Ian lives with his father on a boat anchored in the Ebro delta. The boy has powers, he can make others see things that do not exist. Father and son keep this unusual ability a secret, although they use it to do some tricks and earn a living. But someone very powerful, who also knows about the young man's peculiarity, finds him and an all-out chase breaks out.
Daniel Benmayor directs Awareness, starring Carlos Scholz and Pedro Alonso, a film in which science fiction and action invite the viewer to reflect on the fragility of the truth. “This film emerged from the vision of a world where there are many points of view on the same issues, which forces us to consider the debate on manipulation and narrative,” says Benmayor in a conversation with La Vanguardia during his visit to the Festival. from Sitges where Awareness was screened yesterday, which will have its world premiere on October 11 on Prime Video.
“That idea of how to live in a fractional universe helped me tell the emotional journey of a boy who is at the epicenter of a war because he has the power to generate illusions in others. A young man who is forced to value the opinions and information he receives and to make decisions based on a gray scale because all parties may be somewhat right,” adds the director.
And although the film is full of action and fight scenes, the director explains that “the most difficult thing has been to collect the feelings, because movies are all about emotion.” Something that the two protagonists agree on. Alonso, who plays Vicente, the father of this very peculiar young man, points out that Awareness “has ultra emotional moments, because it touches on something very universal about what it means to care for others.”
And Scholz, who plays Ian, states that representing feelings “is more complicated than filming fights, because you learn that through training.” “I was moved and very touched by the scenes I filmed with my father in fiction,” says the young actor.
Awareness, which also has María Pedraza, Lela Loren and Óscar Jaenada in the cast, makes a couple of detectable winks to Star Wars, which can be “inspiration or homage, call it what you want, because it is the cinema with the one that my generation has grown up and has marked us all,” adds Benmayor.
The film offers an open ending, but a sequel, so fashionable these days, "is not on the director's radar," and what he wanted with this gesture was to "invite the viewer to think, to participate in the film and to decide what Ian's truth can be like after that intense physical and emotional journey."
