‘Nobody’s Watching’ Helmer Julia Solomonoff Prepares ‘Thirst’ (EXCLUSIVE)

Julia Solomonoff, whose “Nobody’s Watching” won best actor for Guillermo Pfening at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival, is preparing her next feature, “Sed” (“Thirst”).

Starring Rafael Ferro (“Los Internacionales”), “Thirst” will be unveiled at the BAL-Lab Co-Production Forum, which runs from Sept. 30 to Oct. 2 at the 2020 Biarritz Latin American Festival. Laura Huberman (“Alanis” “Implosion”) will produce.

Also written by Solomonoff, “Thirst” turns on a truck driver (Ferro) in Ushuaia, in Argentina’s Tierra de Fuego. A few months short of retirement, he loses his job. Stealing his truck he heads up north, in search of his young son, who disappeared a year before on Argentina-Paraguay border.

A road movie, charting a physical and inner journey which Solomonoff calls “metaphysical,” “Thirst” takes the lorry driver from Patagonia to the Pampas and on to villages in a sub-tropical jungle.

Secrets, lies and guilt will “blend with recurring optical illusions in the reverberating flat horizon or the lush landscapes, navigating across the elusive frontier between reality and fantasy, in a quiet search for truth and forgiveness,” she said.

The missing son in the movie will be played by Rafael Ferro’s son, Lorenzo “Toto” Ferro (“El Ángel”).

“Thirst” marks a change in of style and creative process, Solomonoff told Variety: “I wanted to try another way of writing, to focus less on the page count, the dialogue, the polish and more on the actual experience of making this movie, to write it on the move,” she said.

“Sisters,” Solomonoff’s 2005 feature, was backed by “The Motorcycle Diaries’” director Walter Salles; Pedro and Agustin Almodovar’s Madrid-based El Deseo co-produced Solomonoff’s next movie, “The Summer of La Boyita.” “Thirst,” in contrast, is being made with a small crew of creative collaborators. It will have a small budget, a minimal crew and shoot in real locations using available light.

“Thirst” will be also be the first film in which Solomonoff will make extensive use of VFX,  attempting a mix of realism (locations, castings) and some kind of stylization/enhanced reality” the VFX  “part of the narrative” but “barely perceptible.”

It will also be the portrait of a country, Argentina, in crisis. This runs deeper than just the daily context of Argentine politics or the economy, Solomonoff argued.

“It’s a crisis of expectations and promises. It is not necessarily a bad or a sad thing,” she said.

She added: “There is a sense of loss but also a liberation, of a path that opens up once the ideas of masculinity, dominance and the exploitative relationship of humans with nature are put into question.”