Love, Sex and Tears tells the story of Phi, a thirty years old French woman who, after going through multiple love relationships that only leads her to monotony, and after the sudden death of her mother (who dies in a very absurd way) decides to travel to Buenos Aires, where her aunt Rita, a retired psychoanalyst, will receive her to help her answer the doubts that Phi drags with her. In this new city, and accompanied by the hypnosis sessions that her aunt proposes her, Phi will be able to dive into her deepest memories and sexual fantasies, in order to understand what prevents her from reaching pleasure.
Ana María is an illegal Colombian migrant in Panama. She has just turned 40, has no family and is alone. She faked a pregnancy so that they would take pity on her and give her a job in a nursing home. Jimena arrives at the nursing home desperately looking to hire someone to take care of her mother Mercedes, who has already fired four girls in a month. Ana Maria starts working at Mercedes' house, a sullen aristocrat who is aware of how Alzheimer's is devouring her. Mercedes does not fire her immediately and Ana Maria gradually begins to win her sympathy. As time goes by, Ana Maria finds it harder to get out of her own lie. Or maybe she wishes her pregnancy was real? In a tropical garden, these two women share a friendship and for a time save each other from isolation and loneliness.
In Roboré, a forgotten town in the Bolivian Amazon, Larachi (18), Gutiérrez (18) and Valenzuela (19) begin compulsory military service along with 97 boys. Days pass slowly in the middle of extreme heat where military exercises and punishments test the cadets. Monotony changes with the news of forest fires approaching town. Thousands of hectares of virgin forest, indigenous communities and hundreds of species are in danger. The regiment is prepared to contain the fire, but they are sent without any proper tools. The military and politicians minimize fires, avoid the attention of the press and boycott arrival of real help. The fire exposes power abuse and the interest in maintaining a cruel order shared by drug trafficking and agribusiness. An order that the young cadets begin to question.
Vicente is a musician of limited talent and obsessed with rock. On the day of his grandmother's late husband's death anniversary, she commits suicide. Vicente had been raised by her. Without anyone else around, he refuses to let Helena's body be taken. Vicente finds Helena's journal, and with it, suggestions of all sorts of physical and emotional violence she had suffered from his grandfather. He gets numb. In his new job, he has the opportunity to meet women from different walks of life, especially Shirley. He needs to confront his memories alone. He burns his grandfather's military uniform. Vicente and Shirley connect and get involved. They kill her violent husband. Vicente drives his car, loaded with boxes, along a highway. Shirley sleeps in the passenger's seat.
A girl lives in the outskirts with her grandparents because her parents cannot take care of her, the grandmother uses her as a means to sell drugs to survive while her grandfather continues playing dolls with her.
Valladolid, México (1750's). When Elena, a widow with syphilis, remarries Servando, a well known pig farmer, her symptoms suddenly worsen before her wedding day. She secretly finds a doctor to apply a mercury therapy, but when she arrives at Servando’s pig farm after the ceremony with her children and her maid Teresa, she has not recovered and knows she must keep her body hidden from her new husband. The worse her disease gets and the longer she cannot consummate the marriage, the further she pushes Servando from confusion into a deep anxiety that he cannot control. When he murders Teresa’s son, Elena takes her revenge by finally consummating the marriage in complete darkness. And in surrendering to the disease, she becomes a conduit for the power of Coatlicue, the Mexican mother goddess.
Sonia and her son Santiago travel in a Citroen Ami 8 crossing the mountain road that connects Mendoza with Las Tumanas, a legendary site in the heart of the San Juan valleys. Sonia is an academic violinist. Santiago, her son, a sound documentary maker who pursues the spirit of popular music. Hi is sick, she does not assume it yet. Although silence has kept them in parallel worlds for years the journey opens up the possibility for them to face what is never talked about: their ideological cracks, mutual weaknesses the taboo of death. While traveling through an increasingly desert landscape between recordings and playlists, they enter the original ruins of Las Tumanas, the Temple according to Santiago, to practice a ritual. Sonia is already another in front of the worst goodbye for a mother.
Two friends, Pelu (31) and Jandro (32), come up with a plan to steal a large amount of money from the house of Pichiqui (50), his boss. A few minutes after the robbery, Pelu and Jandro slides into the city on The Arrow, Pelu’s beloved motorcycle. Both celebrate eating at their favourite burger canteen. When Pelu gets up to go to the bathroom, Jandro betrays him and take all the spoils of the night, fueled by a lingering resentment towards his friend. As he escapes on the Arrow he is filled with remorse and decides to returns to apologize to his friend, who is no longer there. During that night, Jandro must find his friend to reconcile, while together they must get rid of a thug Taxi Driver sent by Pichiqui, who is willing to do anything to recover the money.
After five thousand days of searching for evidence of water on Mars, the Opportunity rover is trapped in a sandstorm while crossing Perseverance Valley. Curiosity, a second rover on the Red Planet, is ordered by NASA to rescue the missing robot. The rover sets off for its mission but the storm cuts off the link with planet Earth. Alone in the Universe, Curiosity wanders in search of her unfortunate companion. With no response from the space center, the rover gradually loses itself in a monologue about humanity's rush to consumption. At the same time, in the Atacama Desert, mining companies are intensifying the uncontrolled extraction of lithium, a metal that is essential for the manufacture of communication devices, disrupting the ecosystem of the region.
Peteyem is one of the only 8 native Kawésqar survivors, declared a "Living Human Treasure” by UNESCO. He was born in Puerto Edén, Chile, on an unspecified date. Just a few months later, his parents died in a canoe accident. Subsequently, he was adopted by the manager of a radio station and his wife, who named him Cárlos Edén. When his adoptive mother died, Carlos decided to start traveling around the country. Due to his association with the MIR, he was persecuted by the Chilean Armed Forces. In 1978, he scaped to Argentina where he was finally arrested and tortured on suspicion of being a Chilean spy during the Argentine-Chilean Conflict. As the World Cup was held in Argentina, he was visited by international observers and transferred to the U.S. as a political refugee.
Dana is 22 years old. She works in a call center while finishing her degree in photography. Caro is 23 years old. She's a musician and a graphic designer. They live in the industrial Monterrey city. They start a relationship after meeting in a concert and move in together. They enjoy the little moments they share while surviving low-paying jobs with the eternal hope of living off what they love. Something changes when Caro's family moves to Mexico City and Dana is fired from her job. Caro returns to live with her family to recover from depression. They lose communication. Dana sends Caro a video letter where she reflects on what they lived. Caro replies with another one from her point of view. They will resume their communication in an attempt to heal wounds.
Having hit hard times, the street-side cinema where Izaquiel works is sublet to a Pentecostal church. Izaquiel, a young black gay man and former evangelical Christian, is sucked into a spiral of harassment by the new tenants, a bunch of religious hardliners, with whom he wages a silent and increasingly violent war. Among the shadows of the mangroves, where he goes for sexual adventures with other men, Izaquiel will find a means to escape this somber reality. But the situation takes a violent turn and Izaquiel alone knows that something strange lurks in the cinema basement, and it’s a secret he must keep at all costs.
Three small children navigate the strange world around them, full of life, death, innocence and redemption. Nine fragments over nine years sewn through the fantastic threat in which they observe life and how their father observes them in pursuit of newness.
With Trova Tanguera, I want to transmit the militant and artistic energy that I have nourished with a group of enthusiasts of “current tango”, a movement still unknown, born twenty years ago. Coming for the most part from rock culture, young artists have fought against a stoic and aging music by reappropriating it to express a committed vision of their society. Tango, which was a culture steeped in machism and patriotism, prized in bourgeois salons favorable to the dictatorship, has returned to its popular origins, to the point of becoming the appropriate expression of all subversions. Today’s tango artists have the ability to articulate music with the collective and the political in a jubilant impulse, while Argentina is a country overthrowed by tragedies.
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