in Panama’s lush coffee growing landscape, 65-year-old plantation owner Victoria is forced to question her privileged life. Produced by Mansa Productora, Expansiva Cine, Mimbre Films and Respiro Productions.

What Follows Is My Death (Lo que sigue es mi muerte, Laura Baumeister, Mexico, Spain) Baumeister’s second feature after Daughter of Rage, a fantasy laced drama set at a Managua landfill. On a full moon night in the Mexican desert, Virginia, a young Nicaraguan migrant, is rescued by Aurora, a sheep shearer. They fall in love, as Virginia completes her transformation into a nahual woman.

John Hopewell, Emiliano de Pablos