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Among the five Madrid Film School (ECAM) Incubator titles this year comes “The Unmoving Hands” (“Las manos quietas”) from Barcelona-based Victor Diago, who describes his project as a “queer horror story about desire,
love and the unstoppable urge to let oneself be swallowed by that abyss.”
The horror thriller follows Hector, who roams the streets of Barcelona seeking young men for his father, known as the Doctor, who is 140 years old and finally feeling the weight of his years. The Doctor feeds off these youth who come willingly to bask in his power and enjoy the illusion of being loved. Anxious to save his father, Hector is a ready accomplice until Bilal appears, who he falls in love with and tries to save from the fate of the others.
“The victims don’t see themselves as victims. They willingly, so to speak, go into the wolf’s den. They know what they are and what they will become – and they want to become that.”
“At the heart of the script lies an extraction system: powerful men who consume the vital energy of the young men who lack it,” he said, describing it as a “direct allegory of late capitalism.”
The setting, Barcelona’s sketchy El Raval neighborhood, is pivotal to the story. “El Raval is a space with a specific political history. A neighborhood of immigration, marginalization and coexistence between cultures. The characters who inhabit it are the populations that the city expels to its margins while consuming them as fuel for itself,” Diago explained.
Given its setting, the film will feature an international cast with dialogue in Catalan, Spanish, French and Arabic. “We’ve always talked about the film having a kind of Tower of Babel feel, with different cultures and languages mixed together. That gives us flexibility when looking for international partners and we’re now focused on finding co-producers who can join us in both the development and production stages,” said its producer-executive producer Andrés Mellinas.
“The film has a sense of happiness and lightness, so you understand why these people are together and why they’re having such a good time. But gradually, something starts to nag at you: there’s clearly something wrong, and something horrible is going to happen. We wanted to play with that tension rather than immediately presenting a world of predators and victims, or good guys and bad guys, and instead explore the gray areas. And all of this unfolds in a completely surreal world inhabited by vampires,” Diago noted.
According to Mellinas, the project is in an advanced development stage, having passed through various programs, including the Crossroads Co-Production Forum in Thessaloniki, Greece and the Mediterranean Film Institute script lab last year. It already has a berth on Spanish streaming platform Filmin, which it got during the ECAM forum.
After securing federal and regional funds, they hope to lock in regional and national television support.
According to Mellinas, they’re also working on a short film based in the universe of the movie. “We are using that as a proof of concept, but also as a way of financing the movie itself.”
