Tag Archives: Belén Atienza

The J.A. Bayona-Produced “Un Fantasma en la Batalla” to Debut at San Sebastian Film Festival

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J.A. Bayona’s latest film will be getting its world premiere in his native Spain.

The 50-year-old Spanish filmmaker’s political thriller Un Fantasma en la Batalla will debut at this year’s San Sebastian Film Festival.

J.A. BayonaThe title, produced by Bayona, was among several other Spanish titles announced by the festival.

Directed by Agustín Díaz Yanes, the film stars Susana Abaitua, Andrés Gertrúdix, Iraia Elias, Raúl Arévalo and Ariadna Gil.

Producing along with Bayona are Belén Atienza and Sandra Hermida.

The film’s synopsis reads: Inspired by the lives and experiences of several members of the Guardia Civil directly involved in the fight against terrorism and grounded in the historical, political, and social context of the 1990s and 2000s, Un fantasma en la Batalla tells the story of Amaia, a young civil guard who spends more than a decade working as an undercover agent within ETA, with the aim of locating the band’s hideouts in the South of France.

Un Fantasma en la Batalla is a Netflix title.

Filmmaker Alberto Rodríguez will return to San Sebastian this year with two projects. First, Anatomía de un instante, a 3-episode mini-series based on the book of the same name by Javier Cercas about the attempted coup d’état in Spain on 23 February 1981. The series stars Álvaro Morte as President Adolfo Suárez, Eduard Fernández as the communist leader Santiago Carrillo, Manolo Solo in the part of the army officer and politician Gutiérrez Mellado, and David Lorente as the lieutenant colonel leading the coup, Antonio Tejero.

The second Rodríguez title is Los Tigres, a feature written with Rafael Cobos, in which Antonio de la Torre and Bárbara Lennie play siblings who work as professional divers for an oil company. Their lives change when Antonio has an accident and learns that he can no longer dive.

Elsewhere, Jose Mari Goenaga and Aitor Arregi return to San Sebastian with Maspalomas, while José Luis Guerin returns to the official competition with a new non-fiction work, Historias del buen valle, which he shot in Vallbona, a Barcelona district known for its migrant communities.

This year’s San Sebastian Film Festival runs from 19-27 September.

J. A. Bayona to Direct Netflix’s Disaster Film “Society of the Snow”

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J. A. Bayona is preparing for a disaster…

The 46-year-old Spanish Goya Award-winning film director will direct the Spanish-language disaster film Society of the Snow for Netflix.

J.A. BayonaBased on the book La sociedad de la nieve by Pablo Vierci, the film is set in 1972, charting the true story of what happens after an Uruguayan Air Force flight transporting a rugby team to Chile cashes on a glacier in the Andes. Only 29 of the 45 passengers survived the crash, finding themselves in one of the world’s toughest environments, forced to resort to extreme measures to stay alive.

Bayona, whose credits include The Impossible, The Orphanage and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, has written the screenplay with Bernat Vilaplana, Jaime Marques and Nicolás Casariego.

Producers are Belén Atienza and Sandra Hermida.

The film will shoot in Sierra Nevada (Andalucía, Spain), in Montevideo (Uruguay) and in various locations in the Andes (both in Chile and Argentina) including El Valle de las Lágrimas, the location where the real incident took place.

The cast will include Enzo Vogrincic Roldán, Matías Recalt, Agustín Pardella, Tomas Wolf, Diego Ariel Vegezzi, Esteban Kukuriczka, Francisco Romero, Rafael Federman, Felipe González Otaño, Agustín Della Corte, Valentino Alonso, Simón Hempe, Fernando Contigiani García, Benjamín Segura, Jerónimo Bosia.

“It was during the documentation process for The Impossible that I discovered Society of the Snow, Pablo Vierci’s fascinating chronicle about the tragedy of the Andes,” said From J. A. Bayona. “More than ten years later, my fascination for the novel remains intact and I am happy to face the challenge that lies ahead: To tell one of the most remembered events of the 20th century, with all the complexity that implies a story that gives so much relevance to the survivors as well as to those who never returned from the mountains. I also face it in Spanish, a language that I excitedly return to after 14 years without filming in my own language, and with a team of young Uruguayan and Argentine actors, whom I’m totally thrilled with.”