Introducing: The Ivy
20 December 2020
Ecaudorian director Ana Cristina Barragán will be familiar to Rotterdam audiences after her debut feature Alba won the Lions Film Award at IFFR 2016. The film was a coming-of-age drama about a shy teenager who must form a relationship with her estranged father after her mother is hospitalised. Issues of adolescence, womanhood and family come to the fore in this film, many of which can be seen again in her latest project The Ivy at CineMart 2021.
Adolescence is here swapped for another formative period, one that the director shared with the lead in the latest film, the Mexican actress Karla Souza. “Both of us were 30 when we started thinking about this film,” says Barragán, “and we both were thinking about fertility and motherhood.” Souza is best known for the ABC series How to Get Away with Murder as well as a number of popular Mexican films that have made her a household name. The two met at an actor-director workshop at the Arte Careyes Film Festival where they established a strong working relationship based on a mutual feeling about this time in their lives. “She wanted to try something different and I really liked her. I think she's a great actress” recounts Barragán.
Souza will play 31-year-old Azucena in The Ivy, who decides to reunite with her 18-year-old son, Julio, an unwanted pregnancy who lives in an orphanage. Although not directly related to a personal experience, Barragán wants to explore a familiar moment in this character’s life. “I know the main sense and atmosphere of the film,” she says. “It comes from my dreams and from an image, almost an instinct. I am not a mother, but what is very close to me is the feeling of anxiety and the feeling of abandonment.”
For Barragán, reaching the age of 30 is a moment when you can reflect on such sensations, and the many formative experiences of your youth. “These scars from childhood and growing up are like rivers without a mouth, that flow into a lagoon. When you reach that age it is as if they start flowing again.” These lyrical words reflect the strong sense of feeling the director seeks to evoke in her work, focussing on bodies, smells, mundane moments and sensations, that come together to form stories “charged with an aroma.”
The film will be produced by longtime collaborator Joe Houlberg. “We met at undergrad school in Quito, Ecuador” says Houlberg. “We started working together, and we never stopped. Every project she has done or I've done, we've worked on together in some way.” Their most recent collaboration was for Barragán’s second feature La piel pulpo on which Houlberg was the assistant director, and is now in post-production. It received Script and Development support from the Hubert Bals Fund in 2016, and was selected for CineMart 2017. Alba also received HBF post-production support in 2015, meaning it has been a vital part of the director’s work thus far.
“It’s extremely important. If we don't have international funding we cannot make a film” reflects Barragán on the HBF. Houlberg, who now runs his own production company in Ecuador – Botón Films – agrees: “Right now there's a big cultural and economic crisis and of course when politicians have an economic crisis, what's the first thing they stop giving money to? At least here in South America or in Ecuador, it's to cultural affairs.” The two are now well experienced in the toils of making work in a small Latin American nation. “It’s very uncertain all the time” says Houlberg, talking specifically about the local film fund, which has recently been combined into a wider and more competitive cultural fund. “Each year we don't really know if it's going to still exist,” he says.
Despite the challenges, and the common concerns that the director explores in her work, they are committed to preserving the Ecuadorian elements of their work. “I live in Ecuador, I grew up in Ecuador and I studied in Ecuador” says Barragán. “The locations are in Ecuador. I think Ecuador is underneath everything in the film, but it’s still universal in its appeal.”
