Ojos Negros
A fresh, melancholy and dense farewell to childhood
Ojos Negros is an astonishing direct debut feature by two very young Spanish directors: Marta Lallana and Ivet Castelo. It shows incredible maturity and exceptional sensitivity on a theme that is more than just a subject: Paula’s (Marta Lallana, the younger sister of one of the two directors) transition to the adult world, during a summer spent by her grandmother and aunt at the Aragonese pueblo Ojos Negros. Yet the portrait is fresh, not at all superficial and full of small and universal truths, centred on the figure of Paula and her rites of passage. Paula finds her aunt as harsh and ruthless as the Aragonese landscape in which she is immersed and her grandmother is very old and sick. It seems to be a long lonely summer for the young girl, in contact with nature and the simplicity of life in a small village: but she immediately manages to make friends with Alicia (Alba Alcaine). At Alicia’s side, Paula tastes freedom for the first time swimming in the lake, setting her aunt’s dog free, fleeing from the religious processions of the village and for the first time in her life she will understand the sense of detachment, the temporariness and mutability of others’ feelings, the smell of death, the reality of family ties. Paula begins to understand… Ojos Negros is a beautiful promise of the cinema of the future.
Maria Cera
About the Directors
Marta Lallana (1994, Zaragoza). She was finalist of the European Master of Photography contest (Sky Arts), supervised by photographers such as Bruce Gilden or David Lachapelle. She began her career as the director of photography of the short film El Arquero (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 2016). Afterwards, she combined the production, script and codirection of her debut Ojos Negros with the thinking-out of several projects in Nanouk Films production company, co-scripting, among others, the short film Restos De Cosas (Salvador Sunyer and Xavier Bobés, 2018).
Ivet Castelo (1995, Vic). Graduated in 2017 in the degree of Audiovisual Communication at the Pompeu Fabra University. In 2016, she studied abroad at Korea University (Seoul). She was the production director of the short film El Arquero, produced by Pompeu Fabra, premiered at the Mecal and selected at national festivals such as SomCinema. She currently resides in Vienna, where she is studying a Master in Production at the Filmakademie. Ojos Negros is her debut as a director and scriptwriter.
