The Colombian directors new film Wandering Girl (Niña errante) had its world premiere in Estonia as part of the Official Selection of the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.
The film received a Comprehensive Grant from the Colombia Film Fund (FDC) in 2015 and participated in the Films in Progress section of the San Sebastian festival in 2017. At Tallinn, the largest northern European film festival, it competed in the Official Selection against seven productions from Denmark, Albania, Hungary, Finland, Canada, Africa, Costa Rica, and Egypt.
The A list festival is the only Baltic film festival held in Estonia, running since 1997. With over 80,000 people attending and more than 1,200 film professionals, the festival has three competitive sections: Official Selection, First Feature Film, and the Estonian Film Competition. Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (PÖFF) is the only festival in northern Europe with FIAPF accreditation (International Federation of Film Producers Associations) for the celebration of an International Program of Competitive Feature Films, which places it alongside 14 other nonspecialized competitive world festivals, among them Berlin, Cannes, Venice, Karlovy Vary, Warsaw, and San Sebastian.
Four European films had their premieres in the Official Selection: Until We Fall by Samanou Acheche Sahlstrøm; A Shelter Among the Clouds by Robert Budina; Bad Poems by Gábor Reisz; and The Human Part by Juha Lehtola. Africa was represented by Hadi Elbagoury’s The Guest and the Americas by Bernard Émond’s A Place to Live (international premiere), Ishtar Yasin’s Two Fridas, and Rubén Mendoza’s Wandering Girl (world premieres). Four of these films are their country’s nominations for the next Academy Awards in the category of Best Foreign Film.
In Wandering Girl, Ángela, a 12-year-old girl, meets her father’s three other daughters upon his death. The girl then embarks on a trip across the country to seek out an aunt and thus avoid falling into the hands of the state. In this journey of mourning, especially while in a shared room in a low-cost road hotel, Angela, in the midst of a bodily awakening, recognizes in each of her sisters her own femininity and sensuality, the mysteries of pleasure and pain, the body, the misfortunes and the privileges of being a woman on these roads.
In the words of the director, "Wandering Girl tells the story of the journey of four half-sisters from ocean to ocean in Colombia, from the south of the country to the north. It is a story about the particular meaning that crossing a country like ours holds for a girl, a woman, an orphan, a person that is newly alone. "
The shoot took place over six weeks, along a route four years in the making from the San Cipriano River, in the Colombian South Pacific region, to Dibulla, on the Atlantic coast. The shoot traveled along Valle del Cauca, Eje Eafetero, Tolima, Guajira, and Bolívar. The Colombian actresses Sofía Paz, Carolina Ramírez, Lina Sánchez, and María Camila Mejía make up the main cast of this film. Sofia Oggioni directed cinematography, Óscar Navarro served as art director, and Las Añez provided original music. Casting and actor training was by Fagua Casting, field production by César Rodríguez and Vaya Films, production by Andrea Chignoli and Rubén Mendoza.
Wandering Girl is a production of Día Fragma Fábrica de Películas, directed and written by Rubén Mendoza and produced by Daniel García Díaz, with whom the director has developed most of his feature films—with the exception of Señorita María—and all of his shorts. It is co-produced by the French company CineSud Promotion (The Stoplight Society, Land and Shade, The Towrope) with support from Dago García Producciones and Caracol Cine.
