This week, the first feature film by Costa Rican director Valentina Maurel is released on screens in France. ” I have electric dreams », multi-awarded in 2022 at the Locarno and San Sebastián festivals where he won the Latin horizonsexplores the tensions within a family unit which has just exploded and more particularly the strong bonds between Eva, the rebellious teenager, and her father.
What color could Eva’s electric dreams be? Electric blue like the color his mother suggests to him to paint the walls of his bedroom? Red like the anger that seems to permanently inhabit the teenager with frowning eyebrows and black eyes?
” I have electric dreams in which my father, when he can’t fix something, smashes it to the ground
he gets angry, shouts, insults
we love each other with cries, sometimes with blows…”
This little poem, it was his father who wrote it. A short text that he reads in a writing workshop under the watchful eye of his daughter. Eva and Martin are inhabited by the same electric dreams, the same anger, the same violence. Eva clings to her father – her parents have just separated – like a castaway to his buoy. A teenager in love with her parent, who is looking for him a new apartment in which she will have to have her own room because she wants to live with him. This quest for an apartment is an opportunity to stroll through San José, the capital of Costa Rica, its popular neighborhoods with small low houses and rutted sidewalks, its dented terrain and its anarchic electric cables that run in all directions, image of these characters who are looking for each other. A city and its intimacy filmed without any exoticism and with all the know-how of the cinematographer Nicolas Wong, a regular in Latin American credits.
Two acting prizes at Locarno
The family of sixteen-year-old Eva is a little sister and a cat troubled by family tensions, a dancing mother – the very beautiful Vivian Rodríguez Barquero is Anca – who tries to put together the exploded puzzle of her family and her House. And finally Martin, the father, a hypochondriac translator, penniless, who is trying to build a new life, inventing himself as a painter-sculptor-poet. And so Eva, a teenager who tries to appropriate hers. And it starts with his body. Eva, played by Daniela Marín Navarro, prize winner at Locarno last year (like Reinaldo Amien Gutiérrez who plays Martin), is always on screen, often filmed close-up, on edge. She scratches, sniffs, masturbates, explores this changing body that she discovers (a vein previously explored by Valentina Maurel in her short film Lucia en el limbo). She also fights… with her father.
Intimate violence in the image of daily violence: that of the television images that mother Anca banned, that of the street fight between young people, while three old street musicians perform a famous bolero (mi jacket), that of a car chase… A violence on several levels, almost banal, far from any exotic otherness, claims the director. ” European audiences expect Latin American films to be cultural objects, whereas they should simply be cinema objects “, explains Valentina Maurel who, after having left Costa Rica to study in Europe, returned there to film there, being part of a revival of national cinema with many directors such as Ariel Escalante MezaPaz Fabrega, Alexandra Latishev Salazar, Carolina Arias or even Nathalie Álvarez Mesen whose films are shown in festivals, but few in theaters yet.
Films that explore the intimacy of friendly or romantic relationships, family life, contrary to an “exotic” cinema.