Cinema: "I have electric dreams" by Valentina Maurel, "we love each other with cries, sometimes with blows"

On screens this week, Valentina Maurel's first feature film, "Tengo sueños electricos", "I have electric dreams" depicts the tormented relationship between a father and his daughter.

The two actors were awarded two acting prizes at the Locarno festival in 2022 and the film won the Horizontes latinos section prize in San Sebastian.

© Geko distribution

Text by: Isabelle Le Gonidec

3 mins

This week, the first feature film by Costa Rican director Valentina Maurel is released on screens in France.

" 

 ", multi-awarded in 2022 at the Locarno and San Sebastián festivals where it won the

prize , explores the tensions within a family unit that has just exploded and more particularly the strong ties between Eva, the rebellious teenager, and her father.

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What color could Eva's electric dreams be?

Electric blue like the color his mother suggests to him to paint the walls of his bedroom?

Red like the anger that seems to permanently inhabit the teenager with frowning eyebrows and black eyes?

"

he gets angry, shouts, insults

we love each other with cries, sometimes with blows..."

This little poem, it was his father who wrote it.

A short text that he reads in a writing workshop under the watchful eye of his daughter.

Eva and Martin are inhabited by the same electric dreams, the same anger, the same violence.

Eva clings to her father – her parents have just separated – like a castaway to his buoy.

A teenager in love with her parent, who is looking for him a new apartment in which she will have to have her own room because she wants to live with him.

This quest for an apartment is an opportunity to stroll through San José, the capital of Costa Rica, its popular neighborhoods with small low houses and rutted sidewalks, its dented terrain and its anarchic electric cables that run in all directions, image of these characters who are looking for each other.

Two acting prizes at Locarno

The family of sixteen-year-old Eva is a little sister and a cat troubled by family tensions, a dancing mother - the very beautiful Vivian Rodríguez Barquero is Anca - who tries to put together the exploded puzzle of her family and her House.

And finally Martin, the father, a hypochondriac translator, penniless, who is trying to build a new life, inventing himself as a painter-sculptor-poet.

And so Eva, a teenager who tries to appropriate hers.

And it starts with his body.

Eva, played by Daniela Marín Navarro, prize winner at Locarno last year (like Reinaldo Amien Gutiérrez who plays Martin), is always on screen, often filmed close-up, on edge.

She scratches herself, sniffs herself, masturbates, explores this changing body and

She also fights... with her father.

"Tengo sueños electricos" by Valentina Maurel depicts the relationship between a father and his daughter, between complicity and violence, a love that sometimes hurts.

© Geko distribution

An intimate violence in the image of daily violence: that of the television images that mother Anca banned, that of the street fight between young people, while three old street musicians interpret a famous bolero (Vete de mi)

that a car chase... A violence on several levels, almost banal, far from any exotic otherness, claims the director.

"

", explains Valentina Maurel who, after leaving Costa Rica to study Europe, returned there to film there, as part of a revival of national cinema with many directors such as

, Paz Fabrega, Alexandra Latishev Salazar, Carolina Arias or even Nathalie Álvarez Mesen whose films are shown in festivals, but few in theaters yet.

Films that explore the intimacy of friendly or romantic relationships, family life, contrary to an "exotic" cinema. 

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