IUS of Time will make its Bulgarian premiere at the 15th Sofia Pride Film Fest, Bulgaria’s only LGBTIQ+ film festival, screening in Sofia from June 2nd to 12th, 2026. Our Spanish LGBTQ+ short film — directed by Roberto F. Canuto and Xu Xiaoxi and produced with the support of the Department of Culture, Linguistic Policy and Sport of the Principality of Asturias and the Asturias Paraíso Natural Film Commission — screens on June 6th at Dom na Kinoto (Cinema House), in competition for the Audience Award for Best Short Film.

Some selections are about where your film travels. Others are about what a festival stands for. Sofia Pride Film Fest is firmly the second kind, and being part of its 15th edition means a great deal to us.

IUS of Time at the 15th Sofia Pride Film Fest — Screening Details

🗓 June 6, 2026 — 20:00h
📍 Dom na Kinoto (Cinema House), Sofia, Bulgaria
🏆 In competition: Audience Award for Best Short Film
🎟️ Tickets: domnakinoto.com
📱 Festival: @sofiapridefilmfest · sofiapridefilmfest.org

Our film screens in a short film block alongside Blow (Brazil), If Only You Knew (USA), Stimulants & Empathogens (Poland) and Found at Sea (Bulgaria/Belgium). The festival runs across two venues — Dom na Kinoto and the French Institute in Bulgaria — and for the fourth year running, the audience itself votes for the winning films.

A 25-Minute Asturian Short Film with 60+ Selections and 7 Awards

IUS of Time is a 25-minute Spanish-language fiction short film, set in Asturias and featuring touches of Asturian (amestáu), directed by Roberto F. Canuto and Xu Xiaoxi, written by Roberto F. Canuto, Xu Xiaoxi and Enrique Pérez Romero, and produced by Almost Red Productions with the support of the Principality of Asturias. The film stars Manuel Pizarro, Pelayo Carrizo, Andy Almar and Laura Ubach. Since its 2025 premiere, it has gathered more than 60 international festival selections across Europe, the Americas, Asia and Oceania, along with 7 awards, making it one of the most internationally circulated Asturian fiction short films in recent years.

The film’s 7 awards and distinctions to date are:

• Director’s Choice Award — 45th Thomas Edison Film Festival (USA)
• Audience Award Asturias — 24th Avilés Acción Film Festival (Spain)
• Best Cinematography — 4th Silicon Valley Queer Film Festival (USA)
• Best Cinematography — 3rd Rural and Mountain Film Festival of Cervera de Pisuerga (Spain)
• 3rd Audience Award — 20th Beijing Queer Film Festival (China)
• Honorable Mention — 13th Goitacá International Film Festival (Brazil)
• Certificate of Merit — 68th Rochester International Film Festival (USA)

From its first presentation in Asturias (XI Festival Cortogijon) to its international premiere at the 27th OUTshine LGBTQ Film Festival and its Northern European premiere at Manse Pride by the 56th Tampere Film Festival, through to recent selections at the 10th FeCHA Athens, the 11th Geelong Pride Film Festival in Australia and its fourth Indian festival at Out & Loud Pune, the film’s complete trajectory is documented in our festival selections and awards list.

Through its focus on memory, landscape and intergenerational connection, IUS of Time has become part of a wider conversation around contemporary rural queer cinema — stories that move queer experience out of the city and into the mountains, the fields, and the small communities where it has always also existed.

Why Sofia Matters to Us

Sofia Pride Film Fest is the only LGBTIQ+ film festival in Bulgaria. For fifteen editions, it has presented international queer cinema in a country where doing so is neither easy nor safe — since 2019, screenings have faced verbal and at times physical attacks. The festival continues regardless. That persistence is, in itself, a kind of cinema we admire deeply.

This is why the Bulgarian premiere of IUS of Time feels different from other selections. Our film is about silence — about a man who has spent a lifetime keeping a part of himself unspoken, in a rural world where prejudice made silence the safer choice. To screen that story in a place where queer visibility is still actively contested gives it a resonance we couldn’t have planned for. The selection also brings the film into Eastern Europe’s growing network of LGBTQ+ cultural festivals — a context where queer cinema carries a weight, and a risk, that it doesn’t always carry elsewhere.

The festival is organized by LGBTI organization Deystvie, Bulgaria’s largest LGBTIQ+ rights organization and a key defender of the community’s rights in the country. This 15th edition, themed “The Hero Is You!”, brings together 8 feature films and 11 short films — including titles awarded at Cannes and Venice in 2025. We’re honored that IUS of Time is part of that program.

The selection also expands the film’s presence within Eastern Europe’s growing network of LGBTQ+ film festivals and cultural initiatives. With its Bulgarian premiere, IUS of Time continues to expand its presence across European LGBTQ+ film festivals while bringing stories rooted in rural Asturias to new international audiences.

About IUS of Time

IUS of Time follows Luca, a young photography student who arrives in a small mountain village in rural Asturias and rents a room from Xuan — an older cheesemaker, solitary, carrying a past he has never spoken aloud. Through Luca’s camera and their slowly growing connection, the two men begin to rediscover memory, desire and belonging. The film was shot on location in rural Asturias, including the facilities and natural cheese-ageing caves of Quesería Ecológica Asiegu in the Cabrales municipality, along with the Piloña municipality, the valleys of Onís and the Picos de Europa. The landscape is not a backdrop. It carries the story.

The project emerged through an extended creative process that also produced the companion short films Blow Down and Sunset in Paris, conceived as “Sketches of IUS” during the screenplay development stage. It also features collaborations with artists such as Elmer Guevara, who created the analogue photographs attributed to Luca’s character in the film.

“Screening in Sofia means something we find hard to say lightly. A film about loving in silence, across generations and against the weight of prejudice, belongs especially in the places where that silence is still being enforced. We’re grateful to Deystvie and to everyone who keeps this festival alive.” — Roberto F. Canuto & Xu Xiaoxi

More About IUS of Time