“Death in Torrevieja,” the anticipated first feature of Adriana Arratia expanding on her eye-catching same-titled 2023 short, has tied down its first international co-production accord, with Luxembourg’s Deal Productions.
Founded by “Bad Banks’ actor Désirée Nosbusch and Alexandra Hoesdorff (“High Fantasy”) and signed by CAA in 2024, Deal is behind love story “Poison,” starring Tim Roth and Trine Dyrholm, Western adventure “Flatland,” which opened the 2019 Berlinale Panorama and Toronto-selected “Souvenir,” toplining Isabelle Huppert.
Attracting further upstream partners, usually a very good sign for a film still in development, “Death in Torrevieja,” a 2025 Berlinale Talent Project Market title, is set to be distributed in Spain by ADSO whose releases take in Oscar laureate “Flow” and Cannes Uncertain Regard winner “Pillion.”
In another move, Valencia-based pubcaster À Punt has pre-bought free-to-air TV rights.
Starring Caterina Hurtado, who fronted the short, and Ana Maria Jimenez (“Simon el Mago”), “Death in Torrevieja” is produced by Valencia-Barcelona new talent axis Nakamura Films/Maqueta Films, headed by Araceli Isaac Delso and Jordi Llorca, both behind Alex Montoya’s 2024 “The House,” a critics’ pick at the 2024 Malaga Festival which won six awards and went on to score €588,216 ($682,330) in box office in Spain – impressive for an independent title from a then little-known director.
Deal Productions “deliver high-quality, broadly commercial products with a feminine touch.” That looks like a good description of Arratia’s feature if the 15-minute short it expands is anything to go by.
Scooping best direction at the Madrid-PNR Film Festival, and best short at both the Sant Joan and BCN Film Fest, both in Barcelona, the short feature stars Hurtado as Chetia, a “nini” – someone who’s not studying nor of fixed employ – who organises illicit balconing bets for drunk tourists.
She yearns to escape to Madrid and star in “Big Brother” but is anchored in Torrevieja, a low cost tourist resort in southern Spain, by her very young child Yeray.
Shot in a tawdry pop-out aesthetic, “Death in Torrevieja” draws on a 1980s home-grown Spanish sub-genre, the so-called “quinqui” cinema – think Carlos Saura’s 1981 Berlin Golden Bear winner “Deprisa, Deprisa” or Eloy de la Iglesia’s 1980 “Navajeros.” This featured marginalized working class criminals, heists, police brutality, racy diction, heroin abuse and a vague sense of desire for freedom and visceral contempt for authority and middle-class convention.
Arratia in particular worships at the altar of De la Iglesia whose highly political, outspoken but structured political melodramas, made from the ‘60s to the ‘80s, underscored how Spain’s establishment exploited it young proles, pushed into crime for a lack of real economic alternatives. Meanwhile, patriarchal authorities appeal to the values of family, embodied in De la Iglesia’s “El Pico” and “El Pico II” by a Civil Guard father whose dream is for his drug-addict son to join the force.
De la Iglesia’s delinquent hero were men, however. In the feature, as in the short, one plot driver looks set to be the death of a tourist in a balconing bet which forces Chetia to make “desperate decisions outside the law,” one plot description runs.
“Adriana’s debut feature ‘Death in Torrevieja’ brings a fresh female perspective to Spanish ‘quinqui’ cinema, with a bold contemporary voice and a strong focus on life at the social margins. The film mixes raw realism with a vibrant aesthetic inspired by today’s youth culture,” said producer Araceli Isaac Delso.
“Set against Spain’s cheap coastal tourism economy, the film follows a marginalized woman forced into motherhood, who feels no love for her child and does not wish to take on the role, while fighting for survival in a town shaped by precariousness and phenomena like balconing,” Arratia added. “Inspired by Eloy de la Iglesia, it reimagines the ‘quinqui’ genre through a female lens, with a woman director and a non-professional lead at its center.”
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