'Gypsy Bride' star Neriah Barrows helmer debut 'The Ghost'

Winner of the Spanish Academy Supporting Actress Goya Award for “Marshland” and nominated for the 2023 Spanish Academy Goya Award for Best Doc Short, she directed “Memory” and “The Gypsy Bride” star Neria Barros is producing “The Ghost” (“La Costa” ) which will be his directorial debut.

Written by Barros, „The Ghost” will make its market debut at the 2024 Malaga Festival Fund & Co-Production Event (MAFF) in March. The news comes more than a month after AddressPlayer wrapped its Nov. 29 run of „La Red Purpura,” the second installment in the crime trilogy that began with „The Gypsy Bride” and reunites Barrows. Renowned as one of Spain's best actors of his generation.

„I'm an actress, but over the years I've felt the need to give form to my obsessions, the legacy of the elderly, climate change and women through art. To turn my concerns into a cinematic reality,” said Barrows. Variety.

„'The Ghost' will be my opera prima, an experimental film that comes after years of work and research into my rhetorical and cinematographic language,” he added, adding that „The Ghost” plays on „the bridge between fiction and non-fiction.” -Fiction, cinematography and sound proposition, a cinema that explores and experiments a lot and its theme is situated.” All this, he said, „makes this film a different, sensitive and international production”.

Main cast of „The Ghost”: Old people and animals

The main cast of „The Ghost” cuts two ways. One is the elderly, as Barrows calls them: “They matter. Only those capable of opening the door of memory. Bearers of an essential legacy. They become nomads between tradition and art. A transition from the everyday to the extraordinary. From context to fracture. From Antiquity to Avant-Garde.”

They are, aged 78-96 or older, dedicated to traditional occupations, „the legacy of the natural coast transformed into foot and brick: traditional production with esparto grass, traditional fishing on a trawler, horse whisperers, farmers who love the land, an artisan, a flamenco dancer and two Women have been threatened by the justice system for years, and now fisherwomen are freed.

„The Ghost” „Voices of elders from Latin American tribes and fighting to preserve their heritage, such as the Amazon forest, Mother Nature, Nahua, Kashibo-Kakataibo, Nandi, T. Kawahivas, Yanomanis, Yuri and others, how the Quechuas, their entire traditions, are called success or progress. Or saw that it destroyed the Mapuches.

Animals such as a wolf, a horse, two flamingos, an eagle, two chameleons and a white horn are the secondary main cast. We stopped hearing their screams long ago. „We've humanized some by including them in our lives, and they depend on our will. The rest we've either exterminated or turned into food. „On the beach they will finally claim their land, and their cries will fight for survival with other extinct animals,” said Barrows.

“We are used to forgetting. „La Costa” reveals to us that living is not built to be forgotten, and that truth is not between brick and cement, but yes, in the plant that grows between the asphalt cracks, Barros said.

An experimental node

Expect Barrows to return to the methodically inventive and resonant scenes of „Memory” in „The Ghost,” a film shot in what was once the dust bowl of the Aral Sea, capturing clouds of dust moving across the landscape like waves. Switching from a 4:3 format to a less compressed and more elegant 16:9 aspect ratio.

Product details

In early development, with shooting scheduled from September 2024 to May 2025, “The Ghost” is set at Madrid-based Cholera Films in August 2023 with DP Anna Albee, scribe-helmer Jairo González, executive producer. Sophia B. Jordan and Barrows. One of its first productions was the commission by Spanish rock singer Loquillo of a black and white video clip designed for „El Rey”.

It co-produced with Granada's Siesta Producciones its „El Universo en una Caja,” a biopic of the extraordinary Mariano Fortune, starring Barros and Valencia's Mediterraneo Media Entertainment („Allende, the Thousand Days”).

The producers want to register a small production company in Galicia, north-west Spain and Barros' home region, and then join forces with a large Spanish production company to create an international co-production in Latin America and Europe.

„memory”

Produced by Hernán Zin („Born in Gaza,” „Born in Syria,” „57 Days”), one of Spain's foremost documentarians, his Doc Land Films and Ana Pincus's „Memory” capture the human-caused environmental disaster, and the legacy of knowledge and imagination through an older generation. pass through It was filmed in Uzbekistan in the basin of the Aral Sea, once the world's fourth largest lake, and since the 1960s, the Soviet Union has drained water from the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers for irrigation projects.

A fisherman in his youth, Grandfather Sympedov spends his days with his infant granddaughter Markiana, telling her about the sea, his former fishing boat now a rusted hulk on the desert sands stretching to the horizon.

“The sea is boundless. The sea is our wealth. Our strength and memory. He who fed our people, me, your parents and now you. Breath is what gives us life. A mother who shelters us,” says Saimpetov.

Only the memory of Cymbedo keeps the Aral Sea alive for Margiana.