Alpha Violet Boards Fernanda Tovar’s ‘Sad Girlz’ Ahead of Berlin World Premiere (EXCLUSIVE)

Paris-based sales agent Alpha Violet has acquired the rights to Fernanda Tovar ‘s feature debut “Sad Girlz.” The sensitive coming-of-ager, which will world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival as part of the Generation strand, follows two best friends in the aftermath of a traumatic event. Sad GirlzCourtesy of Alpha Violet In “Sad Girlz,” it’s summer in Mexico, and sixteen-year-olds Paula (Darana Álvarez) and La Maestra (Rocio Guzmán) are training to represent their country at the Junior Pan American Swimming Championship in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. They play with pictures of Brazil’s uber-famous soccer player Vini Jr. and teach each other words in Portuguese before heading to reggaeton dancing on cobbled streets, long afternoons melting into one another with the heat. One night, Paula ends up alone with a teammate, Daniel. Soon after, La Maestra senses something has shifted in her best friend. What happened that fateful night changes the girls’ lives over the course of the summer, with the film touching upon sensitive issues of trauma and guilt as the two tensely prance around difficult conversations that forever alter their relationship. Popular on Variety Tovar is a member of Mexico’s Colectivo Colmena and a former participant at Berlinale Talents Latin America. Her short, “My Age, Yours, and the Age of the World,” was featured at Cannes’ Critics’ Week in 2022. Speaking with Variety , the director says she spent a long time thinking about approaching the “wound” that is the subject of sexual abuse and its aftermath without “reopening it.” “I spent a long time wondering how to speak about a wound like this without reopening it. I wanted to shift the gaze away from the imagery and the language of violence, because sometimes it feels as if fire only ever gives birth to more fire.” “Sad Girlz” forgoes an explicit depiction of the assault itself, in line with other recent films that broach the subject, such as Gemma Blasco’s SXSW-winning “Fury” and Eva Victor’s “Sorry, Baby.” “I believe we must tell the stories of what hurts us, of what keeps us awake at night, but I no longer wanted to add more violent images to a world already saturated by them,” emphasizes Tovar. “There is already so much darkness around us. What I wanted was to turn, gently, toward love, toward light, toward the fragile and necessary work of empathy.” Asked about how she prepared her young cast to broach such a sensitive issue, Tovar says the girls are “so young, yet so remarkably intelligent.” “I realized that youth today is very different from when I was their age. With the internet, they are exposed to an amount of information that simply wasn’t available to earlier generations. We talked a great deal with the boys and girls in the cast, and at times I felt they knew more than I did. It was a process I will always treasure, for everything it taught me and for how it revealed the importance of open communication and dialogue, which was...

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