Marc Recha, director of “Pau and His Brother,” which played in Cannes competition, is initiating post-production on “Wild Road,” a thriller produced by Barcelona-based director label Parallamps.
Heaed by Montse Germán, a star in Cesc Gay’s “Fiction” and Sergi López” (“Pan’s Labyrinth”), “Wild Road” follows 50-year Ona, who is about to fulfill her dream of piloting a light aircraft. Then a chance encounter with some Serb ex-combatants will change her life and that of her loved ones, forcing her to face up to her own past.
A Locarno Fipresci prize winner for “The Cherry Tree,” in “Wild Road” Recha aims for a “cinema d’auteur for a wider audience. It’s a disturbing thriller but full of humanity,” producer Ana Stanič told Variety announcing “strong interest for the film in Spain, Central and Eastern Europe and further abroad.”
A sales agent deal is close to being closed.
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The move towards larger audience filmmaking is in line with other Catalan arthouse heavyweights such as Jaime Rosales (“Wild Flowers”), Isaki Lacuesta (“One Year, One Night”) and Agustí Villaronga (“Loli Tormenta”) who feel the need to reach broader audiences without abandoning their singular styles, sometimes incorporating genre, a key to Recha’s training as a cineaste.
Genre tropes will also be prominent in Recha’s next two projects: “Centaurs of the Night,” which is in pre-production, and “Lucija & Zoran,” currently in development.
“Genre is, undoubtedly, the cornerstone, but it doesn’t emerge in every project in the same way,” Recha said adding that in all three films, “a sense of humor linked to the specificity of landscape and culture play a primary role.”
Starring Àlex Brendemühl (Lucía Puenzo’s “Wakolda”), Montse Germán and Marisa Paredes (Pedro Almodóvar’s “All About my Mother”) “Centaurs of the Night” is a quirky comedy thriller about a blind man helping a friend to find some religious relics hidden by two Slovenian monks.
The third title follows Lucija, a mountain shepherdess who waits for her boyfriend to help her bring her cows down to the valley. But Zoran first has to help some Serb workmates who are being threatened.
“Wild Road” will offer a “visual approach turning on the world of the almost ‘60s Western, sometimes infused with a certain tonality of Jean-Pierre Melville films,” Recha anticipated.
