coldwaterofthesea

Cold Water of the Sea

(Agua Fria de Mar)

Year 2009
Runtime 83 mins
Language Spanish
Subtitles Spanish
Canadian Premiere

Spanish with English subtitles

PG: Not Recommended for Children

Set on Costa Rica’s beautiful coastline, Paz Fabrega’s COLD WATER OF THE SEA is a lovingly paced study of two girls’ parallel lives and the way they intersect for a few odd and revelatory days. One girl, Mariana, is wealthy, wed and locked in an isolating world of privilege. The other, Karina, is a precocious seven-year-old testing the bounds of her small, impoverished world. Both have families that no longer fill their lives, and both find a strange common bond in their loneliness and separate developments.

Sea snakes boil on the sands, neglected pools sit idle, hotel sheets lie unused and children dig in the beaches with glee and little concern for danger. Moment to moment, this world alternates between beautifully flat and taut with tension. The visual universe Fabrega sets up is both perilous and totally banal from shot to shot. This unsettling rhythm creates a mesmerizing effect and COLD WATER OF THE SEA achieves a resonant place as one of the fine mysteries of 2010 cinema.

TS

Countries

Costa Rica
Awards
VPRO Tiger Award/ International Film Festival Rotterdam 2010
Festivals
Official Selection International Film Festival Rotterdam 2010, Official Selection Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema 2010, Official Selection Durban International Film Festival 2010
Director
Paz Fábrega
Executive Producer
Max Valverde-Soto
Producer
Cyriac Auriol, Jean des Forêts, Paz Fábrega
Screenwriter
Paz Fábrega
Cinematographer
María Secco
Editor
Nathalie Alonso Casale
Production Design
Marielos Cordero, Dominique Ratton Perez
Cast
Lil Quesada Morúa, Montserrat Fernández, Luis Carlos Bogantes