The ‘Exiled’ producer now acts as production partner on the ambitious Gloria Carrión project inspired by the unpublished book 'Del fuego y de la sangre' by former Sandinista Félix Vijil, based on his personal experience in the Nicaraguan war.
Costa Rican production company Juli Films, known for documentaries Songs from Bosawas (2014), Patrol (Mountainfilm Festival, 2023), and Exiled (Hot Docs, 2019), has boarded Gloria Carrión’s stop-motion documentary Pantasma as a production partner, according to Variety.
The feature will narrate how Félix, a 17-year-old revolutionary, became an adult in the battlefields of the Nicaraguan Sandinista-Contra War of 1982-1989.
Cine CA co-produces the Caja de Luz and Juli Films feature alongside Leonor Zuñiga and Honduras’ Servio Tulio Mateo. Carrión and Zuñiga serve as writers on the “essayistic” film, inspired by the unpublished book Del fuego y de la sangre by former Sandinista Félix Vijil, based on his personal experience in the Nicaraguan war.
At the recent 76th Locarno Film Festival, the Pantasma project was awarded an Open Doors Grant of CHF 25’000; a total of eight projects in development were selected for the event’s co-production platform, the Projects’ Hub. Open Doors is Locarno Pro’s talent development program for artists from underrepresented communities around the world.
According to Carrión, Pantasma explores “a far more complex reality on the ground regarding who the enemy really is, versus what the official propaganda portrays: The realization that the revolution is fighting Nicaraguan peasants and not paid mercenaries will make him question everything he believes in.”
“Something that sets this film apart is that both Leonor, the main producer and I, the director and co-writer, are both in exile,” added Carrión. “This has inspired us to expand the cinematic language through the use of stop-motion, a largely unexplored animation technique in Central America,”
To achieve the stop-motion effects, the team will use dry corn leaf small-scale replicas mixed with archival footage, video art, and photos projected onto a screen. “It is thus through animation that we will reconstruct and reclaim the territory that has been taken away from us while transcending censorship and repression,” Carrión told Variety.
“Instead of letting exile limit us, we chose to turn it into a source of inspiration,” added Zuñiga.
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