NIEBLA

Screenwriter’s Motivation
A friend’s grandfather told us about a strange town which name he never learned and after many years, its memories still caused him nightmares. In the 50s, he and a partner traveled through the peaceful Ecuadorian Andes. They had to stop to rest in a place in the middle of the fog where the villagers treated them like kings, with an exaggerated kindness that caused strangeness to the arrivals. They were served snacks before the hungry gaze of some locals. They were told that the food was pork and grandpa confessed that it tasted very good. He felt guilty when he saw that the villagers, humble people of the countryside, gave their food to the visitors; then he would feel guilty for a very different reason. While they were sleeping, they heard someone sawing somewhere within the house where they stayed. Then, sneakingly, they managed to spy on the place where the sound came from; they saw the body of a man, hanging, while one of the hostesses sawed a limb to extract its flesh. Grandfather and his friend fled from that town. This story, whether true or not, stayed in our heads.
The Ecuadorian films have few spectators with some exceptions. They tend to be intimate and contemplative films, very close to the author. They lack distance and investigation. Usually, they fall in the second act. With this script we try to focus on the viewer with a defined genre that is attractive, that starts from an investigation, that contains tension and does not have false pretensions. With this script we want to entertain, and we want people to return to theaters to see Ecuadorian films; we want the film not be seen because of a forced patronizing to local productions, but for being good. Ecuadorian cinema is an emerging cinema and if it does not have a movie that holds at the box office and is successful in the domestic market, it will sink easily.
This project was benefited in the 2018 open call of the Institute of Audiovisual Creation of Ecuador, with good criticism coming from the judges. It has been in local laboratories and in the Cinefilia laboratory in Colombia. We are motivated thanks to the consultancies and laboratories because we know from the consultants that this project is original, and that it has potential both in festivals and in the commercial cinema. We have an exciting story; in the style of Alex De La Iglesia, without losing criticism and not falling for easy entertainment. We have a speech that is behind an intense plot, not ahead.
We also look for a transgression that starts from a common and honest neurosis so that it is socially relevant. It may have the form of an entertainment movie but it has a background like They Live by John Carpenter. We feel like cows in a pen that this neurosis produces, that which causes us fear. Cows that graze until eaten, either in a bail-in as happened in 2000 in Ecuador, when several retirees chose to commit suicide when they learned that all their life savings had been lost in other people's pockets. We are afraid of populist promises or simple scams among neighbors. Afraid to be Venezuela. We are afraid of our own nature that has overcome human solidarity. We are afraid of the world and where it is going.
In Latin America and the country, we know that the traumas of previous generations eat away at those present and that the corpses buried in the yard will remain in our children's yard. The crises are repeated. No matter the government, no matter the ideology, we fall into our own voracious nature. The left and the right have failed and those who govern only want to endure and do so thanks to populism, which tells you what you want to hear. We left a populist government that plundered for ten years to enter a government that conceals the thefts of the previous one. In Latin America there are no resolutions, impunity is cultural and latent no matter how much we fight, no matter how many likes we give in social networks, impunity is like the elderly ones of this film, it refuses to die and the more time passes, the stronger it becomes. The cinema is a metaphor of life and with this metaphor we want to demonstrate this sensation, that of being condemned to be devoured.