Dolores Fonzi has landed a devilish role…
The 37-year-old Argentine actress is set to star in the horror film El diablo blanco, converting the project into one of the highest-profile genre offerings coming down the pike in Latin America.
Fonzi joins an Argentine A-list cast that includes Esteban Lamothe and Julieta Zylberberg.
Juan Pablo Gugliotta, co-founder of Buenos Aires’ Magma Cine, a pioneer in pan-Latin American co-production and auteur genre movies, will introduce the horror movie to potential co-production partners and sales agents at next week’s Bogota Audiovisual Market (BAM).
The screenplay allows the involvement of one or two actors from outside Argentina, Gugliotta said.
The feature debut of Ignacio Rogers, a theater actor-turned-filmmaker who is writing the screenplay, El diablo blanco kicks off with three male friends going off camping in the mountains. They meet three girls and immediately hit it off. Romance flowers as they decide to continue the trip together. One of them, Fernando, has a strange encounter with a mysterious man and suffers premonitory dreams of this man killing people, after which a once-carefree holiday trip turns into a ghastly nightmare.
El diablo blanco has its origins in classic American horror, but at least two factors set it apart, said Gugliotta. One is the presence of “deep Latin American roots, Argentine indigenous myths and legends.”
El diablo blanco’s friends are also not teens but adults in their mid-to-late-thirties, one a divorcee, another about to inherit local land, and two of the women qualified anthropologists, searching for traces of the mountains’ original indigenous settlers.
About 60% of “The White Devil’s” budget is covered between Magma Cine’s own financing and subsidy from Argentina’s Incaa film board, Gugliotta said.
Fonzi, Lamothe and Zylberberg have all broken through to international recognition this decade. Fonzi toplined Santiago Mitre’s Paulina, which won the Cannes Critics’ Week Grand Prize last year; Lamothe was the star of Mitre’s debut, The Student. Zylberberg co-starred in Anna Katz’s My Friend From the Park, a Sundance Film Festival 2016 best screenplay winner.
El diablo blanco is scheduled to shoot in the first quarter of 2017, during Argentina’s summer.
