Miami Film Festival will world premiere online A Mother (Una madre), directed by emerging Colombian filmmaker Diógenes Cuevas, after the Festival’s intended world premiere at its 37th edition in March was cancelled due to a mid-festival termination caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
The film will now premiere Friday – Sunday, May 29-31, on the Festival’s VimeoVOD channel for a 72-hour period, available worldwide. A live online conversation with the creators of A Mother will be announced soon. This is the Festival’s second online premiere, following the highly successful debut in late April of another film originally programmed for the 37th edition, They Call Me Dr. Miami with live Instagram Q&A, which was viewed by nearly 8,000 accounts.
“Diógenes Cuevas is a compelling, distinctive new voice that signifies another strong decade ahead for Latin American cinema,” said Miami Film Festival director Jaie Laplante. “We programmed his debut film A Mother (Una madre) because of its clear, well-executed vision of love under the siege of a debilitatingly stressful situation, and we are thrilled to be able to proceed with our plans to present the film, this time via online platforms.”
A Mother (Una madre) centers on Alejandro (Jose Restrepo), the younger of two brothers. After the death of his father, he embarks on an impulsive mission to liberate his mother Dora (Marcela Valencia) from a rural mental asylum, where he believes she has been unjustly imprisoned for too many years. Alejandro and Dora travel through the lush forests of the Colombia mountains on a journey of madness, love and loss.
A Mother was nominated for three awards at the 2020 Miami Film Festival – HBO Ibero-american Feature Film Award, Jordan Ressler First Feature Award, and the Zeno Mountain Award. The film is a co-production of Antorcha Films SAS (Colombia) and Pucará Cine SRL (Argentina). Before writing and directing A Mother, Cuevas served as assistant director on two important Colombian productions at the end of the past decade – Catalina Arroyave’s SXSW-debuting Days of the Whale and Jhonny Hendrix’s Candelaria, an official selection of Miami Film Festival.