MONTEVIDEO – Uruguay’s Mutante Cine, a key Latin American arthouse hub, has set a rich six-title 2015-16 slate, led by new films from Ana Guevara and Leticia Jorge (“So Much Water) and Adrian Biniez (“Gigante,” “El 5 de talleres”), as founders Fernando Epstein and Agustina Chiarino tackle two of Latin America’s hottest-button industry issues: Pan-regional co-production and training.
One of Latin America’s most persistent co-producers, and lead producer with Brazil’s Bananeira Filmes on Lucrecia Martel’s upcoming “Zama,” REI Cine, run by Benjamin Domenech, Santiago Gallelli and Matias Roveda, will co-produce out of Argentina “Aleli,” also written by Guevara and Jorge.
Mutante Cine is in negotiations for Germany’s Komplizen Film, a “So Much Water” producer, to also produce “Aleli.” Project has won support from Uruguay’s ICAU film agency for development and production and Argentina’s INCAA Film-TV Institute.
Both “So Much Water” and “Aleli” examine how a family structure is unraveled, the first by the passage of time, “Aleli” by a change in the times.
After the death of the family patriarch, Ernesto, the only son, imagines as he cuts the grass at the family beach home, that his family’s destiny will now depend on him. The beach house remains, named Aleli after its members, Alba, Ernesto and Lilian. But his daughter, 35, has just broken up with her boyfriend, meaning he probably won’t be a grandfather soon, and “nobody recognizes him as the man about the house,” said “Aleli” producer Chiarino.
Scheduled to go into production late 2016/early 2017, “Aleli” is more choral than “So Much Water,” and more at times of a straight comedy, Chiarino said.
Germany’s Pandora Film Produktion will co-produce “Las olas,” the third feature from Biniez, whose debut, “Gigante,” won Berlin’s 2009 Jury Grand Prix. It turns on Alfonso, a Montevideo messenger, mid-thirties, who goes to a beach, dives into the sea and ends up on other beaches, in other summers of his youth, revisiting the friends, relations and loves whose summers together have shaped his life.
“Details – towels, sandals – suggest the date of events; its characters accept Alfonso as if he were a child or younger, but can also have a knowledge of what happens afterwards, Chiarino said, suggesting one of the nearest films to “Las Olas” is Michel Gondry’s “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.”
“Highly surrealistic, somewhat nostalgic, high-concept, and audience-friendly auteur cinema,” “Las olas” is conceived to be shot over three weeks in April on a highly-contained budget,” she added.
Teaming with La Maroma Producciones, Inti Cordero’s Mexico City-based production house, Mutante Cine will lead produce “Un viaje de locos,” a docu-feature about the journey to Mexico of four inmates of Montevideo’s Vilardebo National Psychiatric Hospital so as to share their experience of running an in-house radio at their hospital, Radio Vilardevoz. Alicia Cano (“El Bella vista”) and Leticia Cuba co-direct “Viaje,” winner of an Ibermedia co-production award.
Meanwhile, Mutante features with Argentina’s REI Cine and Sudestada Cine-AZ Films and Brazil’s Bubbles Project as one of Latin America’s most active minority co-producers. Four very different titles are in different stages of production: Argentine Ana Katz’s “My Park Friend,” completed, and tipped for a major fest berth next year;
“Bezinho” (Loveling) a family drama produced by Brazil’s Baleia Filmes and Bubbles Project, and written and directed by Gustavo Pizzi; and “Monos,” from Colombia’s Alejandro Landes (“Porfirio”) and Argentina’s Alexis dos Santos (“Unmade Beds”).
Turning on a group of teen soldiers whose mission is to maintain alive a kidnapped American woman, “Monos” packs a powerful co-production punch of Colombia’s No Franja, Argentina’s El Campo Cine, Mutante, the Netherlands’ Lemming Film, Germany’s Pandora, Norway’s Film Farms and France’s Le Pacte.
A fourth minority co-production, Paraguayan Marcelo Martinessi’s feature debut “The Heiresses,” has just won a €50,000 ($53,000) Torino Film Lab World Production Award. Movie turns on a woman who’s come into a fortune but, past 60, is finally forced to get a job, discovering a new life and maybe a new lesbian partner.
Based out of Uruguay, Mutante can bring little money to the table, said Chiarino. But it can form strategic alliances, developing films’ artistic potential and helping to bring in more partners and structure an international co-production, she added.
Mutante co-organizes with EAVE the first workshop at Puentes, the most prominent of Europe-Latin American co-production workshops, which sees industry tutors subjecting ten international projects, five from each side of the Atlantic, and 10 Uruguayan projects at a parallel Uruguayan Producers Workshop, to sustained development consultancy.
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