Canadian Premiere
Camera Lucida
The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future
Directed by Francisca Alegría
Credits
Official selection
Sundance Film Festival 2022
Miami Film Festival 2022
San Francisco International Film Festival 2022
Director
Francisca Alegría
Writer
Francisca Alegría, Manuela Infante, Fernanda Urrejola
Cast
Alfredo Castro, Luis Dubo´, Enzo Ferrada, Mía Maestro, Marcial Tagle, Leonor Varela
contact
Kino Lorber
USA, Germany, France, Chile
2022 98 mins
OV Spanish
Subtitles : English
Genre
Drama
“Teeming with thought-provoking ideas, wonderfully atmospheric, and often visually striking”- Jonathan Holland, SCREEN DAILY
As fish and cows die in droves, affected by the discharge of a cellulose plant nearby the Cruces River in Southern Chile, Magdalena (Mia Maestro)—who, years prior, willfully drove her motorcycle in the same waters and drowned—emerges from the gunk, long-dead yet miraculously young. Wandering through the small town haphazardly, she encounters her widowed husband, now an old man, in a vision that sends a shockwave through the family tree. As their daughter Cecilia (Leonor Varela) and her own children urgently visit the family’s dairy farm, the ghost’s presence invites further supernatural phenomena—most painful of which is, perhaps, the realization of a life of avoidance, the trauma of suicide and climate change intermingled and laid bare for all to see. As the past comes crashing into the present, a miraculous mother and two generations of neglected daughters hear the call of the future in the form of a song.
A remarkable feature debut from Chilean director Francisca Alegría, the evocatively titled THE COW WHO SANG A SONG INTO THE FUTURE opens with a choir of fish and cows—only to become more beguiling from there on. A unique blend of South American magical realism, nigh-classical ghost tale, ecological fable and familial melodrama, it is a hypnotizing genre hybrid that synthesizes various traditions to arrive at a film that feels resolutely urgent, of the moment, yet wholly personal. Full of vivid characters and a mysterious atmosphere that ebbs and flows as the story unfolds, Alegría places us under a ghostly spell, collapsing space and time to our delight. – Ariel Esteban Cayer
Showings
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