JURY DECLARATION

The documentary recounts the ordeal experienced firsthand by the director during a course of chemotherapy. Starting from a thought-provoking reflection on the paradox of a treatment that devastates the body, the filmmaker lucidly explores its consequences: the suffering of an inexorable physical decline, the rediscovery of the most authentic and precious aspects of existence, the difficult relationship with friends who do not know how to approach someone with cancer, and the fraternal bonds that come to envelop strangers—fellow chemotherapy patients—who are reborn into a new life.

With assured, sensitive filmmaking, the film draws the two girls at the centre of its narrative into a space where solidarity emerges not from understanding but from necessity, weaving together questions of adoption, immigration, family, and eating disorder with remarkable lightness and grace. Surprising in its turns and in its resolution, it is a film that trusts its characters completely, and in doing so reminds us that care for another can quietly transform who we are.

In a small Mayan village in Mexico, two young men searching for their disappeared friend descend into the sacred darkness of a cenote, where ancient legend and contemporary crisis converge – the myth of Ixtabay, demon of abduction, pressing against the all-too-real violence of cartel disappearances. Through camerawork of rare intimacy and purpose, the film navigates the boundary between belief and fact, making both feel equally urgent, equally alive. A film that holds myth and social reality in precise, unsettling balance, it transforms a journey into the dark into a meditation on fear, loss, and what communities carry when those they love vanish without trace.

In a world so distant from me—like that of the two protagonists—I managed to find a way to face my greatest fear by talking about theirs, and about the fear shared by adolescents all over the world: the future. The journey of the two protagonists was also my own constant search in an unfamiliar land, reaching into the depths of darkness, which for me is the meaning of cinema.