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Natalia Solórzano Vásquez’s upcoming “Spells to Revive a Witch” has found new partners in Spain’s Testaferro and Uruguay’s Guay Films. The hybrid documentary, headed to the Costa Rica Media Market, is produced by Costa Rica’s
Sputnik Films. Mariana Murillo’s label has previously produced Sofía Quirós Ubeda’s Cannes-selected “Land of Ashes,” and it’s currently in post-production with the filmmaker’s follow-up, “Madre Pájaro.”
“Spells to Revive a Witch” marks the first collaboration between Natalia Solórzano Vásquez and the burgeoning Sputnik Films banner. Her debut feature, “Avanzaré tan despacio,” premiered at IDFA in 2019 and her short films have found success at the Costa Rica International Film Festival. Her latest project is a “casting call to embody” Costa Rican fortune teller Soralla de Persia, who rose to fame in the 1960s. The hybrid documentary will become a “stage” where “different women invoke her spirit through memories, interpretations, and personal experiences.”
Speaking with Variety, Solórzano Vásquez says she discovered Soralla “almost by accident” while researching women who had “appeared in Costa Rican media.” “I had never heard of her before, which immediately struck me. She had once been one of the most recognizable women in the country, yet she had almost completely disappeared from our collective memory.”
“That absence became the starting point of the film,” she adds. “The more I searched for Soralla, the more I realized I was also searching for all the women whose lives slowly vanish because no one thought they were worth preserving.”
The director says the fortune teller made her think about the women in her own family, who belonged “to the same generation but lived very different lives.” “She represents the possibility of reinventing yourself, but also the price women often pay for stepping outside the roles society has assigned to them.”
Murillo, who has known Solórzano Vásquez since university, says she has “always been fascinated by her ability to observe and make us observe everyday life with a unique combination of tenderness, humor, and critical insight.” “Soralla’s story gave us the perfect excuse to work together and explore a female character through a deeply performative lens, guided by a feminist perspective and a conviction we have shared from the very beginning: who we are today is nothing more than a reflection of who we once were.”
Asked about how she feels about making a film about memory in Latin America at a time when films broaching issues of both personal and collective memory in the region have found great international success, the director says memory “fascinates” her because “it is always incomplete.” “We tend to think of it as something that preserves the past, but it also transforms it.”
“This film doesn’t try to reconstruct Soralla exactly as she was,” she notes. “It asks what happens when almost everything has disappeared, and only fragments remain. Those fragments live inside other people, and every time they are remembered, they become something slightly different. I’m interested in that fragile space where memory, imagination and lived experience coexist.”
As for being a part of a strong generation of female filmmakers in Costa Rica — which has seen the rise of names such as Valentina Maurel and Sofia Quirós Ubeda — Solórzano Vásquez says she feels “very lucky” to belong to this noteworthy group. “Costa Rican cinema is still small, which means we know each other well and have grown alongside one another,” she adds. “There is an incredible diversity of voices, and many women are telling stories that simply hadn’t been told before. I think we’re less interested in representing an idea of Costa Rica than in questioning it, expanding it, and finding new cinematic languages to talk about who we are.”
The “Spells to Revive a Witch” project has been developed through the Rueda Program of the Spanish Film Academy, CIMA Impulsa and Ventana Sur’s Proyecta.
The Costa Rica Media Market runs July 14-15.
