To celebrate the release of Clara Sola coming to blu-ray with limited edition poster, illustrated by Andrew Bannister on August 7th, we have 2 blu-rays to give away!
A Film by Nathalie ÁLVAREZ MESÉN. Starring: Wendy Chinchilla Araya, Daniel CASTAÑEDA RINCÓN, Ana Julia Porras Espinoza, Flor MARÍA Vargas Chaves.
The sheltered life of a woman believed to be possessed of divine, mystical powers is thrown into chaos when she experiences a sexual awakening.
Nathalie Álavarez Mesén’s mystical, intimate, and richly atmospheric film tells the story of Clara, an introverted woman believed to possess divine healing powers. But a powerful and unexpected sexual awakening tear the delicate order of her life apart, setting Clara on a tumultuous path to emancipation from the religious strictures dominating her life.
Special Features:
• Limited edition fold-out A3 poster featuring exclusive artwork by Andrew Bannister
• Interview with writer/director Nathalie Álvarez Mesén
• 2 short films by Nathalie...
A Film by Nathalie ÁLVAREZ MESÉN. Starring: Wendy Chinchilla Araya, Daniel CASTAÑEDA RINCÓN, Ana Julia Porras Espinoza, Flor MARÍA Vargas Chaves.
The sheltered life of a woman believed to be possessed of divine, mystical powers is thrown into chaos when she experiences a sexual awakening.
Nathalie Álavarez Mesén’s mystical, intimate, and richly atmospheric film tells the story of Clara, an introverted woman believed to possess divine healing powers. But a powerful and unexpected sexual awakening tear the delicate order of her life apart, setting Clara on a tumultuous path to emancipation from the religious strictures dominating her life.
Special Features:
• Limited edition fold-out A3 poster featuring exclusive artwork by Andrew Bannister
• Interview with writer/director Nathalie Álvarez Mesén
• 2 short films by Nathalie...
- 8/5/2023
- by Competitions
- HeyUGuys.co.uk
Wendy Chinchilla Araya makes a tremendous debut as a neglected woman with learning difficulties who is believed to have spiritual powers – and who falls for a handsome local boy
A luminous lead performance – captured almost entirely in closeup – is at the heart of this mysterious drama of sexuality and divine grace. It’s an outstanding first feature from 34-year-old Costa Rican film-maker Nathalie Álvarez Mesén, and her lead performer Wendy Chinchilla Araya is making her own deeply impressive movie debut, having worked before this in dance and mime.
Araya plays Clara, a woman of early middle age who lives in a Costa Rican village with her elderly mother Fresia (Flor María Vargas Chavez) and teen niece Maria (Ana Julia Porras Espinoza). Clara has learning difficulties and a spine malformation, but Fresia will not hear of Clara having this corrected surgically despite the hospital assuring her there is no cost involved.
A luminous lead performance – captured almost entirely in closeup – is at the heart of this mysterious drama of sexuality and divine grace. It’s an outstanding first feature from 34-year-old Costa Rican film-maker Nathalie Álvarez Mesén, and her lead performer Wendy Chinchilla Araya is making her own deeply impressive movie debut, having worked before this in dance and mime.
Araya plays Clara, a woman of early middle age who lives in a Costa Rican village with her elderly mother Fresia (Flor María Vargas Chavez) and teen niece Maria (Ana Julia Porras Espinoza). Clara has learning difficulties and a spine malformation, but Fresia will not hear of Clara having this corrected surgically despite the hospital assuring her there is no cost involved.
- 11/15/2022
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
Earlier this year, in Goran Stolevski’s You Won’t Be Alone, a young witch becomes enamored with the life of humans. She starts to interact in a world where she is forbidden, giving up her relation to the witch mother keeping her under her control. Throughout that movie there are inklings of discovery, almost like a child first learning to walk and speak, to eventually realizing what love is. If there is a similar dynamic in Nathalie Álvarez Mesén’s Clara Sola, this is also a movie that finds its central character escaping religious suppression and contending with her burgeoning sexuality. It recalls Stolevski’s film in the treatment of “breaking out of the shell” as a sort of “growing up” but grounds itself in cultural tradition rather than historical fantasy.
A 40-year-old woman named Clara (Wendy Chinchilla Araya) has a spinal disability to which her religiously devout mother proudly...
A 40-year-old woman named Clara (Wendy Chinchilla Araya) has a spinal disability to which her religiously devout mother proudly...
- 7/5/2022
- by Soham Gadre
- The Film Stage
In some ways, Clara (Wendy Chinchilla Araya) is the most liberated woman in the verdant, remote, and deceptively matriarchal Costa Rican village where she works for God. A semi-feral 40-year-old who — legend has it — was once visited by the Virgin Mary, Clara has been molded into a faith healer by her ultra-religious mother (Flor María Vargas Chaves as Fresia), who’s successfully rebranded her daughter’s curved spine and childlike intellect as symptoms of divinity.
Aside from miracles on demand, little is expected of her. Clara is free to spend her days wandering through the forest, brushing her beloved white horse Yuca, and making adorable homes for the beetles she finds in the wild. She’s activated whenever someone with a few dollars to spare needs a leg healed or a cancer cured, but for the most part Clara is left to do as she pleases.
That is, as long...
Aside from miracles on demand, little is expected of her. Clara is free to spend her days wandering through the forest, brushing her beloved white horse Yuca, and making adorable homes for the beetles she finds in the wild. She’s activated whenever someone with a few dollars to spare needs a leg healed or a cancer cured, but for the most part Clara is left to do as she pleases.
That is, as long...
- 6/29/2022
- by David Ehrlich
- Indiewire
"Abracadabra, alakazoo... Clara transform!" Oscope Labs has revealed the full US trailer for a Costa Rican indie film titled Clara Sola, arriving in very limited US theaters this July. This iniitally premiered at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival in the Directors' Fortnight sidebar, playing to great reviews before it went on to play at tons of other film festivals. In a remote village in Costa Rica, Clara, a withdrawn 40-year-old woman, experiences a sexual and mystical awakening as she begins a journey to free herself from the repressive religious and social conventions which have dominated her life. Wendy Chinchilla Araya stars as Clara, with Flor María Vargas Chavez, Ana Julia Porras Espinoza, and Daniel Castañeda Rincón. The critics describe it as a film mixing "religion, mysticism and sexuality in a way that feels simultaneously odd, disquieting and richly rewarding." This looks seriously mesmerizing, with some gorgeous cinematography. Here's the official US...
- 6/9/2022
- by Alex Billington
- firstshowing.net
Costa Rica on Friday selected Nathalie Álvarez Mesén’s debut feature Clara Sola to as the country’s submission to the 2022 International Feature Oscar race. The pic, which made its world premiere in the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, was later scooped up by Oscilloscope Laboratories which will release it in theaters early next year.
Álvarez Mesén and Maria Camila Arias co-penned the script for the pic, which is set in a remote Costa Rican village and centers on 40-year-old Clara, who endures a repressively religious and withdrawn life under the command of her mother. Tension builds within the family as Clara’s younger niece approaches her quinceañera, igniting a sexual and mystical awakening in Clara, and a journey to free herself from the conventions that have dominated her life.
Ana Julia Porras Espinoza, Daniel Castañeda Rincón, Flor María Vargas Chavez and Wendy Chinchilla Araya star.
Álvarez Mesén and Maria Camila Arias co-penned the script for the pic, which is set in a remote Costa Rican village and centers on 40-year-old Clara, who endures a repressively religious and withdrawn life under the command of her mother. Tension builds within the family as Clara’s younger niece approaches her quinceañera, igniting a sexual and mystical awakening in Clara, and a journey to free herself from the conventions that have dominated her life.
Ana Julia Porras Espinoza, Daniel Castañeda Rincón, Flor María Vargas Chavez and Wendy Chinchilla Araya star.
- 10/22/2021
- by Patrick Hipes
- Deadline Film + TV
Without Wendy Chinchilla Araya, the dancer and first-time film actress playing the title role, “Clara Sola” would be a finely wrought tale of a later-life coming-of-age, in which mysticism, marginalization and sudden sexual jealousy collide on the fringes of a teeming Costa Rican forest. With her, and her feral movements and her keen but wary eyes, director Nathalie Álvarez Mesen’s feature debut is elevated into something much more strange and sorrowful, a kind of lament for the casual cruelties that “regular” people visit on those who don’t fit — and by extension on all the creatures of this world that we cannot understand, but still manage to exploit.
Clara is an extraordinarily believable creation: an intellectually challenged middle-aged woman whose otherworldly demeanor and connection to nature — especially to the family’s fairytale-like white horse, Yuca — have, along with a reported personal encounter with the Virgin years before, given her...
Clara is an extraordinarily believable creation: an intellectually challenged middle-aged woman whose otherworldly demeanor and connection to nature — especially to the family’s fairytale-like white horse, Yuca — have, along with a reported personal encounter with the Virgin years before, given her...
- 8/29/2021
- by Jessica Kiang
- Variety Film + TV
Paris-based sales agency Luxbox has added sales to the U.K., Australia and Brazil to previous deals with the U.S. and France on Directors’ Fortnight title “Clara Sola,” making good on its upbeat critical reception at the Cannes Festival this month.
London-based Peccadillo Pictures has acquired U.K. rights. Sydney’s Rialto Distribution, has scooped rights to Australia; Brazil’s Imovision, another classic arthouse distributor, has secured those to Brazil. Turkey (Bir Film) and Switzerland (Trigon) have also closed, Luxbox partner Fiorella Morretti told Variety.
At Cannes, Luxbox confirmed that Epicentre had picked up rights to France while Oscilloscope Laboratories swooped on rights to North America after the film’s world premiere.
One of a brace of features from young Latin American female directors selected for Cannes, like Mexican Tatiana Huezo’s “Prayers for the Stolen,” in Un Certain Regard, and Brazilian Anita Rocha da Silveira’s “Medusa,” in Directors’ Fortnight,...
London-based Peccadillo Pictures has acquired U.K. rights. Sydney’s Rialto Distribution, has scooped rights to Australia; Brazil’s Imovision, another classic arthouse distributor, has secured those to Brazil. Turkey (Bir Film) and Switzerland (Trigon) have also closed, Luxbox partner Fiorella Morretti told Variety.
At Cannes, Luxbox confirmed that Epicentre had picked up rights to France while Oscilloscope Laboratories swooped on rights to North America after the film’s world premiere.
One of a brace of features from young Latin American female directors selected for Cannes, like Mexican Tatiana Huezo’s “Prayers for the Stolen,” in Un Certain Regard, and Brazilian Anita Rocha da Silveira’s “Medusa,” in Directors’ Fortnight,...
- 7/28/2021
- by John Hopewell
- Variety Film + TV
IMDb.com, Inc. takes no responsibility for the content or accuracy of the above news articles, Tweets, or blog posts. This content is published for the entertainment of our users only. The news articles, Tweets, and blog posts do not represent IMDb's opinions nor can we guarantee that the reporting therein is completely factual. Please visit the source responsible for the item in question to report any concerns you may have regarding content or accuracy.