Homing in on one of the key Spanish titles which could move the box office needle, Film Factory Ent. has jumped on worldwide sales rights to multifaceted romantic tragicomedy “Always Winter” (“Siempre es invierno”) the latest movie from David Trueba, a consummate film director and journalist and celebrated novelist hailed by France’s Le Figaro as the “wonder boy of the Iberian cultural scene.”
Film Factory has also shared in exclusivity with Variety a first-look still from the film.
First presented at September’s San Sebastian, “Always Winter” reunites Film Factory with Trueba, actor David Verdaguer and Ikiru Films, Atresmedia Cine and La Terraza Films, sales agent, co-writer and director, star and producers of 2023’s “Jokes & Cigarettes,” which broke out to an appreciable €891,991 ($972,270) at Spanish theaters. Verdaguer, the lead in “Always Winter,” went on to win the 2024 Spanish Academy best actor Goya for his performance in “Jokes & Cigarettes.”
“Always Winter” also toplines Amaia Salamanca, renowned for her performances in “Sin tetas no hay paraíso,” “Grand Hotel” and “Velvet,” and Isabelle Renauld, star of Palme d’Or winner “Eternity and a Day.”
Linking two of Trueba’s life passions, “Always Winter” also marks the first feature which adapts one of Trueba’s written works, “Blitz,” a novella published in 2015.
An international breakout, hailed by Liberation as “delicious, original and subtle,” “Blitz” and “Always Winter” turn on a landscape architect, who travels from Madrid to Munich accompanied by his girlfriend of dazzling beauty, his emotional mainstay, to present a project in a pitching contest which could offer him a professional future. Suddenly, he realises his girlfriend is leaving him, obliterating the coordinates of his emotional landscape.
“Broken and out of place, Miguel meets Olga, an older woman who works as a volunteer at the architecture congress. At her side, he will begin to rebuild himself and to understand what his new life project consists of,” the film’s synopsis end.
In its psychological percipience and the relatability of the gutted protagonist’s sentiments post-rupture, leavened by comic riffs, in its 167 pages “Blitz” melded three key influences on Trueba’s career-long creative life: the introspective intimacy of French cinema; bathetic humor, owing a large debt to Rafael Azcona and a Spanish comedy of the absurd; and, as a novelist, the modernism of Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan.
What is most touching in “Blitz” and potentially the film is the sense of emotional affinity the protagonist feels with a much older woman whose keen intelligence fills his void.
It remains to be seen how much Trueba chooses to capture of “Blitz” in “Always Winter,” an awaited film which Film Factory describes as exploring a “complex emotional journey, filled with absurd situations, which challenges social taboos, particularly those surrounding the relationship between a younger man and an older woman.”
“I have never wanted to take my novels to the cinema. It seems to me that in their format they are complete and explained. Nor, when other directors have asked me to do so, have I been tempted to accept,” said Trueba. “But the case of ‘Blitz’ was different, because it deals with something which is enormously graphic and visual: the perceptible passage of time on people. An element that in film can be enriched and that makes the challenge of adaptation more stimulating.”
“Always Winter” looks to follow in the line of “Jokes & Cigarettes” (“Saben Aquell”) a sentiment-focused romantic drama whose backbone is the real-life relationship over 1965-1980 between Eugenio, a famed chain-smoking deadpanning Catalan comedian, and singer wife Conchita Alcaide.
“After the experience of working with David Trueba in ‘Jokes & Cigarettes,’ he told us about ‘Blitz,’ one of his most intimate and personal novels. It is a very original story full of nuances that talks about human relationships and how love can resurface in unpredictable ways,” said Atresmedia Cine’s Jaime Ortiz de Artiñano, one of the film’s producers.
“Combining seriousness with humor, ‘Always Winter’ is an irresistible romantic tragicomedy that observes and enhances us. Its effect is like that of a restorative embrace,” added Ikiru Films’ Edmon Roch. “It is a luxury to be able to work again with David Trueba, a humanist creator who knows how to portray people with tact and intelligence to build complex and close characters, who bring a lot of truth.”
