Produced by Galicia’s Kraken Media, Fernando Tato’s “Goodbye, Berta,” a buzzy project heading for this week’s Málaga Festival Fund Co-Production Event (MAFF), has added further production partners in Spain’s Tornasol Media, behind Academy Award winner “The Secret in Their Eyes,” and Abano Producións, a producer of “Unicorn Wars.”
Disney will handle the theatrical distribution of “Goodbye, Berta” in Spain.
Kraken Media’s Adrián Castiñeiras and Alba Gallego and director Tato will present the feature at MAFF, one of the centrepieces at the Malaga Festival’s MAFIZ industry forum.
Written by Ángela Andrada and Tato, the 2025 MAFF feature marks an expansion of Tato’s 17-minute short, shot in Galician and Castilian Spanish on location in A Pobra de Caramiñal, a town on the Galician coast and penned and co-starring Andrade.
In the feature, when sister Berta is thrown out of her rehab center, sister Alicia, who has forged a comfortable life in Galician capital Santiago de Compostela, feels obliged to return to Pobra do Caramiñal, where she was born. “This reunion marks the beginning of an emotional journey for the two sisters, where love and resentment intertwine and the past becomes a burden too heavy to forget,” the logline ends.
The screenplay for the feature won the 2023 20th SGAE Julio Alejandro Screenplay Award, one of the most prestigious script plaudits in Spain. It also took an Emerging Award at the 2023 D’A Film Lab Producers Meet Producers. The feature is being developed with the support of the Galician Agency for Cultural Industries, Xunta de Galicia.
“Adeus, Berta is a film that, with a different perspective from the usual, addresses the conflict of [Galicia’s] so-called ‘lost generation,’ young people who, in the 1980s, fell into the abyss of drugs after the inclusion of drug trafficking in Galicia,” said Tato.
“Told from a deeply identity-driven perspective, the point of view is that of the collateral damage. The film explores universal themes, such as family relationships and their disintegration, the approach to life, empathy, pain, and above all, love,” he added.
Also an actor (“Pulsaciones,” “Lobos e cordeiros”), Tato heads up project development at Kraken Media, including screenwriting and direction. He has directed a string of shorts: “Selfpain” (2018), “Uganda” (2018), “El Jefe” (2019), “Fracturas” (2021), “A Entrevista” (2022), “Compañeiros” (2022) and “Te quiero demasiadas veces” (2023), climaxing in “Adeus, Berta” (2024).
Goodbye, Berta
Tato also helmed web series “Delicias Amargas” (2021), a winner at the 2023 Premios Mestre Mateo 2023. His feature screenplay “El fin de la verdad” took the Daniel Domínguez prize for best Galician-language screenplay.
“The language of the original version of the feature will be in Galician since it is the language in which the family relates, originally from a small town on the Galician coast with a very particular accent of that area in which no one uses another language,” noted Loureiro.
“When they relate in the city where one of the protagonists works, Santiago de Compostela, they will speak in Spanish. Something that happens a lot in Galicia, where Galician is used in the intimacy of the home and Spanish from outside doors,” she added.
Bi-lingual Spanish films in Catalan and Castilian Spanish, the Spanish spoken in Latin America, have began to be embraced in Spain, as was the case of “El 47,” which grossed $4.3 million in Spain, and shared the Spanish Academy best-picture Goya in February.
“For Tornasol Media, it’s very important to discover talent and new voices. ‘Goodbye, Berta’ won the SGAE Julio Alejandro Screenplay Award, we loved the screenplay, and we enthused by the idea or working with Chelo and Fernando Tato’s production house,” Besuievsky added. “For us, Galicia is a second home, since we’ve shot a lot of films there and Galician cinema has immense talent and potential.”
