“When we planned Vesper, it was a film of hope, we wanted to create a utopia within the framework of a dystopian world, it was the 2000s and the future was looking bright, but then things changed and, now, what is glimpsed in the horizon is a dark green world”, say Kristina Buozyte and Bruno Samper, directors of Vesper, which was screened yesterday at the Sitges Festival and which already sounds like one of the films that could enter the list of winners.
Vesper is "a fairy tale" that has to do with The Beanstalk, Little Red Riding Hood or Snow White. Vesper is also the name of the protagonist who lives in a future riddled with inequalities where the rich are very rich and isolated and the poor suffer hardship because the seeds are difficult to find and only yield one harvest.
Vesper cares for her sick and bedridden father, with whom she communicates through a mobile android. The girl also deals with her uncle Jonás, an ogre, who sells the blood of the poor to those rich people whom no one has seen because they hide behind the walls of their luxurious citadel. Until one day a ship suffers an accident and Vesper rescues her passenger, a girl from that unknown world.
Kristina Buozyte from Lithuania and Bruno Samper from France met in Prague at a fantasy writing workshop and hit it off from the start. Their coincidental passion for creating new and unknown worlds led them in 2012 to a first collaboration on Vanishing Waves, a film whose screenplay they wrote with four hands and directed by Buozyte.
In this new collaboration, the filmmakers are aware that they have painted a very gray future, but also that their film is "a song of hope, because by drawing the worst future scenario we wanted to show that as long as there is one person who sees the beauty of world, there will always be an opportunity", they explain in a conversation with La Vanguardia on their way through the Sitges Festival.
A contest that for the directors "is quite a celebration". Vesper has received good reviews and Sitges is a big step forward for the film, which will hit Spanish screens in December, because it is "a festival of the genre and because now thousands of films are made, so it is an honor that ours has been selected."
