Once a prominent action filmmaker, Leonor spends her senior years with the ghost of her dead son and the pestering, very alive presence of her younger son. In her cramped apartment, she distracts herself from overdue electricity bills by daydreaming about her movies, until a freak accident causes her to fall into a coma. In this liminal state, Leonor magically finds herself in the production of one of her own long-forgotten, unfinished screenplays, blurring the lines between reality and dream, life and death. Colourful, exuberant, packed with thrills and B-movie nostalgia, writer-director Martika Ramirez Escobar’s debut feature is an homage to the power of stories, the enduring force of grief, and a tender love letter to filmmaking itself. 2022 winner of the Special Jury Prize for Innovative Spirit at Sundance.
Packed with self-reflexive humor and a deep reverence for the art of filmmaking, Leonor Will Never Die establishes writer/director Martika Ramirez Escobar as an artist with a singular voice and bright future in halls of weird cinema.”—Marya E. Gates, RogerEbert.com
Amplify Voices Award, TIFF 2022 & World Cinema Dramatic Special Jury Award: Innovative Spirit, Sundance 2022
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Sheila Francisco, Bong Cabrera, Rocky Salumbides, Anthony Falcon
Philippines
2022
In Filipino and English with English subtitles
Book Tickets
Missing VIFF? Check out what's playing at the VIFF Centre
Amrum
Twelve-year-old Nanning (Jasper Billerbeck) sets himself a mission to secure bread and honey for his mother to snap her out of her depression. It is 1945. The war is all but lost, and such luxuries are not easy to find on the remote island of Amrum...
The Power of Restitution: The Spoils
Join us for a special free screening of The Spoils, an acclaimed documentary about German-Jewish art dealer Max Stern, followed by a live panel discussion exploring the urgent and evolving global movement for art restitution.
The Music Room
Devan Scott continues his journey through the history of lighting. This week, he credits Indian director of photography Subrata Mitra for profound innovations that laid the foundation for ideas of motivated lighting + screening of The Music Room.
Credits
Executive Producer
Aurora Oreta, Martika Ramirez Escobar, Quark Henares
Producer
Monster Jimenez, Mario Cornejo
Screenwriter
Martika Ramirez Escobar
Cinematography
Carlos Mauricio
Editor
Lawrence S. Ang
Production Design
Eero Yves S. Francisco
Original Music
Alyana Cabral and Pan De Coco
Director
Martika Ramirez Escobar
Martika Ramirez Escobar was born in Manila in 1992. Her love for the bizarre is best reflected through her films and photography. After graduating with honours from the University of the Philippines, her thesis film Pusong Bato (2014) competed at the Busan International Film Festival and won Best Film at the Cinemalaya Independent Film Festival. Her short film Quadrilaterals (2017) premiered at the DMZ International Documentary Film Festival. She is currently working as a freelance director-cinematographer for various production houses in Manila.