Mexico’s Whisky Content, Chile’s Juntos Films Forge Nine Pic Development Pact (EXCLUSIVE)

Following the success of their collaboration on Nicolás Postiglione’s debut feature “Immersion,” production shingles Whisky Content of Mexico and Chile’s Juntos Films have forged a medium-term strategic alliance for the joint development of nine films in six years.

The agreement comes just days after the premiere of “Immersion,” a thriller headlined by Chile’s most bankable star, Alfredo Castro, at the Miami Film Festival where its poster won the Best Poster Design Award. The film has already racked up top awards from the festivals of Guadalajara, Tallinn Black Nights and Punta del Este.

The move also comes as further cooperation among Hispanic companies continue apace in response to the increasing challenges of local content production. The insatiable demand for content from both traditional and new players – especially streamers – in the entertainment industry is also a key factor.

“This is another firm step towards our goal of turning our company into a recognized player in the content industry,” said Whisky Content partner Juan Bernardo González. “Since we started working with Juntos on the film ‘Immersion,’ we have understood that our companies complement each other naturally,” he added.

“We’re jointly exploring a variety of themes but common elements will include the questioning of social structures, institutions and biases that are built on an individualistic worldview,” said Juntos Films co-founder Francisco Hervé. “We’re also searching for universal stories but with very strong roots in local realities, which could be that of miners in Chile’s Atacama Desert or a private school in Patagonia,” he added.

“Thirdly, we aim to tell these stories from the author’s point of view but through the prism of conventional film genres in order to appeal to the widest audience,” he continued, adding: “At the moment we have projects that draw on thrillers, westerns, comedies, police dramas and some even include adventure and superhero elements.

Founded in Mexico City in 2009 by González and Arturo Pereyra, Whisky Content focused on creating advertising content until 2018 when they began co-producing feature films led by “Immersion” and “The Box” (“La Caja”), the second feature film by Venice winner Lorenzo Vigas, which world premiered in the official competition of the Venice Film Festival. The company has several film and TV projects in the pipeline and has a presence in Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and the U.S.

Juntos Films (“Together” in Spanish) was founded in 2019 in Santiago de Chile by Hervé, Moisés Sepúlveda and Daniela Raviola, after they merged their companies Madriguera Films and Panchito Films with the aim to produce genre films with an auteur outlook.

“For years, we’ve been working on our own, like lonely wolves. Collectively though, we find that in creative work, the sum is more than the value of the parts,” Hervé told Variety about the merger then. That same philosophy guides their new collaboration with Whisky Content.

Raviola concurred: “Since we founded Juntos, we have considered ourselves as a production company that seeks to reconcile the artistic gaze with the search for increasingly wider audiences.”

“The name of our company stems from the value we give to collaborative work, because we understand that together we work better. And Whisky is a great collaborator for us, since we share a view on the future of Latin American cinema,” she added.

Juntos has built a portfolio of some dozen films, both fiction and non-fiction – that have collected awards at key festivals in Italy, Switzerland, Brazil and Spain, among others.

In the last two years they have released, in addition to “Immersion,” the feature films “Gran Avenida,” directed by Sepúlveda, “La Taza Rota” by Esteban Cabezas and Francisco Bermejo’s Moby Dick-inspired “The Other One” (“El Otro”) an acclaimed winner of the best film award at Visions Du Reel’s Burning Lights sidebar.

They are currently prepping five new projects across the 2022-2023 period, in which Whisky Content will likely be investing in some. To date, “Whisky has already selected three projects in our slate, and next year they can select three more, and three more in 2024,” said Hervé. “The selected projects so far are ‘La Hija del Pacífico’ (to be shot late 2022), ‘Condicional’ (to be shot in 2023) and ‘En el Lugar Equivocado’ (no shooting date yet),” he added.