The White Devil Casts a Spell on Latin America
Steve Barton
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Man, I could make so many off-color remarks right now… sigh… but I’ll refrain! According to Variety an Argentine A-list cast of Dolores Fonzi (Paulina), Esteban Lamothe (The Student), and Julieta Zylberberg (My Friend from the Park) is slated to star in El diablo blanco (The White Devil), converting the project into one of the highest-profile genre offerings coming down the pike in Latin America.
Juan Pablo Gugliotta, co-founder of Buenos Aires’ Magma Cine, a pioneer in pan-Latin American co-production and auteur genre movies, will introduce the horror movie to potential co-production partners and sales agents at next week’s Bogota Audiovisual Market (BAM).
The screenplay allows the involvement of one or two actors from outside Argentina, Gugliotta said.
The feature debut of Ignacio Rogers, a theater actor-turned-filmmaker who is writing the screenplay, The White Devil kicks off with three male friends going off camping in the mountains. They meet three girls and immediately hit it off. Romance flowers as they decide to continue the trip together. One of them, Fernando, has a strange encounter with a mysterious man and suffers premonitory dreams of this man killing people, after which a once-carefree holiday trip turns into a ghastly nightmare.
The White Devil has its origins in classic American horror, but at least two factors set it apart, said Gugliotta. One is the presence of “deep Latin American roots, Argentine indigenous myths, and legends.”
The White Devil’s friends are also not teens but adults in their mid- to late-thirties, one a divorcee, another about to inherit local land, and two of the women qualified anthropologists, searching for traces of the mountains’ original indigenous settlers.
About 60% of The White Devill’s budget is covered between Magma Cine’s own financing and subsidy from Argentina’s Incaa film board, Gugliotta said.
The White Devil is scheduled to shoot in the first quarter of 2017, during Argentina’s summer.
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