'Natural Phenomena' wins the award at the Guadalajara Festival; Andrea and Osvaldo Doimeadios, Lola Amores and Mario Guerra perform

July 18, 2024

The film, directed by Marcos Díaz Sosa, is set in the late 1980s and features performances by Andrea Doimeadiós, Lola Amores, Mario Guerra and Osvaldo Doimeadiós.

The film Natural Phenomena, a co-production between Cuba, Argentina and France that marks the debut of Cuban filmmaker Marcos Díaz Sosa, won the Award for Best Ibero-American Fiction Feature Film Debut at the 39th edition of the Guadalajara Festival.

The film, which received funding from the Ibermedia Program in the 2019 call for proposals and from the Cuban Film Development Fund, from the Cuban Institute of Film Art and Industries (ICAIC), is set in the late 1980s in Cuba. With a screenplay by Díaz Sosa himself, Natural Phenomena features performances by Andrea Doimeadiós, Lola Amores, Mario Guerra, Osvaldo Doimeadiós, Armando Miguel Gómez and Reinier Díaz Vega.

According to the website of said program, the synopsis of the film, which was submitted to both funds under the production title Obra de choque, is: "On an isolated farm, in a small town in Santa Clara, lives Vilma, a young nurse who dreams of a better place to raise her future baby with her husband Iván, who has a disability. But neither her dedication to her work nor her talent as a sharpshooter offer her a way out of her harsh reality. After a tornado carries her flying to a tourist cay where she will live with Government celebrities and Soviet tourists, she realizes that there's no place like home and returns to her farm to face her reality".

The production companies responsible for this fiction feature film were: Gema films, from Argentina; Petit Film, from France; Cinevinay, from Mexico; and Marinca Filmes from Cuba.

Díaz Sosa, who at age 17 directed along with Kayra Gómez Barrios and Marcel Hechavarría his first work, the documentary Fractal (2006), is a graduate of the Screenplay specialization at the International School of Film and TV of San Antonio de los Baños (EICTV) and of Dramaturgy at the Higher Institute of Art (ISA).

Recently, the short film The Rubber Boy, written and directed by Díaz Sosa in 2020, participated in the Toulouse Latin American Film Festival. Earlier, in 2020, it had participated in the International Festival of New Latin American Cinema in Havana.

The Guadalajara Festival, the longest-running in Mexico, took place over nine days in that city and, among other awards, gave the Best Mexican Film award to the film They Won't Move Us, by Pierre Saint Martin, while Best Direction went to Isabel Cristina Fregoso with The Muleteers (Mexico), which also earned the award for Best Cinematography, in this case for María Sarasvati Herrera.

The award for Best Performance was won by Juan Ramón López, for his work in Shame (Mexico), by Miguel Salgado, while the Audience award went to They Won't Move Us. For its part, the Young Jury award went to Treatise on Invisibility (Mexico), by Luciana Kaplan.

At the closing of the event, actor Diego Luna stated that the festival "is a space to nourish the industry".