Alamar

Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian: ‘There are some lovely, gentle moments in this documentary-style feature from Mexican director Pedro González-Rubio, set around the ravishingly beautiful coral reef of Banco Chinchorro in the Caribbean off the Mexican coast. Alamar – that is, "to the sea" – shows Jorge, a Yucatan tour guide bonding with his five-year-old son Natan from a failed relationship with an Italian woman, Roberta.’

Sukdhev Sandhu, Daily Telegraph: Is it fiction? Is it a documentary? Alamar…feels like a sun-kissed dream-drift. It’s a haze of a film, tremulous with emotion, bursting with poignancy... Jorge takes his son on a trip to the reef and there, he offers him an imaginative patrimony: a world of water and birds and fish… memories that will likely swish and echo in the boy’s subconscious for ever. It’s a man’s world that Gonzales-Rubio depicts without sentimentality, but with unusual tenderness...The intimacy between them belies any impression that what you’re seeing is fabricated.’

Alamar is preceded by Oceans Journey, an underwater travelogue by local filmmaker John Walker.