MADRID — Vicente Canales’ Film Factory Entertainment has acquired world sales rights to “The Consequences” (“Las consecuencias”), writer-director Claudia Pinto Emperador’s follow-up to her 2013 feature debut, “The Longest Distance,” which marked out the Spanish-Venezuelan writer-director as a talent to track.
A Spain-Netherlands-Belgium co-production, “The Consequences” won a €330,000 ($376,000) conditionally repayable non-interest loan for co-production from the Council of Europe’s Eurimages Fund in its latest allocation, announced Oct. 22. That followed on a Eurimages Co-production Development Award at last year’s San Sebastian Europe-Latin America Co-production Forum.
Described by Variety as an “accomplished debut,” thanks to its “well-drawn characters, engaging performances and a convincingly rooted storyline,” “The Longest Distance” won the Glauber Rocha Award for best Latin American film at 2013’s Montreal World Film Festival.
“The Longest Distance” used stunning landscape – Venezuela’s Gran Sabana region – and genre – a road movie – to frame a story of bedrock family relations – a young boy and his grandmother – tensed by common and unresolved issues of blame and guilt.
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Starring Juana Acosta (“Gigantes,” “The Last Panthers”), Alfredo Castro (“Tony Manero,” “From Afar”) and Carme Elías, co-star of “The Longest Distance,” “The Consequences” uses some of the self-same elements in this creatively fertile mix. Pinto herself calls it a psychological drama told as a thriller, In it, Fabiola, unsettled by the way her father César looks at her 14-year-old daughter, sets out to spy on her own family, on a trip to a small island.
“Wild, disquieting landscapes combine with a camera which hugs close to Fabiola, as if we’re spying on a spy, to dig deep into an elusive animal terrain which we don’t want to show or feel,” Pinto said in a director’s statement. She added: “Let he who is free from sin cast the first stone.”
Pinto Emperador recalled that she began to write the screenplay when she was raising her three-year-old daughter, and pregnant with her second child. “All the fears that maternity presented to me were channelled whole into the story,” she said in a statement which calls the film “a story which explores the consequences of silence and emotional legacies in a small family nucleus.”
Sonia Almarcha (“Veronica,” “Vis a Vis”), Hector Alterio (“Son of the Bride,” “Raise Ravens”) and newcomer Maria Romanillos also star in the film.
“The Consequences” part shot recently in the Valencia region of eastern Spain. It will continue shooting from April 2019 on location in Valencia and Spain’s Canary Isles, both La Palma and the striking volcanic island of La Gomera.
Using a tax vehicle, “The Longest Distance” producer Sin Rodeos Films co-produces with the Netherlands’ N279 Entertainment, headed by Els Vandervorts, a producer on Lars Von Trier’s “Dogvillle” and “Dancer in the Dark,” and Belgium’s Potemkino, headed by Peter de Maegd, whose credits include movies by Peter Greenaway (“Eisenstein in Guanajuato”), Terence Davies (“A Quiet Passion”) and Bille August (“55 Steps”).
“The Consequences” has been pre-bought by Spanish public broadcaster TVE, Valencia region state TV Apunt Media. It received financial support from the Valencian Institute of Culture (IVC) and the Netherlands Film Fund and development funding from Ibermedia.
CREDIT: Varanasi
