“Do you think Ma will wake up if we make her movie?” the son of a retired cinema legend, now comatose, asks in the most recent trailer for Martika Ramirez Escobar’s “Leonor Will Never Die. The household drama made its world premiere at this 12 months’s Sundance Film Festival.
Escobar’s debut function tells the story of Leonor Reyes (Sheila Francisco), a pillar of the Filipino motion movie business in the course of the ‘80s who’s presently coping with the ravages of previous age and grieving the premature loss of life of her son. She is transported – fairly actually – into the world of fiction when she takes out a forgotten screenplay she penned years in the past.
While engaged on the script, she is struck on the pinnacle by a falling TV set and knocked into a coma. “As she lays unconscious in the hospital, fantasy and reality begin to blur” and she or he finds herself “awake inside her script, becoming the hero of her own story,” the movie’s synopsis teases.
Escobar instructed us that “Leonor Will Never Die,” isn’t simply a charming story of a former filmmaker spending her closing days inside her personal screenplay. “It’s also about how I see life as one long film that we keep on writing and revising until it’s complete,” she defined.
In writing and directing “Leonor Will Never Die,” Escobar additionally fills a dearth in the Filipino movie canon: “The idea that out of the hundreds of Filipino action films in the Philippines throughout history, none of them were about an action grandma,” she mirrored. “It’s well known as a macho genre, but I think it is something special to see it through the tender eyes of a woman.”
This reconstruction of a historically male-dominated style was what additionally attracted Francisco to the character of Leonor, additionally her first lead movie function. “I was very curious about the whole idea of a female screenwriter for action films,” she’s revealed. “I thought that was very unusual, especially in the ‘80s, when male writers ruled that genre.” Francisco added, “And my director Martika is a young bubbly female millennial. The combination was just too tempting not to jump in.”
Among Escobar’s latest initiatives is “Living Things,” a 2020 quick movie about a girl who finds her companion has become a cardboard cutout of himself, and “Quadrilaterals,” a 2017 doc quick that follows a household of Overseas Filipino Workers in Manila.
“Leonor Will Never Die” opens November 25 at NYC’s Metrograph and can present at LA’s Laemmle Royal and Laemmle Glendale December 2. A nationwide launch is to observe.
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