MBAH JHIWO (ANCIENT SOUL)

Cannes Docs

THURSDAY 25 JUNE 2020
14:30 1h15

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Marché du Film Online

MBAH JHIWO (ANCIENT SOUL)

Original title: Mbah Jhiwo

Directed by: Alvaro GURREA

Produced by: Rocio Mesa (My Deer Films, Spain)

Country of production: Spain

Runtime: 120'

Expected release: January 2021

Budget: €250,000 (80% in place)

1st feature: 1st feature

Looking for: Distribution and sales deals / European and Asian co-producers / Investors and film-funds willing to be part of the project during postproduction-distribution / Festival programmers interested in the film

Synopsis:

A Kawa Ijen sulfur miner finds his routine radically altered the moment his wife goes away. He enters then a time loop that transforms his reality as his beliefs move from animism to Islam and capitalism. In a hybridization between ethnofiction and documentary, the film questions the myth of progress and explores the relationship with the otherness in the neocolonial reality of the South Seas
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Director’s profile: 

Alvaro Gurrea (Barcelona, 1988) explores through his works the notion of identity, in historical, political and cultural terms, and its relation with the conception of the otherness. He has directed the short film Crossboundaries, premiered at Santa Monica Art Center in 2016 and has been a curator at Swab Art Fair, conceiving projects as So Close, So Far, which explored the idea of distance in the hyperconnected era. Since 2014 he has been partly living in Indonesia developing together with a local community in East Java his first feature film, which will be concluded by the end of 2020. He has a degree in Economics by the University of Barcelona and a Master in Creative Documentary by the Pompeu Fabra, where his final project was tutored by Marie Pierre Duhamel- Muller.