Paz Fabrega, the first Costa Rican filmmaker to win Rotterdam’s VPRO Tiger Award for his debut film Cold Water of the Sea (Agua fria de mar) in 2010, is a director of La Mayor Cine (Utama, Aurora).
Produced by Costa Rica’s Fabrega’s Temporal Films, the hybrid post-doc will be pitched at the curated Last Push session of the ECAM Forum co-production market in Matadero, Madrid from June 9th to 11th.
The strong Latin American partners are joined by Guatemalan producer Pamela Guinea (Tesoros) and Spain’s Carla Sospedra Salvado of Edna Cinema, whose award-winning work includes SXSW’s Liliana Torres’ Mamifera, Carla Simón and Dominga Sotomayor’s Correspondences, and Sergi López’s upcoming Memorial. Received the Firmin Award at ECAM Forum 2024.
Additional funding will be provided by Costa Rica’s El Fauno Fund and the Catalan government’s ICEC Cultural Agency.
Fabrega, known for her naturalistic photography of human intimacy, returns here to the themes of motherhood explored in her earlier films Restless and Aurora.
The latter, whose review in Variety highlighted the helmer’s “inner warmth and deep respect for his performers and deep respect for their characters,” opened strong festival runs in 2021 in Rotterdam, San Sebastian, Mar del Plata, and Gothenburg.
In a bold change of direction, “To the Future” finds Fabrega expressing her experience raising two children while juggling financial pressures and artistic desires. Invited into the filmmaker’s intimate space, we meet her young sons Kai (3) and Matti (5).
“While looking for work, Paz rents out rooms in his home to tenants who come and go at the split-second pace of Airbnb tourism. The overwhelming emotions of his children collide with the weight of financial pressures, and the days blur into a blur,” the logline reads. As the children struggle for their mother’s attention, Matti discovers a talent for maintaining apnea for dangerously long periods of time.
“When my children were born, it felt like a secret world had opened up to me, completely different from what I had imagined,” confessed the filmmaker, who felt an urge to tell the world “how wild, very violent, completely fragile children really are” and to depict her own changes as a mother. “Suddenly, I was fascinated by[the children’s]behavior that drove me crazy. I didn’t want to tame them, but rather I asked myself when I had become so quiet. It was as if I had to become wilder myself in order to live with them.”
Sospedra, who was introduced to Fabrega through director Natalia Cabrera, praised the emotional themes of “To the Future.” “One of its central themes is to unravel motherhood and show the reality of how difficult it is to raise a future human being, especially if you are pursuing a career in the film industry. And at its core, and equally important to me, is how children become independent through the development of their imagination.”
“The film is also about creativity and the legacy that Paz passes on to his children,” added the Catalan producer. “Through the process of making films together, she is empowering them to create, imagine, and envision the future they want to build for themselves.”
For Fabrega, shaping the story was “the most difficult part” because of the personal subject matter. “There’s no distance that helps you understand things when it’s your own life, especially what you’re going through,” she admitted. So she assembled a strong team to help her build scenes from everyday life with her children, and shot them “in a very intimate way that is not typical for documentaries, to make the material lively and free.”
The group of photographers included Fabrega’s own life partner Roberto Murillo, Emiliano Zuniga, Adrianne Robert, and Karin Polley.
The editing team includes Aina Calleja (whose credits include Aina Clotte’s Cannes Critics Week winner Viva), Claire Eppelin, and Magdalena Sinca, who scanned more than 45 hours of footage shot over two years.
Fabrega, who said the title was suggested by her eldest son Matti, considers her photographs to be “like letters to the future.” “I think a lot about the future, what kind of world our children will have, and I feel that if there is any hope for what lies ahead, it has to do with birth and death, the important things that shape our lives, and seeing them for what they are, returning our attention to the raw, the complex, the miraculous. And caring for one another.”
At ECAM Forum, Fabrega and Sospedra are looking for distributors and distributors. “I’m really looking forward to the feedback on this movie. It’s going to be very interesting to see how this movie affects people because it doesn’t follow a traditional structure,” Fabrega said.
“To the Future,” which won the Music Library & SFX award at Las Palmas’ Mekas Market in early May, will compete for the ECAM Forum Last Push Prize of 15,000 euros ($17,500).
