In three separate homes, people grapple with their isolation from each other and the outside world. Heavily inspired by the many feelings provoked by the COVID pandemic, The Whirlwind is an abstract dance piece in which movement and editing weave together three individual spaces in a way that shows their ultimate unity.

Julia Ponce Díaz was born and raised in a small Andalusian town with six churches and no movie theatre, but somehow found herself closer to film than to god. So much so that she ended up in Los Angeles, where she just completed her Directing MFA at the American Film Institute thanks to the funding and support of the La Caixa Foundation. Her thesis film SOREDIA, about a self-conscious French girl trying to find her roots in the U.S., won Best Student Short at the San Diego International ShortsFest, and was an official selection of Flickers' Rhode Island, Hollyshorts, LA Shorts and Directed by Women Spain, amongst others. It's also one of the six shorts selected by AAMMA (Andalusian Women in Film Association) to play at this year's edition of the Generamma Film Festival. Just like her thesis film, Julia's body of work focuses mostly on exploring the experiences of young women in search of their identity and place in the world, and the relationships that help them in such journeys. She strongly believes that much of our identity doesn’t happen in the reflection in the mirror but in the gaze of others, and her goal is to create narratives that examine the subjective experience that is growing up. Inspired by filmmakers like Lucrecia Martel, Alice Rohrwacher and Céline Sciamma– the strange realism of their cinematic worlds, and the subjective and almost tactile quality of their movies– Julia is committed to create films that find poetry in everyday life, and reveal those little moments of connection that make reality transcend. While finishing post-production on her latest projects, Julia is currently developing her first feature script DIGITAL DOLLS, a hybrid coming-of-age film that mixes live-action and animation, and is set in the South of Spain.