Natalia Solorzano Vázquez’s new film The Spell to Resurrect the Witch has found new partners in Spain’s Testaferro and Uruguay’s Guay Films. The hybrid documentary for the Costa Rican media market is produced by Costa Rica’s Sputnik Films. Mariana Murillo’s label previously produced Sofía Quiroz Ubeda’s Cannes selection Land of Ashes and is currently in post-production on the director’s sequel Madre Pájaro.
“The Spell to Reanimate a Witch” marks the first collaboration between Natalia Solorzano Vazquez and the burgeoning Sputnik Films banner. Her debut feature Avanzaré Tan despacio premiered at IDFA 2019, and her short film was successful at the Costa Rica International Film Festival. Her latest project is a “casting call” to embody Solara de Persia, a Costa Rican fortune teller who rose to fame in the 1960s. This hybrid documentary becomes a “stage” where “various women evoke their spirits through memories, interpretations, and personal experiences.”
Solorzano Vazquez said in an interview with Variety that she discovered Solara “almost by chance” while researching women “who have appeared in the Costa Rican media.” “I had never heard of her before, so I was immediately shocked. She was once one of the most famous women in this country, but she had almost completely disappeared from our collective memory.”
“That absence became the starting point for the film,” she added. “The more I searched for Solara, the more I realized that I was also looking for women whose lives were slowly disappearing because no one thought it was worth preserving.”
Courtesy of Natalia Solorzano Vazquez
The director said the fortune teller made him think about the women in his family who were “of the same generation but lived completely different lives.” “She represents the possibility of reinventing oneself, but also the price a woman pays to step outside of the role assigned to her by society.”
Murillo, who has known Solorzano Vázquez since her university days, said she has “always been fascinated by her ability to observe and make us observe everyday life with a unique combination of kindness, humor and critical insight.” “Solara’s story gave us the perfect excuse to collaborate and explore female characters through a deep performative lens, guided by feminist perspectives and the beliefs we’ve shared since the beginning. Who we are today is but a reflection of who we once were.”
Asked how she felt about making a film about memory in Latin America, at a time when films that explore issues of individual and collective memory in the region have achieved great success internationally, the director said that memory “fascinates” her because it is “always incomplete.” “We tend to think of it as preserving the past, but it also changes the past.”
“This film is not an attempt to reconstruct Solara as it really is,” she points out. “I ask what happens when almost everything is lost and only fragments remain. Those fragments live in other people and become a little different each time they are remembered. I am interested in that fragile space where memory, imagination and lived experience coexist.”
As for being part of a strong generation of Costa Rican female filmmakers that has seen the rise of names like Valentina Maurel and Sofía Quiroz Ubeda, Solorzano Vázquez says she feels “very lucky” to be part of this remarkable group. “The Costa Rican film industry is still small, which means we know each other very well and have grown together,” she added. “There’s an incredible diversity of voices, and a lot of women are telling stories that haven’t been told before. I think we’re less interested in representing the idea of Costa Rica than in questioning it, expanding on it, and finding a new cinematic language to tell who we are.”
The “Spell to Bring the Witch Back to Life” project was developed through the Rueda Program of the Spanish Film Academy, CIMA Impulsa and Proyecta of Ventana Sur.
The Costa Rica Media Market will be held from July 14th to 15th.
