Costa Rican director Paz Fábrega talks to Ben Walters about her Tiger contender Agua fría de mar, an unsettling take on childhood and relationships
Childhood and nature – two subjects often presented with sentimentality on film – receive more ambivalent treatment in Costa Rican director Paz Fábrega's Tiger contender Agua fría de mar. Mostly set around the country's Pacific coast, the film – which benefited from Hubert Bals Fund backing – explores the peculiar relationship that develops between a young Costa Rican on holiday with her fiancé and a seven-year-old runaway girl she meets near the water.
Favouring low light and wide compositions and paying attention to children's capacity for irresponsibility and nature's potential for danger – the film's title refers to a treatment for water snake venom – it's an unusual, even unsettling work, rooted in small moments. “I'm a little bit against cuteness and empty beauty,” says Fábrega. “I was interested in those things in kids that are a bit threatening to adults. Sometimes nature can be a bit scary too.”
Although much of this atmosphere was deliberate, other aspects evolved contingently. “The strange subjects like the snakes, the strange location, strange children's games – that was intentional,” says Fábrega. “But the general atmosphere is a bit more distanced than I expected. We had a complicated shoot. I work with non-professional actors and I think they need a very intimate atmosphere to do what I like them to do. But we had more of a traditional shoot. A professional crew expects actors to perform on cue, so lots of things were shot wider than planned because we didn't have much time.”
Fábrega was also interested in offering something other than cliched notions of Costa Rica. “I wanted to show something that felt more like my impression of those places,” she says. “There are people in the country! When you see the tourist shots, it's all nature and animals. You never see the beaches full of kids enjoying themselves.”
The country's relatively undeveloped filmmaking infrastructure brought both frustrations and opportunities. “We don't have film labs or a lot of equipment or crews with a lot of feature experience,” Fábrega says. “It would be silly to try to make films in a very traditional way in Costa Rica. The results would be mediocre. But it's easy to shoot there – not too much paperwork, not too many permits – and the films I'd like to make are in between fiction and documentary. It could be great as long as you use the things that are there rather than going against them.”
More about Agua fría de mar here .