The Cow Who Sang a Song into the Future (2023)
Director: Francisca Alegría Run Time: 98 min. Release Year: 2023
Starring: Alfredo Castro, Leonor Varela, Luis Dubó, Marcial Tagle, Mía Maestro
Country: Chile
Language: Spanish with English subtitles
About the film:
Official Selection, 2022 Sundance Film Festival
A choir of creatures introduces a world delicately constructed by fantasy, mystery, and magical realism in Francisca Alegría’s poignant and stunning debut feature.
It begins in a river in the south of Chile where fish are dying due to pollution from a nearby factory. Amid their floating bodies, long-deceased Magdalena bubbles up to the surface gasping for air, bringing with her old wounds and a wave of family secrets. This shocking return sends her widowed husband into turmoil and prompts their daughter Cecilia to return home to the family’s dairy farm with her own children. Magdalena’s presence reverberates among her family, instigating fits of laughter and despair in equal measure with all but Cecilia’s eldest child, who finds much-needed comfort in their grandmother’s love and unconditional understanding during a time of transition.
“Hauntingly moving and hopeful… a folkloric tale that uses magical realism as a way to connect the intimate story of a family suffering from generational trauma with a timely environmentalist fable.”
– Rafael Motamayor, IndieWire
A lyrical rumination on family, nature, renewal, and resurrection, The Cow Who Sang A Song Into The Future (2023) is an ambitious proposal for acceptance and healing, suggesting that the dead return when they are most needed.
About the filmmaker:
Francisca Alegría is a Chilean film director and screenwriter. Her short film And the Whole Sky Fit in the Dead Cow’s Eye (2016) premiered at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Short Film Jury Award. She was a fellow at the Sundance Institute’s Screenwriters and Directors Labs with her debut feature The Cow Who Sang a Song into the Future (2023), which premiered in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. She holds an MFA in screenwriting and directing from Columbia University.
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