On Monday, Cine Albéniz hosted the premiere of the third film in the ‘Zonazine’ section of the Festival de Málaga: a rural tale cast with amateur actors, Historia de pastores, directed by the Andalusian filmmaker Jaime Puertas Castillo.

The film tells the story of a student and two shepherds in the Granada highlands of 2027. Among sheep, ruins and drones, the characters meet, interact and connect with each other around the legend of a farmhouse that appears and disappears.

After the screening, in Cine Albéniz’s Hall 3, a press conference was held with its director, Jaime Puertas Castillo, the actresses Mari Marín and Virtudes Gómez, the actors Yusuf Román and Antón Rodríguez, and the producer María Riera.

The director explained the background to the film to the audience and journalists: The project has been years in the making: it started when I was a child, when I used to go to breakfast with my grandmother and her friends, getting together in the streets to have a cool drink on summer evenings in the village, and it draws on all the stories they told each other, in relation to a collective memory of the farmsteads'.

During the press conference, Mari Marín, one of the leading actresses, spoke about how she and the director like to explore abandoned farmhouses: 'It’s a hobby that we love, more than exploring the farmhouses, we scan them, we don’t leave a single spot unchecked. And this is something that Jaime has captured perfectly in the film'.

In terms of the film’s references, the director wanted to highlight the writing of Donna Haraway, or the book of essays ‘Telling is Listening’ by Ursula K. Le Guin, and films by Studio Ghibli and Abbas Kiarostami.

Jaime Puertas Castillo was born in Puebla de don Fadrique in 1996, but grew up between Andalusia and Catalonia. He started filming in his homeland, with family and friends from the village, and it was in Barcelona where he met the team he now makes films with. They made Los páramos together in 2019, and are now releasing Historia de pastores, their first feature film.

Historia de pastores was selected for the Bright Future section of the Rotterdam Festival. It has not yet been commercially distributed in cinemas, although the idea is to distribute it with the help of the Granada provincial Council.