Since 2020, the New Voices section has been the Curtas space particularly attentive to emerging names in contemporary cinema, seeking to map the most promising authors that have appeared in different latitudes. After Ana Maria Gomes, Elena López Riera, Ana Elena Tejera, Jacqueline Lentzou, Jorge Jácome, Ali Asgari and Farnoosh Samadi, in 2022 the highlight went to the French Céline Devaux and the Spanish Chema García Ibarra.

With a career that began in animated cinema, Céline Devaux is today one of the emerging voices of French cinema and contemporary European cinema. Although she is still young, she was born in 1987, she already has several awards in her CV from renowned festivals, such as Clermont-Ferrand, Angers, Chicago and Venice, and with the recognition of the film industry (she won the César for best animated short in 2016).

Chema García Ibarra's cinema embodies many of the social and political transformations of 21st century Spain. It is such an iconoclastic cinema that “Protoparticles” (2009) almost seems to be a premonitory film about the COVID-19 pandemic. Among other honors, he has won relevant awards and was selected at Sundance, Cannes and Berlin. “The Sacred Spirit” (2021) premiered in the official selection of the Locarno Festival and three of his shorts have already been featured in the Curtas Vila do Conde International Competition.