“The Darkness” fantasy psychological thriller tops Panama Fest’s Meets

“The Darkness” fantasy psychological thriller tops Panama Fest’s Meets

PanARMENIAN.Net - Confirming its status as one of the most buzzed-about Mexican movie projects, Daniel Castro Zimbron’s fantasy psychological thriller “The Darkness” won the Panama Festival’s inaugural Meets Latin American Co-Production Market, taking home a straight $25,000 cash prize, Variety reported.

First presented at Ventana Sur’s Blood Window, “Darkness” won the Panama Meets award – an invitation to Meets – at March’s Guadalajara Ibero-American Co-Production Market. The Cannes Festival has also selected it for its May Atelier workshop.

Presided over by Paul Hudson at Outsider Pictures, the Meets industry jury chose “The Darkness” on the basis of its worldwide distribution potential.

“Castro Zimbron is a very talented director who knows exactly what he is doing,” Hudson said.

Produced by Pablo Zimbron Alva at Mexico-based Varios Lobos, “The Darkness” has already attracted prestige Mexican partners for its development: Jorge Michel Grau and Mayra Espinosa’s Velarium Arts and Ozcar Ramirez’s Arte Mecanica.

Fitting squarely into Spain and Mexico’s burgeoning modern auteur genre tradition that explores dysfunctional family dynamics – think “Pan’s Labyrinth,” “The Orphanage,” “We Are What We Are” – “Darkness” will star Brontis Jodorosky (“El Coco,” “Coco Before Chanel”), Zimbron Castro announced at Meets.

The star of the director’s feature debut “Tau,” Jodorosky plays a father who shelters his children in a benighted forest cabin whorled in dense fog and shrouded in perpetual twilight after an undefined global catastrophe. To protect his children, he claims the air is poisoned, and a wild beast stalks the woods, eager for human prey. At Panama, Castro Zimbron described “The Darkness” as a “story of forgiveness, redemption.”

The Meets industry jury, which included Ernesto Munoz Cote at Fox Intl. Channels/Moviecity, Alazraki Entertainment’s Leonardo Zimbron, Paula Gastaud at Sofa Digital and Pretty Pictures’ Aranka Matits, gave a special mention to Frank Spano’s “Gauguin & Canal.” A bigscreen makeover of his award-winning play, it captures the French painter in Tahiti, near death and on trial, thinking back to his sojourn in “savage” Panama, from which he drew much of the inspiration for his paintings. Jean Reno and Carlos Bardem have signed letters of intent to play the painter and the friend he betrayed, Spano said at Meets.

“This is a project we’d all like to see developed further. It has great potential,” said Hudson, explaining the jury special mention.

Among buzz titles at Meets, there was positive reaction to Violeta Ayala’s percipient and pointed docu feature “The Bolivian Case,” which teases out the racism in Norwegian press coverage of one of the biggest narcotics case in its history; Lucia Gaviglio Salkind’s Uruguay-Brazil co-prod “My World Cup,” targeting 8- to 15-year-olds and their families and turning on a 13-year-old soccer star who suffers a knee injury, also attracted a large number of one-to-one meetings.

Among Panama film awards, the biggest governmental production grant, $700,000, went to another Meets project, Aldo Rey Valderrama’s social drama-road movie “Dream About the City,” produced and presented confidently by Miguel Gonzalez and Mariel Garcia Spooner at new production house Contraplano Films.

Part of the Panama Intl. Film Festival (PIFF), Meets ran April 7-9.

 Top stories
Paris Center Pompidou Musée National d’Art Moderne will host the screening of Sergei Parajanov’s "Triptych" on December 15.
The creative crew of the Public TV had chosen 13-year-old Malena as a participant of this year's contest.
She called on others to also suspend their accounts over the companies’ failure to tackle hate speech.
Penderecki was known for his film scores, including for William Friedkin’s “The Exorcist”, Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining”.
Partner news
---