18/07/2011

This year’s edition of Spain’s most important film event, the 59th San Sebastian Film Festival, will open on September 16 with Canary Island-born director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s highly anticipated new feature, Intruders, whose European cast is headlined by Brit actor Clive Owen (photo), Holland’s Carice van Houten, Germany’s Daniel Brühl and Spain’s Pilar López de Ayala.

Scripted by Nicolás Casariego and Jaime Marqués, Intruders tells the parallel story of two families whose lives are disturbed by threatening presences. In Spain, a mother has to protect her son from attacks by a faceless stranger. Meanwhile, in England, a little girl has nightmares about a ghost called Carahueca, a creature which ends up becoming a real danger.

Fresnadillo has emphasised that the film has its roots in the "visual world that springs from what is most hidden, from the ghosts buried in our unconscious", although, as the San Sebastian fest organisers point out, beyond a mere supernatural horror tale, Intruders is "an intense psychological drama whose central theme is the family".

Shot in English last summer in London and Madrid (see news), this production by Enrique López Lavigne and Belén Atienza for Apaches Entertainment (which, after its setting-up in 2009, is seeing the first fruits of its work, with Intruders; Eduardo Chapero Jackson’s Verbo, which will be released in Spain at the end of the year; and J. A. Bayona’s mega-production The Impossible, whose shoot wrapped at the end of June after 25 weeks of filming) was generously backed by one of Spain’s main TV networks, Antena 3 Films, and US major Universal Pictures. The latter will distribute the film worldwide.

(Translated from Spanish)