Melbourne Documentary Film Festival 2026: Lilith Goes Galactic (dir. Joshua Belinfante) | Review
Joshua Belinfante crafts a luminous portrait of an artist whose boundless imagination becomes a means of rebuilding after profound loss.
In Lilith Goes Galactic, director Joshua Belinfante paints an intimate portrait of Spanish artist Eva Lilith Pereda, who lives on the island of La Palma in Spain’s Canary Islands. Through this poetic and deeply personal film, he seeks to capture not only the artist herself but also the ever-expanding inner universe she inhabits.
The artistic legacy left to Lilith by her parents was destroyed during the 2021 eruption of the Cumbre Vieja volcano, a natural disaster that lasted 85 days and caused €843 million in damage across the island. This devastating loss runs through the film like an invisible scar. She longs to turn back time and save this inheritance, and beneath her words lies a profound sense of nostalgia—the grief of seeing part of her roots disappear without warning. That absence becomes the starting point for a broader meditation on memory, legacy, and the fractures of time.
Lilith’s artistic practice draws equally from Expressionism and Surrealism. She delights in working with texture, building thick layers of paint as though the material itself might preserve the passage of time. Extending this fascination beyond the canvas, she explores the boundaries of physical reality and time travel, often through the figure of her cat, whom she sees as a genuine portal between galaxies.
Formally, the film emerges from the meeting of two artists. Joshua Belinfante carefully shapes his cinematic language around Eva Lilith Pereda’s creative sensibility, resulting in a work of luminous, poetic beauty. Following an opening sequence of sweeping aerial shots of the island and its volcano—which anchor the story within a landscape that feels both tangible and ghostly—the film unfolds with remarkable subtlety. Conversations with Lilith are presented without the conventions of a traditional interview: the director’s questions are never heard, leaving only Lilith’s voice, as though her reflections arise organically from her own world rather than from an imposed framework.
As the artist gradually guides us through the particulars of her journey across time, the film increasingly embraces elements that deepen the supernatural dimension of her imagination. The evocative sound design, the cat’s persistent purr, a gliding shot through a futuristic arcade, a mist-covered forest rendered in time-lapse, and even the appearance of the artist’s double all contribute to this gentle drift toward a psychological and cosmic elsewhere.
In the space of just a few minutes, Joshua Belinfante immerses us in a vast, vibrant universe entirely inhabited by its creator. It is a meditative journey, carried by a cinematic approach that moves in harmony with Eva Lilith Pereda’s imagination and personality. Lilith Goes Galactic celebrates artistic creation as an act of rebuilding from the ruins—a way of making sense of sudden tragedy, finding resilience, connecting past and present, and drawing strength from memory in order to move forward.
Audiences at the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival now have the opportunity to discover Joshua Belinfante’s short film, selected for the festival’s 2026 edition. Renowned for showcasing an impressive range of documentary storytelling centred on remarkable, unforgettable, and deeply inspiring protagonists, the festival provides the perfect setting for this enchanting work.
This article is part of a collaboration with the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival, presented online from July 1–31, 2026, and in cinemas from July 7–19, 2026.
