Numax premieres Iona Athena and Diana Toucedo’s “Horses Die at Dawn”

The Cine Numax cinema in Compostela will premiere on Monday, May 22 (9:50 p.m.) the second feature-length documentary by Navarre filmmaker Ione Atene (Pamplona, ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​1985) — the first January (2019), in which he portrayed his two octogenarian grandmothers, María Jesús and Manolita—. It’s about a movie Horses die at dawn, in whose work the Galician filmmaker Diana Toucedo (Redondela, 1982) plays a very relevant role, who already has a rich career behind her at important specialized domestic and international festivals, where she won numerous awards. The film was written and directed by Atenea, who is also in charge of cinematography, and shares the authorship of the script with Diana Toucedo, who is in charge of editing. Filmed in Barcelona, ​​it was produced by Hiruki Filmak (the company founded by Atenea, Lameiro and Garazi Erburu).

As detailed by the distributor, the film is about how Ione Athena, after moving into the house of the now-deceased García brothers, discovers that their lives continue latently in the objects they left behind: a piano, hundreds of drawings, thousands of photographs, a lot tape… Antonio was a cartoonist for the publishing house Bruguera, and Rosita, an opera singer and pianist. Together with their brother Juanita, they turned their home into a space for creation and fiction, from which one can escape from the gray reality of Franco’s dictatorship. Later, with new residents, the house continues to be a place where life can be different. “I chose to live with their presence,” Athena recalls. Maybe the normal thing would be to get rid of all that junk and old papers to settle in my new home. But I didn’t. Through their things I could know — or imagine — who they were. […] I discovered three people who traveled through fiction to create imaginary worlds at home. His materials had a very strong playful component and I decided to take it as an invitation to play». This was her motivation to make a film that will be shown again at Numax on Monday, the 29th.