“The Hubert Bals Fund is like a breath of fresh air that makes you want to finish your project with renewed energy. It allows you to have a different kind of relationship with your film”, says Mauricio Freyre, writer and director of Estados Generales, a project supported by the HBF+Europe Post-production Support scheme in 2024, and having its Dutch premiere at IDFA this week.
Film still: Estados generales by Mauricio Freyre
With delicate and meditative cinematography, Freyre presents a reflection on the legacies of colonialism that persist today. The Peruvian filmmaker discovered a forgotten, silenced, archive in the Botanical Garden of Madrid: Estados Generales is his artistic intervention in that space. He speaks with us about the process behind this production, his first feature film, which builds a bridge between Spain and Peru, mirroring the spirit of IFFR’s HBF+Europe funding scheme.
“The spectral quality of the archive: that possibility of becoming something else, of having a voice and agency.”
His project began in the Botanical Garden of Madrid. Drawn by its architecture, Freyre started researching and noticed a herbarium closed to the public, containing seeds extracted from Spain’s South American colonies, kept in a box labeled “Frutos sin nombres” (“Unnamed fruits”).
He decided to bring the seeds back to their place of origin: “I was already planning to make a journey.” In the second part of the film, we arrive at the Chincha Valley in Peru, a place that “still bears the legacy of the colonial world”, where the extractivist exploitation of the land continues under new capitalist forms. With the simple act of planting the seeds back, Estados Generales seeks to “question the mirrors and echoes of the colonial and capitalist narrative.”
The film moves between documentary and fiction. What interested Freyre was “the spectral quality of the archive: that possibility of becoming something else, of having a voice and agency.” The seeds are “this forgotten, degraded material, that cannot be entirely destroyed – it exists, it’s there.” That subtle, almost magical sensitivity of the film is beautifully conveyed through Marta Simões’s cinematography.
“I had some complex ideas for the end of the film and without the fund, I couldn’t have developed them. It would have been impossible.”
On set of Estados Generales, by Daniela Muttini
Shot on 16mm film, the film has a spectral touch: “By shooting on film, we absolutely needed production support. I had a lot of faith in the HBF.” Freyre is very much drawn to this kind of practice: “Not being able to see the material immediately brings a certain clarity.” The analogue format, essential to the project’s spirit and materiality, was nurtured through the crucial support of HBF, resulting in an image of exceptional sensitivity.
Freyre describes the support from the Hubert Bals Fund as a “final push” to carefully craft the dialogue between sound and colour, which was essential to the film: “All of that would have been lost without the Fund; the impulse it gave was very important,” he says. The aesthetic carries a weight, a magic, that reveals deep care and attention. “I had some complex ideas for the end of the film and without the Fund, I couldn’t have developed them. It would have been impossible.”
Freyre already knew about the Fund, and it had long been one of his career goals: “I had it on my radar; I’d seen films financed by the fund, and of course, I trust it a lot, I love working with Dutch institutions.” He’s been following the HBF’s work for a long time: “I found some notes from 15 years ago that said, ‘Funds I need to get: HBF’.”
“There is still so much to fight for, to rethink, to imagine.”
Highlighting films like Estados Generales – in which the smallest gestures carry deep meaning – is part of HBF and IFFR’s DNA. The seeds that Freyre and his team plant in Peru become both a symbol of renewal and a political gesture. “Rewritings are necessary,” Freyre says, and institutions like IFFR and the HBF are “a true gift. The care they put into this kind of project is extraordinary.” The film carries a message of hope: in this fast-paced world driven by immediacy, what is small and subtle can still transform reality. As Freyre says, “In places where you think everything is lost, it’s the opposite – everything is yet to be written. The future will emerge from these other ways of seeing. There is still so much to fight for, to rethink, to imagine. The world cannot remain as it is.”
