A Hundred-Headed Dragon – Films

Un dragón de cien cabezas

Samuel Delgado & Helena Girón
Spain | 2025 | 14 min
World premiere
Language : Invented language
Subtitles : English, French

In the Garden of the Hesperides, there once grew a fruit capable of granting immortality. This garden, located off the coast of West Africa, was guarded by a hundred-headed dragon. Through the bio-sonification of banana trees, a monoculture crop in the Canary Islands, we discover the tale of this mythical garden in which eternal life was possible.

Biopolitical research and advocacy, both in the arts and in philosophy, have long since transcended the boundaries of social space to claim the rights of every living creature, be it human, animal or vegetal. Inspired by the Greek myth of the Garden of the Hesperides and the monstrous creature that would defend its golden fruits, Spanish directors Helena Girón and Samuel M. Delgado — noted for their rigorous analogue visual research into landscape and nature’s elements and forces, culminating in their feature debut Eles Transportan a Morte (2021) — go so far here as to literally make plants, in particular banana trees, speak. As they film these plants, revealing the majestic plasticity of their foliage, they listen, record, and interpret their tremors and crackles, translating them into subtitles. The documentary becomes a magical political gesture, and while man once again uses violence to plunder and enslave, it is a moving dialogue between mother and son that becomes a whispered gesture of solidarity and resistance, silently giving each oppressed being, be it plant, animal or human, a voice.

Sergio Fant

A Hundred-Headed Dragon, 2025
Bloom, 2023
They Carry Death, 2021
Irmandade, 2019
Plus Ultra, 2017
Burning Mountains That Spew Flame, 2016
Neither God nor Santa María, 2015