La Claqueta Unveils ‘Bella’ Animated Gender Abuse Survival Story

Famous Andalusian production house La Claqueta, run by producer Olmo Figueredo, will produce “Bella”, the first animated feature film by Spanish director Manuel H. Martín – with whom the company has previously produced the award-winning documentary “30 Years of Darkness “and” El viaje mas largo “, and famous VFX supervisor Amparo Martínez Barco (” Marshland “,” The Head “).

Martín also co-wrote the screenplay for “Bella”, in collaboration with award-winning filmmaker Carmen Jiménez, co-screenwriter of “Adiós”, nominated for the Spanish Academy Goya in 2019, with Mario Casas.

“Bella” is inspired by the true story of Ana Bella Estévez from Seville, an entrepreneur from Ashoka España and a survivor of gender-based violence who founded the Ana Bella Foundation, a global network of over 30,000 female survivors who work to create social change in 82 countries. worldwide. Importantly, the film crew chose animation as the medium to tell their story so that audiences of all ages could hear the important message Ana has dedicated her life to sharing.

Although “Bella” is Martín’s first attempt at making a fully animated feature film, he worked on animated sequences in “30 Years of Darkness”, a documentary on Spanish topos, or moles in English, the opponents of Franco’s murderous regime who went into hiding. after the Spanish Civil War, some of them for up to three decades before amnesty was offered in the late 1960s. The documentary was a key inspiration for the award-winning submission for Best International Spanish Feature “ The Endless Trench ”, also produced by La Claqueta.

Martín explained to Variety that, “Our team knows this is a difficult story to tell, and unfortunately too contemporary, so we opted for a subtle and delicate aesthetic. As a universal story of overcoming adversity, we work so that, with our own and personal artistic proposition, the film finds a very accessible language for the general public, especially young audiences.

For his part, Martínez declared that: “The main challenge that this film presents us is to tell the story of Bella, a story of gender violence, through animation. The scourge of abuse is not discerned by age, so we feel responsible for making a film accessible to younger audiences, and animation makes that kind of storytelling easier.

“Bella” will be produced by Olmo Figueredo Gonzalez-Quevedo for La Claqueta and the Bella La Pelicula label. Sara Gómez is an executive producer and the film is supported by the Spanish audiovisual agency ICAA and the Junta de Andalucía, among other public institutions. As a project, the script was developed with the European programs EAVE and Sources.

“I met Ana Bella Estévez eight years ago at an awards ceremony and her motivational speech made me realize that the way out of a woman’s environment of gender violence is not only to show the physical consequences suffered by other victims, but that it is more effective in showing the survivors’ overtaking stories, ”Figueredo said. “With a vital and positive approach, we hope to show that there is always an alternative and that there is always someone who wants to help us. It was the starting point of this film.