Fasten Movies Revs Up Catalan Cinema (EXCLUSIVE)

Adrià Monés’ Fasten Films, producer of Cannes-selected “The End of It,” “Strawberries” and “Rehearsals of a Revolution,” has introduced a brand new slate of movies led by Catalan expertise Mar Coll, Maria M. Bayona, Adrià Garcia and Nely Reguera.

Fasten can be creating debut options from Víctor Alonso-Berbel, Jordi Boquet, Carlos Lechuga and Oriol Pérez, positioning the Barcelona, Madrid and Canary Island-based manufacturing home as a driving power in a new-phase and already vibrant Catalan Cinema.

Mar Coll: ‘Dasha’

Col (“Salve María”) is about to direct “Dasha,” “a dream project for us as producers, a mafia thriller and black comedy set in the wild, excessive Lloret de Mar of the 2000s, where entertainment and political tension collide,” stated Monés.  

“Dasha” additionally marks “a bold new step for Mar Coll, one of the filmmakers who helped shape a new Catalan cinema, working here with Valentina Viso, one of the key screenwriters in Spanish cinema, and Nataliya Kolesova, an emerging Ukrainian-Russian-Catalan voice with a singular perspective,” Monés added.

María M. Bayona: ‘The First Witch’

Following on her English-language debut, Cannes Premiere title “The End of It” starring Rebecca Corridor, Noomi Rapace and Gael García Bernal, Bayona will shoot in Catalan, her native tongue, “The First Witch,” set to be shot within the Pyrenees.

“A rare voice in Spanish cinema, Maria combines emotional precision, genre ambition and a fearless sense of scale, and this new project feels both culturally rooted and unapologetically ambitious,” Monés enthused.

Adrià Garcia: ‘Sira and the Hidden Arcadia’

Fasten’s first household animated characteristic mixing 2D, 3D and cease movement, Garcia’s “Sira and the Hidden Arcadia” will likely be made in collaboration with Guillermo del Toro’s Guadalajara-based Taller del Chucho and written with Mixtec filmmaker and screenwriter Ángeles Cruz and Ulises Porra.

Nely Reguera: ‘Teresa Up in Arms’

“A dramatic comedy full of emotion, slapstick and tenderness, in which Nely Reguera completely subverts the traditional figure of the stepmother,” stated Monés, Reguera’s new venture, “Teresa Up in Arms” “moves as far away as possible from the Walt Disney archetype: it laughs at menopause, mindfulness and contemporary self-help culture, while fighting for a more generous, complex idea of family,” Monés added.

Reguera will write with Eduard Sola, a 2025 unique screenplay Goya Award winner for “A House in Flames,” and Viso, Mar Coll’s common co-scribe and a Catalan Academy Gaudi Award orginal screenplay winner for 2024’s “Salve Maria.”

Fasten’s Subsequent Step Ahead

Rolling off a wealthy new expertise ecosystem of movie faculties, led by Pompeu Fabra U and the Escac, Catalonia’s movie trade advantages massively from sturdy assist this decade from the Catalan Authorities’s ICEC film-TV company, which launched a Minority Co-Manufacturing Function Movie Fund in 2020 and adopted up with €1.5 million ($1.7 million) grants for higher-end Catalan-language TV collection.

Carla Simon’s “Summer 1993,” a 2017 Berlin Greatest First Function Movie, introduced down the flag on the closest Spain has needed to a movie motion in a long time: Auteurist fiction movies grounded in a big sense upon a particular place, however which speak about huge image social and gender points. Simon’s “Alcarràs” received a Berlinale Golden Bear, “20,000 Species of Bees,” a Catalan co-production a yr later. 

Bulwarked by Catalonia’s Minority Co-Manufacturing Fund, Monés has already carved out a status for remarkably cosmopolitan co-production. He partnered, as an example, on Cannes’ 2023 Digicam d’Or winner “Inside the Cocoon Shell.” Fasten Movies’ new slate, nevertheless, now goals to broaden the Catalan cinema’s gamut, go pedal to metallic on ambition and add a broader viewers edge. 

Fasten’s new slate represents “the kind of cinema we believe in: ambitious, original and unafraid,” Monés advised Selection. “They grow out of the intimate drama that has defined much of recent Catalan auteur cinema, a tradition we deeply admire and feel indebted to, but they also try to take a step further, embracing genre, spectacle, emotion and political engagement, while reclaiming cinema as a collective celebration.”

That new ambition cuts numerous methods. One will be scale. “The End of It” weighs in with a price range of almost €8 million ($9.3 million), stated Monés. “First features with this budget are very difficult to finance,” he acknowledged. He managed to mesh, nevertheless, financed worldwide co-production – BBC Movies, Norway’s Eye Eye Photos, behind “Sentimental Value,” in addition to Canary Island tax incentives, a Spanish ICAA movie company subsidy, a Filmin streaming service pre-buy and U.S. buyers. The Mediapro Studio took an fairness place and made a Latin America pre-buy.

One other step ahead for Monés is definitely style, pure for a producer who reduce his enamel making “[REC]” within the Canary Islands. Monés calls “The End of It” a close to future drama with style parts. Bayona’s follow-up, “The First Witch,” is about towards the earliest witch hunts within the fifteenth century. “The film reminds me a bit of Chicho Ibañez Serrador’s ‘Who Can Kill a Child?’ It’s genre edge, of about talking about society, violence suffered by children, and how it repeats in time.” 

The ambition can be creative, nevertheless. “Sira and the Hidden Arcadia” “brings together Mixtec culture and Catalan modernism in an adventurous, emotional and visually singular world. It speaks about identity in all its forms, gender, origin and belonging, at a time when the world seems to be turning inwards,” Monés defined.

Behind such expansive strikes, nevertheless, is among the solely manufacturing methods which has labored down the a long time: Expertise.

“For me that always comes first,” Monés advised Selection. I keep in mind how, six or seven years in the past, a mutual good friend despatched me María’s shorts they usually drove me wild with enthusiasm. I advised María: ‘Whatever you want, let’s do it.’ So we started to develop a screenplay after which María stated she had one other concept however was a really costly sci-fi movie. I stated we may by no means make it simply in Spain. María stated she wished to make it. So I stated we’d need to make it a unique means.”