Natalia Solórzano Vásquez’s upcoming hybrid documentary Spells to Revive a Witch has added new partners in Spain’s Testaferro and Uruguay’s Guay Films, according to the report. The project, produced by Costa Rica’s Sputnik Films, is heading to the Costa Rica Media Market and marks the first collaboration between the filmmaker and the company.
The film centers on Soralla de Persia, a Costa Rican fortune teller who became widely known in the 1960s. Rather than presenting a straightforward biography, the project is described as a kind of casting call to embody Soralla, with different women bringing her back through memory, interpretation and personal experience. Solórzano Vásquez has said she came across Soralla while researching women who had appeared in Costa Rican media, and was struck by how someone once so recognizable had nearly disappeared from public memory.
That absence became the starting point for the film, which the director says is also connected to her own family history and to questions about the roles women are expected to play. She has described Soralla as a figure who suggests both the freedom of reinvention and the cost of stepping outside social expectations. Producer Mariana Murillo, who has known Solórzano Vásquez since university, said the story offered a chance to explore a female character through a performative, feminist lens.
Solórzano Vásquez also said she is drawn to memory because it is incomplete and constantly reshaped, and that the film is less about reconstructing Soralla exactly than about exploring what remains when only fragments survive. The project has been developed through the Rueda Program of the Spanish Film Academy and CIMA, according to the report. Solórzano Vásquez, whose debut feature premiered at IDFA in 2019, is part of a growing group of Costa Rican women filmmakers whose work has helped broaden the country’s cinema.
Source: variety.com
