‘Lullaby’ Producer Buenapinta Media Units New Slate

Madrid-based Buenapinta Media, a producer on Maite Alberdi’s Oscar-nominated “The Mole Agent” and Alauda Ruiz de Azúa’s “Lullaby,” has unveiled a improvement slate that features new options by Ruiz de Azúa, Cinéfondation alum Guillermo García López, and Borja Cobeaga and Victor García León.

The slate announcement comes one week after “Lullaby,” hailed by Pedro Almodovar as “undoubtedly the perfect debut in Spanish cinema for years,” triumphed on the 2023 Spanish Academy Awards, successful greatest first function, actress (Laila Costa) and supporting actress (Susi Sánchez)  

The 2023-24 manufacturing slate at Buenapinta Media, headed by Marisa Fernández Armenteros, additionally options Isabel Coixet’s just-announced “Un Amor.”

“Lullaby’s” 4 producers — Sandra Hermida, Buenapinta Media, Encanta Movies and Sayaka Producciones — are actually backing improvement on Ruiz de Azúa’s second function. She is writing the screenplay. 

Buenapinta can be creating “Cuidad sin sueño,” from García López, whose “Frágil Equilibrio” gained a 2016 greatest doc function Goya. “Ciudad” is a social-issue movie turning on the Canada Actual, a shanty settlement alongside a 14-kilometer stretch of highway, principally in Madrid. 

Two of Spain’s prime comedy skills, scribe-director Cobeaga (“Spanish Affair”) and García León (“Los Europeos”) are writing “Altas Capacidades” (“Higher Class”), a social satire. León will direct.

“Impressed by a real-life occasion, it activates the coexistence and contradictions of relations between Spanish higher and center lessons, independently of their ideology or code of ethics,” stated Armenteros. 

“A subtle comedy, it talks very properly concerning the good intentions which, typically, fall far in need of the intent”, she added. Orange Spain is a monetary associate.  Sayaka can be backing improvement. 

Shaping up as one of many high-profile Spanish productions of 2023, “Un Amor,” which matches into manufacturing on Feb. 20, adapts the same-titled novel by Spain’s Sara Mesa, hailed by Spanish newspaper El País as the perfect ebook of 2020.

Starring Laia Costa (“Victoria”) and Hovik Keuchkerian, greatest identified for his flip as Bogotá in “La Casa de Papel” (aka “Cash Heist”), “Un Amor” activates a translator, Nat, in her thirties who goes to dwell in a benighted small village, her metropolis origins clashing with its male inhabitants. Ostracized, she plunges right into a dependent obsessive love affair. 

“‘Un Amor’ confirms that mendacity beneath need, affection and worry, the irrational stays,” stated Fernández Armenteros. That’s why the story’s fascinated so many readers,  my companions Sandra Hermida and Belén Atienza and myself. A neighborhood of robust characters in an atmosphere recognizable in anywhere on this planet.”

Hermida and Atienza’s credit embody J.A. Bayona’s upcoming “The Society of Snow” and “The Not possible.” 

“I wish to be concerned in initiatives which I can defend due to their points and inventive ambition,” Fernández Armenteros stated.

Introduced at Berlin, the slate underscores Europe’s surging co-production scene, as producers adapt to new market situations and capitalise on connections made at improvement labs throughout the continent. The final word mainstay of this mannequin is the resilience of public movie funding which has risen, not fallen, as governments prioritize movie and TV as strategic sectors serving to to energy get better from pandemic.

In Spain, for instance, the movie safety fund of the ICAA central movie company has sky-rocketed rose 52.8% to $114.91 million in 2023, an all-time report.

Triple Goya successful “Lullaby” “couldn’t have been made with quotas [for women directors] and a hike in selective movie funding in Spain,” Fernández Armenteros attested. 

Additionally, “I consider in co-production. It’s the tradition I used to be born and grew up in. My first traineeship was in Eurimages. I lived this tradition at Mediapro,” stated Fernández Armenteros. 

Fernández Armenteros exec produced  “Lullaby” with Hermida, Manuel Calvo at Madrid’s Encanta Movies and Nahikari Ipiña at Bilbao’s Sayaka Producciones. The identical companions are backing Ruiz de Azúa’s second function. 

Fernández Armenteros is one among 5 co-producers on “The Mole Agent.” On “Un Amor,” Hermida relies out of Barcelona, Fernández Armenteros in Madrid. “Ciudad sin sueño” is being structured as a co-production with France.

“We’re now sharing tales with different factors of view and views and a brand new technology of expertise,” she added.

The surge in co-production marks a sea-change in outlook for Europe’s cinema. Disadvantaged of markets, with restricted monetary sources and little non-public funding, Europe’s arthouse cinema can solely look to public TV and public-sector funding. “So I’ve to show to different international locations to make movies,” the Spanish producer reasoned. 

“It’s the one method for small, startup firms reminiscent of Buenapinta Media to tackle initiatives,” she added.

“4 eyes see greater than two,” she says. “There are such a lot of crises in filmmaking that it’s higher to deal with them with others. Quickness, diversify dangers and share alternatives”.

Movie Constellation takes an affiliate producer credit score on “Un Amor.” “The audiovisual world is consistently altering,” Fernández Armenteros stated. “Now we have to search for help from distributors who’re in fixed contact with the market.”