It Rains

After reading “The Floating Beacon” by John Howison, I found it difficult to escape its oppressive atmosphere. A short piece of classic Gothic literature, it is the dark tale of three convicts sentenced to live the rest of theirlives in a floating jail. Like other works of Gothic literature, the text was rich with details of the suffocating space and laden with an eerie general ambience but lacked either character depth or any exploration of human relationships. What fascinated me about the story was its premise of one being forced to interact for the remainder of his life with people he finds insufferable. This, then, became the starting point for Llueve (It Rains). For a year, I struggled to create a narrative that would allow me to develop the characters and their relationships, not in a floating jail but in a more familiar but still uncanny location: the Andes.

In the project’s research and development stage, I conducted several trips to the most remote towns in the Andes. I familiarized myself with the space and the people. After months of interaction, I started an exercise in transplanting Gothic ideas into this unlikely mountain setting, transforming its otherworldly spaces into a platform for cross-cultural exploration. From that exercise, and after two and a half years, I went into production of Llueve.

The film introduces three characters, two men and a woman, who share a fragile emotional equilibrium in the isolated house where they live. When a wounded man arrives looking for shelter from the merciless rain, the emotional triangle is thrown off-balance, creating an unbearable tension. With no dialogue, the film substitutes voices with the sounds of rain, at times a faint shower and at others, a tempest. The film is the product of camera and light: I used no digital intervention in post-production. To achieve the film’s velvety texture, I color- graded the film, painstakingly using a magnifying glass and gels, and finished it across various print stages (work print, internegative, interpositive), a “legacy” process that today has been replaced by computers.