Laura Huertas Millan

Laura Huertas Millan approaches cinema as an oneiric, diasporic and multi-cultural medium. In the past twenty years, she has developed a hybrid practice through historical inquiries and cinematic fabulation, revolving around ecological resistances, the legacies of cultural dissidences in Latin America, and artistic strategies to exit coloniality. Her modular approach to storytelling encompasses film, installations, writing, pedagogy, and expanded media. While grounded in real-life contexts and collaborations, her work reclaims fiction as an emancipatory tool, where altered states build potential sites of healing and commonality, and imagination is the most precious political treasure.

HOW DOES YOUR SUBMITTED WORK RESPOND TO THE CIRCA 20:25 MANIFESTO?
AMAZONIZE — is a film-poem, an incantation, a spell, about the Andean sacred coca plant, a psychotropic native to Latin America prohibited since colonization and still listed by the United Nations as a narcotic drug. Often confused with cocaine, the leaf itself produces mild and benign effects. But its cultural, scientific, and spiritual heritages are monumental and repressed. Women’s hands collect and disseminate coca leaves, symbolically spreading the Amazonian Muina Murui teachings of considering the plant as the voice of the forest: coca is a person, a goddess, a power figure, a technology. The leaves“amazonize” our cities, conjuring the forest into urban imaginaries, for the Amazon to haunt us, to infatuate us — as our ultimate refugee.

IF AWARDED THE £30,000 CIRCA PRIZE, WHAT 10-MINUTE WORK WOULD YOU CREATE – AND HOW WOULD IT EMBODY THE SPIRIT OF REFUGIA?

What if healing began at the dinner table? AMAZONIZE will be an experimental hybrid short film, in between the pastiche of a marketing campaign and a science-fiction dream, presenting a mysterious green pill that promises to “amazonize” humanity. Set in a speculative near future, in a Western city haunted by climate collapse, AI automation, and spiritual disconnection, humans mourn the disappearance of the Amazon rainforest, vanished after decades of fire and deforestation. “Amazonize”, a green capsule, offers the vision of a dinner around a sacred plant, the coca plant, an assembly for restorative justice where real-life guests and fictional characters intend to bring back the forest’s voice.

FOLLOW LAURA HUERTAS MILLAN ON INSTAGRAM

Funding for the CIRCA PRIZE is generated entirely by the #CIRCAECONOMY, a circular model that reinvests proceeds from affordable art sold on CIRCA.ART into new public art commissions, charitable causes, art education and prizes. Since launching in 2020, the initiative has raised over £1 Million, placing artists and communities at the centre of an economy that continually reinvests in the future of art and culture.

The CIRCA PRIZE 2025 winners will be revealed LIVE in Piccadilly Circus on Monday 13 October, with a special 30-minute award ceremony starting at 20:00 BST. Don’t miss it!