The Festival de Málaga hosts the screening and colloquium of 'El diablo en el camino'
Carlos Armella presents his new feature film in which he portrays a father's journey across Mexico carrying his son's coffin
On Friday 21 March, the Festival de Málaga hosted the screening of 'La terra negra', the latest film by director Alberto Morais. The film, starring Luis Alberti, Mayra Batalla, Aketzaly Verástegui, Ricardo Uscanga, Osvaldo Sánchez and Roberto Oropeza, portrays a journey marked by death, faith and destiny in a devastated country.
The film tells the story of Juan, a former Federal Army mercenary, who after losing his son Jesús sets out on a journey to bury him in the village where his wife is buried.
After the screening, the audience took part in a colloquium moderated by Fernando Méndez-Leite with the participation of the director Carlos Armella, actor Luis Alberti, and producers Elsa Reyes and Marion D'Ornano.
In the words of the director, 'El diablo en el camino ' "is a film that has been a long time in the making. Many years have passed since the idea and the script were born, and this premiere comes to close a very important cycle. The selection in this Festival was a push to finish this film. We needed an injection of energy”.
Speaking of his influences, Armella explained that he grew up "in a Mexico that had already advanced quite a lot, and fortunately there is Mexican literature and cinema through which we can see how they lived or how they dressed as the way to know and recreate that bygone era".
And on dealing with death, Alberti said that "in Mexico, few parents are able to bury their children. This has always been the case and we continue to live with this; we continue to look for bodies, we continue to carry those bodies. And culturally we have a mystique about life, about death, about religion. We are a pre-Hispanic culture that has been transforming and redefining itself until we have come to have a very practical relationship with death”.
Alberti also talked about what it was like to work carrying a coffin: "There were different types of coffins, some heavier, some less heavy, but after six weeks carrying that on your forehead it becomes heavy. But they are always the elements we work with in fiction, and they also help us to enter and dimension the drama and the experience we are portraying on the screen”.
About the director, producer Elsa Reyes pointed out that "Arnella has a very practical and exact vision as a director. He knows what he wants to film and that allowed us to make the film with the resources we had".
She also commented that "the script had to have some adjustments made to it when it came to the reality of the shoot, but these were always concessions from Arnella to make the film better and also to make the reality of the shoot fit the production size. Period films are a lot more expensive to make and we didn't have a huge budget.
With 'El diablo en el camino', the Feature films Official Competition is drawing to a close, with a selection that this year has brought together more than twenty films.
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