Costa Rica’s Hilda Hidalgo, best known for her lauded adaptation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel “Of Love and Other Demons” and drama “Violeta at Last” is plunging back into fiction filmmaking with “Cousins” (“Primas”), where she teams up once again with “Violeta at Last” producer Emi Kodo, DP Nicolás Wong, a Costa Rican Variety Below-The-Line Talent to Track last year, and art director Olga Madrigal.
Taking a page from her past documentaries, Hidalgo will give a hybrid treatment to “Cousins” where her young leads will turn cameras on themselves in some scenes.
The coming-of-age drama, Hidalgo’s third fiction film, follows two 12-year-old girls who are forced to run away from their homes after a traumatic incident. Trapped in a spiral of escape, complicity and feverish visions, they wield their phone cameras to expose the truth, confront the unnamable and find a way to make themselves heard.
“Every film demands its own language, with ‘Cousins,’ although it’s a scripted fiction film, I want it to be infused with the spirit of a documentary. The screenplay is there, but I’m interested in preserving the unpredictability, intimacy and sense of discovery that documentary filmmaking allows,” Hidalgo told Variety.
