These titles will be showing at Kosmorama 2026!
We’re thrilled to finally share the first titles from Kosmorama’s 2026 main film program!
At the 22nd edition of the festival, you’ll be able to see Joel Alfonso Vargas’s debut film Mad Bills to Pay and Diego Céspedes’s The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo.
Screening times and tickets will be released closer to the festival — around mid-February.
Mad Bills to Pay
About the film:
19-year-old Rico is a sharp-tongued, street-smart kid from the Bronx, New York. When he tells his mother and sister that he’s going to be a father — and that his 16-year-old girlfriend is moving in with them — life in their cramped apartment is turned upside down. Problems start piling up, and there’s no easy way out.
Joel Alfonso Vargas has both written and directed one of the year’s most original debut films from the U.S. Shot on a tiny budget over just 16 days, the film captures the chaos of urban everyday life with an authenticity that can only come from filmmakers and actors who know their environment inside and out. The static camera and astonishingly believable performances make it easy to forget you’re watching fiction.
Mad Bills to Pay is a funny and unconventional coming-of-age story, full of humor and charm — wrapped in a style of documentary realism.
The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo
About the film:
In a dusty mining landscape in 1980s Chile, a secluded village is slowly being consumed by an unknown disease. No one knows how it spreads — whether through touch, a glance, or perhaps love itself. One thing, however, is certain: death awaits all who are infected.
Amid this still, shadowed world lives Lidia with her family, in a house that once stood at the heart of the village but now sits in isolation — a quiet monument to a lost sense of community.
With The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo, director Diego Céspedes weaves together magical realism, fantasy, and human vulnerability to create a dreamlike portrait of fear, desire, and isolation.
The film reflects a time when love and illness walked hand in hand, inviting us to explore the fragile boundaries between life, death, and longing.
