This first feature film by Chilean Francisca Alegría, a family and environmental chronicle, points in a half-realistic, half-fantastic form to the dangers that await nature.
A ghost, dead fish, sick cows, a boy who wants to become a girl… The Chilean screenwriter and director Francisca Alegría tells in her first film a family story marked by the tragic disappearance of the mother, in a world otherwise undermined by the destructive headlong rush of men.
First feature film with a heavy atmosphere, The cow that sang the futurein competition at the 2022 Sundance Festival, will be released on July 26 in France.
Ghosts
The film opens with a scene of horror: hundreds of fish in a river are dying before washing up on the banks. From this brackish water emerges a woman covered in mud who snorts and spits water before catching her breath.
A few days later, Cecilia, a surgeon, returns to the family farm with her two children to take care of her father. The old man felt faint when he thought he saw his wife through a window, who had died several years earlier in mysterious circumstances in the waters of the river.
At the farm, where she has returned with her two children, her youngest daughter and her son Tomàs, who wishes to change gender, Cecilia finds her brother, who takes care of the dairy cows. Insemination, separation of calves from their mothers, exploitation on the farm has become intensive. Sick cows, disappearance of bees… Since the arrival of Cecilia and her daughters, disturbing events have multiplied.
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The very carnal ghost of Cecilia’s mother lurks around the farm as much as the painful memories of the past weigh. Cecilia gets closer to the cows and hears their suffering, an empathy that allows her to free herself from this heavy past.
Ecological fable
The scenario of The cow that sang the future is inspired by an event that took place in 2017 in southern Chile, where thousands of fish were found dead in a river after the installation of a paper mill.
Rhythmed by a choir, this first feature film, in the form of an ecological fable, is carried by water, which irrigates the subject as concretely as metaphorically. First place of life, teeming nature, water is also the element that carries death. The element that once engulfed the mother is also the vehicle of the pollution that poisons the fish, then the cows. The camera searches this water, this humidity, as it scrutinizes the suffering gaze of a dying cow, and observes the world running to its end.
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Combining realism and fantasy, The cow that sang the future raises the questions that cross our contemporary societies, pointing out the dangers that threaten the planet and the limitless instrumentalization of nature, of the animal world, by humans.
It will be necessary to listen to and respect nature and animals so that life can regain its rights, listen to and respect the other as he is, and his freedom, so that the family can also find the path of life. Such is the moral of this fable which is a little too loaded with strong messages and pathos.
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The sheet
Gender : Drama
Director: Francisca Alegria
Actors: Leonor Varela, Mia Maestro, Alfredo Castro
Country : Chile, France, USA, Germany
Duration : 1h 38min
Exit : July 26, 2023
Distributer : Nour Films
Synopsis :
Cecilia, a surgeon in the city, has to rush back with her two children to the family farm where her father and brother live in southern Chile. At the same time, dozens of cows are stricken with a fatal illness and Cecilia’s mother, who has been missing for several years, reappears.