Ecuadorian filmmaker Ana Christina Barragan is pitching her next project, “Amapola” on the Venice Gap-Financing Market, launching her third feature, “The Ivy,” at the Horizons Competition at the Venice Film Festival. The director spoke to Variety about her upcoming features ahead of the event, which will take place from August 29th to 31st.
“Amapora” follows a group of sex trafficking teenage victims living in secret shelters hidden in the forest. There, their days are still determined by the nocturnal schedule that has been accustomed to sexual exploitation over the years. Striking past trauma, the girls develop deep bonds to learn to slowly navigate pain, and consider rebuilding their lives with time at the shelter approaching the end.
Written and directed by Barragán, the film is co-produced with Klaxon Cultura Audiovisual and produced by Tropico Cine and Botón Films. Producers are Estefania Arlergi and Joe Hoolberg Silva, and co-producer is Rafael Sampaio.
“Amapora” was inspired by the director’s own experience of visiting a shelter for trafficking victims in Ecuador, where she met a girl between the ages of 12 and 16, struggling to overcome the fear they had experienced. Barragan said she was impressed with their resilience – there were invisible scars that they were still bored, even if they showed a glimpse of their father’s nurse’s baby by the temptation and their childhood.
“Amapora explores sex trafficking through the trails left behind from the bodies of teenagers, their wounds, games, actions and secrets,” Barragan said. Like her previous traits, the film is an intimate study of the human body. “In their awkwardness, their touch, their expressiveness of hands and small gestures, everything that is not visible but intuitive,” she said – in “Amapora,” “the body is an invaded and affected territory.”
The director’s acclaimed debut, “Alba,” premiered on INTL. It is Rotterdam at the film festival and the official entry for the 2016 Ecuadorian Oscars, and the sophomore special feature “Octopus Skin” (2022), premiered in a competition in San Sebastian, taking advantage of Barragan’s appeal to girls’ and childhood trauma, returning to the theme of “Amapora.”
“It’s a very specific age. As a woman, you start to become aware of yourself and feel how others perceive you. You lose some kind of freedom,” she said. “It is a very fragile age, and produces a mixture of feelings of anxiety and beauty.” She says that the girl at that troublesome stage in the cusp of femininity, “flower-like, growing, but in roughness.”
The director will once again work mainly with unprofessional actors. This selection is made after a large casting search. Barragan explains how she can work with the actor for months and help her prepare for their roles. “I’m really involved in the acting process,” she said. “I’m really close to the actress. It’s very intimate and very respectful.”
In “The Ivy,” which premiered in Venice this week, the director worked with a cast of almost professional children and teenagers to tell the story of a 30-year-old woman who develops unlikely intimate bonds with a teenage boy who lives in the group’s home. “I said I wanted to push the boundaries of intimacy that we have come to accept as normal,” Barragan said.
“Amapora” marks the starting point from previous films of “Ivy” and Barragan. She compares it to a “trilogy,” which focuses on the scars left behind by family ties and our childhood experiences. Nevertheless, she said in her upcoming film that “The Ivy” has “roots.”
