Brazil’s Maya Da-Rin’s “Canção da Noite” (“Nightsong”), director of “Fever,” and Argentine first-time feature director Julia Rodríguez “Los Zorros Grises” have won the first screenwriting mentorship awards adjudicated in a joint initiative by Projeto Paradiso and Foundation Fondosa.
Announced at Cannes Marché du Film on Wednesday, the awards consist in screenwriting mentorship of their upcoming features from Lucrecia Martel (“The Swamp,” “The Holy Girl,” “The Headless Woman,” “Zama”), one of Latin America’s most highly regarded and influential writer-directors.
The awards catch the directors at slightly different stages of their careers. Bowing at the 2019 Locarno Film Festival, “The Fever” (“A Febre”), Da-Rin’s first fiction feature, won best actor (Regis Myrupu) and a Fipresci Prize at the Swiss festival, screened at Toronto, won best director at the Chicago Film Festival and Festival do Rio.
Turning on Justino, a member of the Indigenous Desana people, now security guard at Manaus port, it was hailed by Variety as a modern-day fable about modernity and fabulation and an “entrancing portrait of a man adrift in an urban jungle.”
At least in its version presented in 2022 to the IFF Rotterdam’s CineMart it was described by Da-Rin as a “sensorial and dreamlike experience” set in an environment devastated by soy monoculture, and turning on the growingly deep friendship between Helena, the young daughter of field workers, and Poñy, a solitary Guarani indigenous lady.
Winning development support from the Hubert Bals Fund, it took the top fiction award at CineMart, the Filmmore Prize for post-production services. Its producers take in Brazil’s Tamanduá Vermelho and Cinemascópio, co-founded by Cannes competition competitor Kleber Mendonça Filho, Portugal’s Uma Pedra no Sapato and France’s Still Moving.
An increasingly dark comedic parable exposing the limits of human tolerance, Rodríguez’s “Los Zorros Grises” is set in a wealthy gated community in Argentina which is suddenly invaded by a pack of grey foxes which foul gardens, anything left outside and could be a threat, the more fearful residents argue, for pets and even babies.
Split in their reactions on how to deal with the invaders, the community begins by quarrelling at emergency meeting called to thrash out a strategy regarding the foxes as tensions between its members escalate towards the very violence attributed to the invading beasts.
“Through fiction, I want to ask, and for us to ask, about the limits we are capable of crossing when our own interests are at risk,” says Rodríguez, who cites as possible inspirations both the Javier Bardem starrer “The Good Boss,” from Fernando León de Aranoa – in its evolution from laugh-out-loud humor to its revelation of jus how low human despicability can reach, as well as the Argentinian touch of “Wild Tales.”
Buenos Aires-born, and an alum of ENERC, the film school of Argentina’s film-TV agency INCAA where she currently teaches screenwriting, Rodríguez has worked on writing tables for both scripted series and documentaries for Netflix, Nickelodeon and Argentine TV channels Canal Encuentro and Paka Paka, and the country’s TV Pública.