Natalia Solórzano Vásquez’s next film, “Spells to Revive a Witch,” has found new partners in the Spanish company Testaferro and the Uruguayan Guay Films. The hybrid documentary, aimed at the Costa Rica Media Market, is produced by Costa Rican company Sputnik Films. Mariana Murillo’s label has already produced “Tierra de ashes” by Sofía Quirós Úbeda, selected at Cannes, and is 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 company Sputnik Films. His debut feature, “Avanzaré tan slowly”, premiered at the IDFA in 2019 and his short films have been successful at the Costa Rica International Film Festival. Her latest project is a “casting to embody” the 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.”

talking to VarietySolórzano Vásquez says he discovered Soralla “almost by accident” while investigating women who had “appeared in Costa Rican media.” “I had never heard of her before, which caught my attention immediately. She had been one of the most recognizable women in the country, but she had almost completely disappeared from our collective memory.”

“That absence became the starting point of the film,” he adds. “The more I searched for Soralla, the more I realized that I was also searching for all the women whose lives are slowly fading away 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 oneself, but also the price that women often pay for stepping outside of the roles that society has assigned to them.”

Murillo, who has known Solórzano Vásquez since university, says that “he has always been fascinated by his ability to observe and make us observe everyday life with a unique combination of tenderness, humor and critical vision.” “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 beginning: who we are today is nothing more than a reflection of who we once were.”

When asked how it feels to make a film about memory in Latin America at a time when films addressing issues of personal and collective memory in the region have had great international success, the director says that memory “fascinates” her because “it is always incomplete.” “We tend to think of it as something that preserves the past, but also transforms it.”

“This film doesn’t try to reconstruct Soralla exactly as she was,” he notes. “It asks what happens when almost everything is gone and only fragments remain. Those fragments live inside other people, and each time they are remembered, they become something slightly different. I am interested in that fragile space where memory, imagination and lived experience coexist.”

As for being part of a strong generation of women filmmakers in Costa Rica, which has seen names like Valentina Maurel and Sofía Quirós Úbeda emerge, Solórzano Vásquez says she feels “very lucky” to belong to this outstanding group. “Costa Rican cinema is still small, which means that we know each other well and we have grown together,” he adds. “There is an incredible diversity of voices and many women are telling stories that simply have not been told before. I think we are 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 project “Spells to revive a witch” has been developed through the Rueda Program of the Spanish Film Academy, CIMA Impulsa and Proyecta de Ventana Sur.

The Costa Rica Media Market will take place from July 14 to 15.