Costa Rican filmmaker Hilda Hidalgo is moving ahead with her third fiction feature, Cousins (“Primas”), a coming-of-age drama that centers on two 12-year-old girls who flee their homes after a traumatic incident. Known for Of Love and Other Demons and Violeta at Last, Hidalgo is reuniting with several collaborators, including producer Emi Kodo, cinematographer Nicolás Wong and art director Olga Madrigal.
The new project will blend scripted storytelling with a documentary-like approach. In some scenes, the young leads will film themselves on mobile phones, continuing a method Hidalgo has used before in documentary work. She said the idea is to keep the sense of spontaneity and closeness that documentary images can bring, while still working within a fictional framework. According to the report, the girls’ own footage will become part of the film’s visual language alongside the staged scenes.
Hidalgo said the story is also about the early awakening of desire and the complicated overlap between vulnerability, wonder and abuse. She described sexual violence as a deeply present issue in Costa Rica and said she wanted to approach the subject from the girls’ point of view, focusing on their agency, resilience and rebellion rather than reducing them to the violence done to them.
Casting has not yet begun because Hidalgo is still seeking additional financing and co-production partners. She expects the roles to go to unknown performers or students from Costa Rica’s film and acting schools, and she stressed that securing the budget first is especially important when working with children. The filmmaker also pointed to the growing recognition that smaller film industries need to build projects differently in order to get ambitious work made.
Source: variety.com
