LOCARNO — Tiempo Libre, the Lima-based production house behind Peruvian Oscar candidate “Videophilia (and Other Viral Syndromes),” has boarded “Valves” (“Valvas”), the second feature film from Andrea Hoyos, whose feature debut “Autoerotic,” established her as one of the forthright rising stars of Peru’s still expanding film industry.
Verony Centeno, a Peruvian actress with significant experience in film and dance, is attached as the film’s lead.
Hoyos is at Locarno as part of its Directors’ Club at Open Doors, its major Latin American project and talent platform. She is also screening “Autoerotic” as part of its Open Doors screenings.
Hoyos’ follow-up, “Valves,” is now set up at Episodio 14, its main production company and also based in Peru, and Tiempo Libre. Peru’s Lady Vinces and Juan Daniel Férnandez Molero are serving as producers. “Videophilia” won a Rotterdam Tiger Award.
In development, and seeking further co-producers, said Hoyos, “Valves” is described as a road movie that touches on themes such as trans masculinity, relationships, and fear of the unknown.
It turns on Verony, a young dancer, who is accompanying her partner, Marte, a photographer, through his gender transition process.
Both decide to take a road trip to the north coast of Peru where they spend New Year’s Eve with Marte’s family. In the north, spondylus shells are being washed up from the seas. These “awaken a connection with beings from the ‘Beyond,’” the synopsis says. “Both Verony and Marte fear that they may need to take different paths, both in travel and in life,” it ends.
“It’s a film that speaks about resistance to change and the necessity of transformation. It’s the largest project I’ve started writing at this moment, and also the most personal. The pains of love, grief, and gender intertwine in a universe of fantasy portraying our real fears,” Hoyos toldPvNew.
The film also looks to continue Hoyos focus on what she calls “narratives about what it means to inhabit certain bodies, marked by sex and gender,” themes which are prominent in “Autoerotic.”
Hailed as marking a fresh voice on Peru’s film scene, “Autoerotic”starts out as coming-of-age drama, which rings totally true whether in scenes of Bruna, 15, with her best girlfriend, or grating at her mother’s latest live-in boyfriend, or using a dating app to lose her virginity as soon as can.
Starring Rafaella Mey as Bruna, “Autoerotic” soon expands, however, to explore sexual and reproductive rights in aconservative Peru.
Having studied filmmaking at EPIC in Peru, Hoyos is currently completing a master’s in creative film at Catalyst (Berlin). Her first short film,2017’s “Arrecifes,”won Peru’s national short film competition. Part of Berlinale Talents 2023, Hoyos’ next installation project, is a co-production between
Peru and Germany, entitled “Crip <3,” an experimental film depicting the process of diagnosis of her chronic illness, dysautonomia, as a diary using new media.
