'The Wild Woman,' Cuban Alan González's directorial debut, will have its world premiere in Toronto

August 8, 2023

The feature film The Wild Woman, the directorial debut of Cuban screenwriter and filmmaker Alan González, will have its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), which will take place in that Canadian city between September 7 and 17.

The film, an independent production that received financial support from the Cuban Film Development Fund (FFCC), was included in the festival's Discovery section, which will bring together 26 titles from 25 countries this year.

The Wild Woman stars Cuban actress Lola Amores (Santa and Andrés), who plays a young mother fighting for the love of her son.

The cast also includes debut child actor Jean Marcos Fraga, Isora Morales, Grisell Monzón, Yaité Ruiz, Leandro Sen, Afrodreak, and Jorge Perugorría, in a special collaboration.

Alan González is a graduate of the University of the Arts with a degree in Audiovisual Communication and of the screenwriting program at the International School of Film and Television (EICTV) in San Antonio de los Baños, where he is a teacher.

He previously directed the short films The English Teacher (2015), The Anthill (2017), and The Lovers (2018). As a cinematographer, he worked on The Rose and the Thorn, by Serguéi Svoboda, and The Roof, by Patricia Ramos, among others.

About The Wild Woman, he told DIARIO DE CUBA: "It is a film in almost real time about a mother who survives a crime of passion and must travel through the city to find her 12-year-old son and flee with him, but she must face everyone who judges her for what happened and for who she is, a viral video of the event that puts her at the center of attention and gossip, and her own sense of guilt, which society has instilled in her."

"For me, the complexity of that protagonist is very important, because she is not the typical victim. She is a complex mother. But simply because she and her son love each other, it doesn't matter if she is not the mother others expect her to be, or what happened in the crime, or what is seen in the video. No one has the right to separate them," he added.

"This story was born from a sum of events that happened near me, and that touched me. Surely, the one that affected me most was the video of a woman on fire that overwhelmed me. But at the same time, Nuri Duarte, with whom I worked on the script, was full of stories like this that had marked her," he concluded.