Costa Rican filmmaker Patricia Velásquez Guzmán, whose drama “The Skin of the Water” world premiered at Locarno last year, is gearing up to shoot a new project titled “Where Do Birds Go When It Rains?”. The drama is produced by Velasquez’s Costa Rica-based Tiempo Liquido and has just landed a co-production deal with Spain’s Potenza Producciones (“Calladita,” “The Memory of Water”) with filming planned to start in the second semester of 2025.
The film will follow Lola, a trans woman returning to the coastal town she was forced to leave a decade before to go look for Rosa, her old love. Lola finds out Rosa died while giving birth to Lola’s biological daughter, a baby girl, and now faces the dilemma of whether to accept her motherhood in a conservative, moralistic town or continue with the freedom of her nomadic lifestyle.
Velásquez, who is currently delivering her first edition at the helm of the Costa Rica International Film Festival, recalls her time working as a psychologist on a project with sex workers many years ago, where she met a trans woman caring for a young girl who had been abandoned. Despite the loving, caring relationship between the two, the state refused to give custody to the mother figure because of her gender identity.
“From this story, I became very interested in the theme of motherhood, and it led to a series of questions: Does this thing called maternal instinct really exist? Why does society reject unconventional motherhood so strongly? What is the underlying issue?,” the director added.
“This film is about otherness, about deep-rooted social prejudices against trans and impoverished people,” she continues. “Ricardo’s decision to become Lola has forced her to endure poverty and homelessness in a country where being trans is still considered sinful. Even in academic discourses, transgender people are still described as ‘trapped in the wrong body,’ which assumes that the only valid options are binary, man or woman, and that other bodies must be modified to fit that framework.”
For over a year now while working on the project, Velásquez has been meeting with a trans visual artist to learn more about the life of trans people in Costa Rica and more broadly, as well as reading texts from trans activists like Paul Preciado and Miquel Missé. The director said her statement on her latest work “may give the impression of a polemical film” but that her intention is the opposite. “I would like to film a very sensory movie where the relationships of the characters and the images presented pose contradictions and questions to the viewer.”
The film will also broach issues of class inequality in Costa Rica, with Lola leaving a big city and heading to the Pacific Coast, a region Velásquez says presents “a great contrast in privilege.” “You have luxury hotels full of rich tourists enjoying their resort holidays but also people who don’t have access to water. I was very interested in this inequality as the backdrop for this story.”
Carlo D’Ursi, producer at Potenza Producciones, says co-producing “Where Do Birds Go When It Rains?” was a “natural decision” to their company. “Patricia Velásquez Guzmán brings a poetic and deeply political gaze that resonates with our company’s commitment to socially engaged cinema. What sets this project apart is its lyrical approach to grief, violence, and resilience, into a queer inclusive perspective — without ever losing sight of the beauty that can exist even in the most fragile places.”
“Where Do Birds Go When It Rains?” received grants from Costa Rica’s Fauno Fund and Ibermedia.