Adria Mones’ Fasten Films, producer of Cannes selections The End of It, Strawberries and Rehearsals of a Revolution, has announced a new film slate led by Catalan talents Mar Coll, María M. Bayona, Adria García and Nelly Reguera.
Fasten is also developing the debut films of Víctor Alonso-Berber, Jordi Boquet, Carlos Lechuga and Oriol Pérez, positioning the Barcelona, Madrid and Canary Islands-based production company as a driving force behind the already vibrant Catalan cinema in a new phase.
Ma Col: “Dasha”
Col (“Salve Maria”) will direct “Dasha,” which Mones said is “a dream project for us as producers, a mafia thriller and black comedy set in the wild and over-the-top Lloret de Mar of the 2000s, where entertainment and political tensions collide.”
“Dasha” is also “a bold new step for Mar Coll, one of the filmmakers who helped shape the new Catalan cinema, collaborating here with Valentina Viso, one of the leading screenwriters of Spanish cinema, and Natalya Kolesova, an up-and-coming Ukrainian-Russian-Catalan voice with a unique perspective,” Mones added.
Maria M. Bayona: “The First Witch”
Following his English-language debut with The End of It, which starred Rebecca Hall, Noomi Rapace and Gael García Bernal and premiered at Cannes, Bayona will be filming The First Witch in his native Catalan in the Pyrenees.
“A rare voice in Spanish cinema, María combines emotional precision, genre ambition and a fearless sense of scale, making this new project feel both culturally rooted and unapologetically ambitious,” Mones enthused.
Adria Garcia: “Silla and the Hidden Arcadia”
García’s Sira and the Hidden Arcadia, Fasten’s first family animation feature that combines 2D, 3D and stop-motion, is produced in collaboration with Guadalajara-based director Guillermo del Toro’s Tarer del Chucho, who will write the screenplay with Mixtec filmmakers and screenwriters Ángeles Cruz and Ulises Pora.
Nelly Regera: “Teresa Up in Arms”
“Nelly Reguera completely subverts the traditional stepmother figure in a dramatic comedy full of emotion, slapstick, and tenderness,” Mones said, adding that Reguera’s new project, “Teresa Up in Arms,” is “as far away from the Walt Disney archetype as you can get. It pokes fun at menopause, mindfulness, and modern self-help culture, and fights for a more generous and complex view of family.”
Reguera will co-write the screenplay with Eduardo Sola, who won the Goya Award for Best Original Screenplay for 2025’s “The House on Fire,” and Viso, a regular co-writer of Mar Col and winner of the Catalan Academy Gaudí Award for Best Original Screenplay for 2024’s “Salve Maria.”
Fasten’s next step forward
With a rich ecosystem of new talent at film schools led by Pompeu Fabra University and Escac, Catalonia’s film industry has benefited immensely over the past decade from strong support from the Catalan government’s film and television agency ICEC. ICEC launched the Minority Co-Produced Feature Film Fund in 2020 and subsequently awarded €1.5 million ($1.7 million) in grants to high-end Catalan-language television series.
Carla Simon’s Summer 1993, winner of the 2017 Berlinale Best Feature Film Award, marks the closest Spain has come to a film movement in decades. It is an independent fiction film that is broadly rooted in a specific place, but speaks to big-picture social and gender issues. Simon’s “Alcaraz” was followed a year later by the Catalan co-production “20,000 Species of Bees,” which won the Berlinale Golden Bear.
Protected by the bulwark of Catalonia’s Minority Co-Production Fund, Mones has already established a reputation for incredible international co-productions. For example, we were a partner on the 2023 Cannes Film Festival Camera d’Or winner Inside the Cocoon Shell. However, Fasten Films’ new goal is to expand the scope of Catalan cinema, to commit to its ambitions and reach a wider audience.
Mones told Variety that Fasten’s new stance represents “the kind of movies we believe in: ambitious, original and fearless.” “They grow out of the intimate drama that has characterized much of recent Catalan auteur cinema, a tradition to which we deeply respect and feel indebted, but at the same time seek to go a step further, embracing genre, spectacle, emotion and political engagement, reclaiming cinema as a collective celebration.”
That new ambition can be carved out in a variety of ways. One is scale. “The End of It” has a budget of nearly 8 million euros ($9.3 million), Mones said. “The first features in this budget are very difficult to fund,” he acknowledges. However, he managed to finance the international co-production with BBC Films, Norway’s Eye Eye Pictures, the company behind Sentimental Value, as well as Canary Islands tax incentives, Spain’s ICAA film agency subsidy, Filmin streaming service pre-buy and US investors. Media Pro Studio has taken an equity position and pre-purchased Latin America.
Another step forward for Mones is certainly genre, which makes sense for a producer who honed his craft making (REC) in the Canary Islands. Mones calls “The End of It” a futuristic drama with genre elements. Bayona’s sequel, The First Witch, is set during the earliest witch hunts of the 15th century. “This film reminds me a little of Chicho Ibáñez Serrador’s Who Can Kill a Child? It’s an edge to the genre that talks about society, the violence that children are subjected to, and how it repeats itself over time.”
But the ambition is also artistic. “Sira and the Hidden Arcadia” “fuses Mixtec culture and Catalan modernism into an adventurous, emotional and visually singular world that speaks to all forms of identity, including gender, place of origin, and belonging, at a time when the world seems to be turning inward,” Mones explained.
But behind these massive moves is one of the only production strategies that has worked for decades: people.
“For me, that’s always number one,” Mones told Variety. I remember six or seven years ago a mutual friend sent me a pair of Maria shorts and I was crazy about them. I said to Maria, “Do whatever you want to do.” So we started writing the script, and Maria said she had another idea, but it was a very expensive science fiction movie. I said that we could never do it in Spain alone. Maria said she wanted to do it. So I said we should do it another way. ”
Rebecca Hall in “The End of It”
“The End of It” Luis Tudela
