Music Box Films has acquired the North American rights to writer-director Martika Ramirez Escobar’s genre-bending “Leonor Will Never Die,” which won the Special Jury Prize for Innovative Spirit in Sundance this year after premiering in the festival’s World Cinema Dramatic Competition.
The film tells the story of Leonor Reyes, once a major player in the Filipino film industry during its ragtag action cinema glory days, but now in her golden years and struggling to pay her bills. When she reads an advertisement for a screenplay contest, Leonor begins tinkering with an unfinished script about a young man avenging his brother’s murder at the hand of thugs.
But after a falling television knocks her unconscious and sends her into a coma, Leonor finds herself inside her incomplete movie, re-writing and editing on the fly in a fantastical bid to complete the film while her body lies in limbo.
The film tells the story of Leonor Reyes, once a major player in the Filipino film industry during its ragtag action cinema glory days, but now in her golden years and struggling to pay her bills. When she reads an advertisement for a screenplay contest, Leonor begins tinkering with an unfinished script about a young man avenging his brother’s murder at the hand of thugs.
But after a falling television knocks her unconscious and sends her into a coma, Leonor finds herself inside her incomplete movie, re-writing and editing on the fly in a fantastical bid to complete the film while her body lies in limbo.
- 2/16/2022
- by Christopher Vourlias
- Variety Film + TV
From its opening minutes, Martika Ramirez Escobar’s meta-prank “Leonor Will Never Die” aims to scramble the viewers. Leonor Reyes (Sheila Francisco), an elderly retired action film director in Manila who, the title assures us, must have some claim to immortality, pads into view from the knees-down and steps onto a trunk – the universal film cliché for suicide. Not so fast, but it is true that awful things have happened to Leonor. Her ex-husband Valentin (Alan Bautista), a former movie star, has left. Her favorite son Ronwaldo (Anthony Falcon) is dead. And her least-favorite son Rudie (Bong Cabrera) is hounding her to pay the electric bill, which is three months past due and would have already been shut off if Leonor hadn’t helmed the meter reader’s mother’s favorite shoot-em-ups.
If life was one of Leonor’s films, she could write a happy ending. Instead, Leonor consoles herself...
If life was one of Leonor’s films, she could write a happy ending. Instead, Leonor consoles herself...
- 1/22/2022
- by Amy Nicholson
- Variety Film + TV
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