Alexander Hick

San Agustín - Marea baja en el mar del plástico

Michael Schmitt, Gudrun Gruber

Mercedes built the first greenhouses of San Agustín with her own two hands. She is now an old lady, and Andalusia has long since become Europe’s vegetable plantation, with 90% of the sweet peppers in our supermarkets coming from the so-called plastic coast. It’s a lucrative business – but not for the farmers of San Agustín, whose share of profits is miniscule. This results in many of them taking on cheap labour from illegal African immigrants. A mysterious virus that threatens to destroy the crop further compounds the situation – with the affair dubbed the “cucumber crisis”. In this portrayal of a village and its people, three filmmakers highlight in nine chapters the deeper workings of industrialised agriculture – presenting another side to Southern Spain, far from its image as a beach filled, party Mecca. Like the holiday industry, vegetable growing receives criticism for its excessive exaggeration. But who are the real black sheep?

Thinking like a Mountain

Alexander Hick

The Arhuacos are the guardians of the forest and the ice of Colombia highest mountain, the Sierra Nevada Santa Marta. They draw from this unique environment a preserved and singular spirituality. For the first time a director was invited to visit the heartland of the sacred mountain. Hick tells the story of resistance which is a voyage through space and time: from the shores of the Caribbean to the stars that light up the night on the glacier and from the encounter with the first colonizing whites to the return of the warriors following FARC's laying-down of arms.

Atl tlachnolli

Alexander Hick

Roberto Altamirano Hernandez, Dolores Benitez

Searching for the unique Axolotl, a endemic salamander that used to live in the former lake of Mexico, Atl Tlachinolli is an essayistic inquiry into survival and adaptation, the film casts its gaze on that which remains.