PARIS — Paris-based sales company Alpha Violet has acquired world sales rights to “La Camarista,” a standout at Mexico’s Los Cabos Festival and Argentina’s Ventana Sur, and first feature of of Mexico’s Lila Aviles, a standout among a rapidly emerging and exciting new generation of women film-TV directors and screenwriters.
Also the subject of a pioneering Mexico U.S.-co-production deal closed on the eve of Ventana Sur, “La Camarista” joins an Alpha Violet sales slate which also includes Berlin Competition contender “Dovlatov,” from Russia’s Alexey German Jr.
Launched by Virginie Devesa and Keiko Funato, Alpha Violet acquired last year “Hunting Season,” a sometimes shockingly violent father-son relationship drama resolved via hunting excursions in the wild snowy forests of Patagonia which won 2017’s Venice Intl. Critics’ Week. Alpha Violet now has a second debut movie from a young Latin American filmmaker in Aviles’ “La Camarista,” which won a Labo Award at Los Cabos and the European Vision Prize and Le Film Français Prize at Ventana Sur’s pix-in-post Primer Corte showcase.
A winningly grounded fiction film which follows a chambermaid on her daily grind around Mexico City’s chicly wood-paneled Hotel Presidente Internacional – “La Camarista” combines near documentary style details which strike home – such as the showers the chambermaid plays to stay awake with a structured story which many at Los Cabos and Ventana Sur found touching of the search for identity of a person who seems invisible to some clients, is already a mother, but not yet her own person.
Now in editing “La Camarista” will be finished by late February or March, said Devesa.
Alexey German Jr.’s “Dovlatov,” chronicles six days in the life of the famous Russian author Sergei Dovlatov, whose work was far ahead of its time and place, 1970’s Soviet Russia. The writer struggled to maintain his own decency and standards alongside fellow poet and writer Joseph Brodsky, while contemporaries were crushed beneath the soviet government machine.
The film will play in the main competition at this year’s Berlinale. It is German’s second film to earn that distinction, joining 2015’s “Under Electric Clouds,” which won the Silver Bear for outstanding artistic contribution at that year’s fest.
