The celebrated Black Canvas Festival of Contemporary Film in Mexico has completed a successful hybrid edition, succeeding in spite of the restrictions imposed by the pandemic. As an extension of the festival's new digital footprint, we have paired with the programming team to bring this special selection of the very best that the previous few years of the festival have had to offer.

Here are two thematic strands that have, invisibly or not, characterised Black Canvas in recent years: A Glimpse of the Other, featuring films that reach outwards to the world for their inspiration, investigating subjects beyond the filmmaker’s immediate concerns, and An Intimate Glimpse, which represents another way of creating cinema — an inward gaze that finds inspiration in the explorations an artist makes into his or herself.

Titles for that program include the starkly beautiful experimental portrait of the life of Mexican fishermen Ruins, Your Realm by Pablo Escoto, the celebrated Berlin-premiering cinephile essay Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream, the Cambodian documentary ​Last Night I Saw You Smiling​ ​that premiered at IFFR last January, ​Ashore ​by Golden Bear-winning filmmaker Leonor Teles, from 2018, the blistering The Crosses by Teresa Arredondo and Carlos Vásquez Méndez, about one of the darkest episodes in the history of organized labor in Chile.