News

Huelva’s main Competition titles, all premieres in Spain, pick up on big festival standouts that still merit further attention. Some brief details:

“Bionico’s Bachata”

Bionico’s Bachata

The film which won Morales, production house Mentes Fritas and producer and co-writer Cristián Monica a South by Southwest 2024 Audience Award. A mockumentary, shot in a box format, Biónico, an equally hopeless romantic and crack addict, battles to clean up his act and make some cash before his fiancée arrives back from rehab. A “romantic story in a hostile Caribbean city” about a “serious topic but handled via the absurd and dark comedy that we have in our culture,” Morales has told Variety.

“El Cuento del Lobo”

The latest from López Amado, a director on big Spanish TV series such as “El Principe” and “The Time In Between,” plus notable films from upscale supernatural thriller “Nos Miran” (2002), his first feature, to...

The unique joy of friendship is at the fore in helmers Ana Guevara and Leticia Jorge’s “Don’t You Let Me Go.”

Produced by Uruguay-based Agustina Chiarino’s Bocacha Films, the feature clinched the Noah Ephron Award at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. It marks Guevara and Jorge’s third collaboration with Bocacha, a production company at the forefront of pan-regional co-productions. Paris-based Alpha Violet is handling international sales.

The film opens at a wake. Adela, portrayed by Chiara Hourcade, reminisces with friends there to mark the death of her best friend Elena, dead at 39. The friends and family gathered are heartfelt, polite and emotional in this most clinical and anodyne of places. “Nothing here reminds me of my sister,” remarks one.

Waves of grief hit people at different times; Adela’s strikes as she sits in her car to leave. It’s in these opening moments that the fantastical strikes.

With Cannes now wrapped up, the next film festival on our radar is Tribeca, which runs its 23rd edition from June 5 to 16. One film we’re looking forward to is Don’t You Let Me Go (Agárrame fuerte), the most recent feature film by the celebrated Uruguayan directorial duo of Ana Guevara and Leticia Jorge (So Much Water), which will have its world premiere in the International Narrative Competition.

Featuring a predominantly female cast and crew, Don’t You Let Me Go follows Adela, 39, who is confronted with the sudden loss of her best friend, Elena. Standing amidst the mourners at Elena’s funeral, Adela feels disconnected from the solemn rituals, sensing the absurdity of bidding farewell to someone so dear. Consumed by shock and the looming void in her future, Adela becomes an unexpected time-traveler.

Transported to a decade earlier, Adela reunites with a vibrant Elena at a beach house,...

Exclusive: Alpha Violet has acquired world sales rights for Uruguayan filmmaking duo Ana Guevara and Leticia Jorge’s new drama Don’t You Let Me Go, exploring themes of friendship and death.

The Paris-based company previously worked with the filmmakers on their debut film So Much Water (Tanta Agua), which world premiered in the Berlinale’s Panorama section in 2013 and was acquired by Arte for Europe and HBO for the U.S.

The new movie, which is in post-production, sees follows a woman’s journey through time to see her best friend after one of them dies.

They reconnect in a past that may not be perfect but seems more real than the unintelligible present in which death has come to soon.

The cast features Eva Dans, Chiara Hourcade and Victoria Jorge.

“Don’t You Let Me Go is totally a movie for us,” said Virginie Devesa, Alpha Violet co-founding head with Keiko Funato.