Brazil’s Caru Alves de Souza, a Berlin Crystal Bear winner for “My Name is Baghdad,” will unveil new movie project “A City for Christine” at Spain’s Malaga Festival where it weighs in as one of the highlights at its industry centrepiece strand, the Málaga Festival Fund Co-Production Event (MAFF).
“A City for Christine” is written by Alves de Souza, selected as one of Variety’s Brazil: 10 Next Gen Talents to Track, and Nara Marinho, who teamed for the Berlin 2025-selected “Underage,” the series expansion on Alves de Souza’s 2013 feature debut of the same title.
The lead role of Christine will be played by Karina Buhr, a Brazilian singer-songwriter and percussionist who starred in “My Name is Baghdad,” a best film winner at Berlin’s 2020 Generation 14plus sidebar.
“A City for Christine” (“Uma cidade para Christine”) also unites Alves de Souza and Rafaella Costa, founder of Manjericão Filmes and the writer-director’s career-long producer from her Rio Film Festival best film winner “Underage.”
Costa also produced two films by Tata Amaral – “Bring It Inside” (2013), “Express Kidnapping” (2018) – as well as Lillah Halla’s Cannes Critics’ Week title “Levante,” a Fipresci Prize winner for titles competing outside Cannes’ Official Selection.
Packed with ideas and framing a typical Alves de Souza questioning of authority and received wisdom in a tale of female agency, “A City for Christine” begins with Christine, a victim of domestic violence, escaping and wandering the streets of São Paulo.
“In her drift, she experiences situations because she is a woman and meets other women who reflect on the need to think about cities from a gender, race and class perspective to denaturalize violence against women both in public and in domestic places,” the logline runs.
The morning after escaping, Christine returns home to take revenge on her aggressor with the help of the woman she has encountered.
“‘A City for Christine”’ starts with the questions: ‘Do cities have gender?’ and ‘What would cities be like if they were designed by and for women?’” Alves de Souza told Variety.
“The project has a hybrid structure alternating between rehearsed and spontaneous scenes with the objective to reflect on the principle of the Right to the City, based on the assumption that we all must be part of the construction of the places where we live and that we all have the right to occupy it and live in it decently,” she said. “However, the logic of large urban centers, marked by exclusion and the commodification of spaces and human relationships, is contrary to this idea,” she added.
The project has won a 2022 BRDE/Fundo Setorial do Audiovisual (FSA), allotted by public tender, in the TV/VOD Production, Via Programmer category, aimed to fund projects of an artistic and auteurist nature through television channels or VOD services. Notably, the grant amounts to around 80% of the film’s total budget.
The project is currently at a stage of research, fundraising and screenwriting development. At Mafiz, Malaga’s industry forum, Costa and Alves de Souza will be looking for investors, distributors, programmers, co-producers, sales agents and international funding.
A City for Christine
Courtesy of Caru Alves de Souza
