A Spanish Premiere Full of Amor and Esperanza
Earlier in October, we enjoyed screening The Rebel Reef: Seeds of Hope at the 7th Annual Love & Hope International Film Festival in Barcelona.
This was the Spanish premiere of our little docu that could, and I’ll admit that a festival built around “love and hope” could sound a little… fluffy. But this festival was anything but!
Instead, it explored all the strange, beautiful, complicated ways that humans relate with one another and with the world around us. There were stories about romantic love, certainly, but also friendship, family, community, grief, courage, and belonging. These kinds of love ask something of you. These kinds of love survive hard things.
Against that backdrop, we showed The Rebel Reef in a shorts block that felt particularly focused on human connections and how they change our lives. From The Piano Tuner, we learned to dream, feel, and choose ourselves. A Small Service showed a love between sisters that even death could not erase. A Wake explores the most ironic (and maybe annoying) pillow talk possible. And, LITTLE DARLING shows us how music can transcend cultures and nationalities.
Sharing Tela’s Message
When it was our turn, we took viewers underwater to experience the magic of Tela Bay, and we introduced them to Christian. His love for his family, his town, and his reef is woven through the entire film. So is Antal’s. So, too, is ours, as we get into the story.
Importantly, the hope in his story does not exist because everything turned out okay — because it didn’t. The events in the movie show the hardest thing that Christian and his family have ever been through, and they graciously trusted us to share these dark moments with the world. This story, their story, grew out of the deepest pains and the hardest-earned resilience. And from that, we find hope.
Several people found us throughout the festival just to tell us how much the film had moved them. Others had thoughtful questions about the science, the reef’s resilience, Christian’s story, and what happens next.
I especially loved that people became invested in Tela in just 24 minutes and 47 seconds—a place many of them had never heard of before sitting down to watch our film.
That is really the magic we hoped for when we made The Rebel Reef. Not simply to tell people that Tela has an extraordinary reef, but to help them care about it.
Finding Our People
As a filmmaker and creative, the festival also was a major highlight!
There was a real sense of camaraderie from the moment I arrived. The “festival family” thing can sometimes feel like a line people put in their closing speeches, but here, it actually happened. People were welcoming, curious, generous with their time, and genuinely excited to see one another’s work. In an industry known for being cutthroat, that’s special.
We met filmmakers from around the world who became friends over Iberic ham and future colleagues we cheersed with over cobblestone streets. Conversations that started with “What’s your film about?” turned into conversations about storytelling, conservation, impact, future projects, and all the things we might make together someday.
The Takeaway
Watching all these different films about love and resilience reminded me what a privilege it is to be human in the first place: to get to experience this wildly complicated life, to care about people and places, to fall in love with the world and then decide it is worth protecting. To feel!
By the time our team left Barcelona, we had more ideas than we arrived with: more stories we wanted to tell, more ways to think about the impact of The Rebel Reef, and a long list of people we hope to work with.
What a gift the entire experience was! Thank you, Barcelona! Thank you, Love & Hope and Darwin and team for an incredible little universe you’ve created and curated for us. ¡Hasta la próxima!
