Lucila Mariani’s first feature is a summer horror story about girls, eclipses, and the old internet. The Days Off (Los días libres) world premieres August 7 in Locarno’s Filmmakers of the Present competition, and the trailer is out ahead of the 79th festival (Aug. 5–15).
Producer MaravillaCine frames it cleanly: in the near future, during a long summer with a solar eclipse coming, 12-year-old Bego hunts for her place in her family and among her peers. While the moon “eclipses” people around her, she meets online friend REN__ and learns shifting, the viral teen belief that lucid dreaming can open other realities.
Trailer
Watch the official trailer on Vimeo: The Days Off / Los días libres
Mariani’s director’s statement (the thesis)
Mariani has been blunt about what the movie is actually for:
Los días libres explores themes that I have been drawn to throughout my career, such as horror, female identity, our relationship with technology and the virtual world and the limits of cinematic language.
On the personal stake:
This film is very personal to me. The internet was deeply formative in my life: it was where I met friends when I couldn’t find them in the real world, where I pirated music and films that otherwise would never have been within my reach in my country. It was also a refuge where I began to understand who I was and who I wanted to be. In many ways, the internet taught me how to dream.
And the closing dedication:
This film is an open love letter to that internet – the one that no longer quite exists, the one that is changing. To its hidden corners that not everyone can see. A wink, a secret, to those who, like me, do not always belong. A refuge for those who don’t quite fit in and who, like me, needed cinema, the internet, something to hold on to and believe in.
That is not a tech-panic press kit. It is nostalgia with teeth: the chatroom as shelter, plus the uncanny of teens trying to dream their way out of a collapsing present.
