The César Manrique Foundation (FCM) and the Canary Islands International Environmental Film Festival (FICMEC) are organizing a new edition in Lanzarote, this year under the slogan “In the Clouds”. The events will consist of three days of audiovisual screenings —Wednesday 14, Thursday 15, and Friday 16 October— and, as usual, all will be linked to ecology and nature. The screenings are free and will take place in the Sala José Saramago, located in La Plazuela, Arrecife.
As in previous editions, the sessions will be organized into morning and afternoon sessions. The former will be exclusively reserved for the school community of the educational centers partnered through the Pedagogical Department of the FCM, while the afternoon sessions —Wednesday and Thursday, from 7:00 PM onwards— will be open to the general public.
The film selected for this 28th edition for schools is Amma, do giraffes cry?, directed and written by Kartikeya Saxena. The film is about an Indian filmmaker who describes to his mother, a zoologist, the mysterious lives of captive animals at the Prague Zoo. A gorilla afraid of cameras, an insomniac anaconda, or penguins who feel besieged by their own shadow are part of this universe in which the distance between mother and son, between the human and the animal, evaporates.
As for the sessions aimed at the general public, on Wednesday 14, at 7:00 PM, the feature documentary Al oeste, en Zapata, directed and written by David Bim, will be screened. The film follows Landi, a father who secretly camps in the Zapata marshes, where he hunts crocodiles with his bare hands to feed his family. While the radio reports hundreds of daily deaths due to the pandemic and the strong social tensions that Cuba is experiencing, on the coast, his wife Mercedes searches for charcoal to cook and care for their son, who suffers from severe autism.
On the other hand, on Thursday 15, at 7:00 PM, the feature fiction film titled DJ Ahmet, directed and written by Georgi M. Unkovski, will be shown. The film tells the story of Ahmet, a fifteen-year-old from a remote village in North Macedonia, inhabited by a Yuruk community, who finds refuge in music while facing the expectations of his father and his conservative community, as well as his first love: a girl who has already been promised to someone else.
FICMEC is directed by the Tinerfeño documentarian and filmmaker David Baute, whose film Mariposas negras received the Goya Award for best animated film in 2025. The Festival is presented as a space for reflection on the acceleration of events and processes related to the deterioration of Nature. This premise is explored through audiovisual language and is done from a place like the Canary Islands, a fragile territory with valuable landscapes and natural resources that are threatened by intense tourist pressure, making it a suitable space for reflecting on open and deep conflicts.
FICMEC takes over from the Canary Islands Ecological and Nature Film Festival, which was held since the early eighties in Puerto de la Cruz (Tenerife) and was a pioneer in Spain regarding its theme: the first film festival in the country focused on environmental issues. Now, from a contemporary, more complex and problematic perspective, FICMEC consolidates this reflective space in the face of what has become one of the major issues that disturb and challenge our time. Since 2014, the FCM and FICMEC have jointly developed this activity in Lanzarote, which addresses aspects related to the work and activist discourse of César Manrique and the Institution itself.
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