From Thursday, Grimmfest will take over Manchester’s Odeon Great Northern, giving genre-lovers the opportunity to spend four days submerged in all things frightful. The event will mark the thirteenth year of the festival and after last year’s virtual only event will be a return to the festival in physical form. One film hoping to delight horror fans is the Colombian movie, Tarumama.
A Dynamo production directed by Andres Beltran, Tarumama stars Paula Castaño and Andres Londono as a married couple on the brink of separation. Hoping to keep their family together, they venture into the woods for a secluded family holiday, but soon after arriving, events take a spooky turn after a nocturnal encounter with a strange woman. As husband and wife are pushed further apart, an evil entity sets its sights on the children. As cabin in the woods films go, Tarumama is a great addition, there’s plenty of moody atmosphere and some genuinely traumatic visuals. Easily one of the more straight horror films of Grimmfest, Tarumama feels like it has been created especially for the genre-mad attendees.
Ahead of the UK premiere, Beltran, Castaño, Londono, and I traversed three separate time zones to talk about life in the pandemic and the journey of bringing Tarumama to life.
Tarumama is screening at Grimmfest in October, how are you feeling about introducing the United Kingdom to it?
ANDRES BELTRAN: This film has only been released here in Colombia, and it will be premiered also in Sitges in Spain, but we’re so excited to hear what the people in other countries [will think], how they are going to receive it, how they’re going to appreciate what we’ve done. So we’re really honored to be in the festival. We’re really, really happy.
For those that haven’t read up on the film, what’s Tarumama, about in a nutshell?
AB: This is the story of Sara and Oscar, a couple that are basically dealing with a marriage that is having some troubles. They have two kids, and they decide to go to this cabin in the woods to try to sort things out and see if they can somehow save their marriage. As soon as they arrive, Sara starts feeling that there’s somebody or something in the woods, and also the kids, and this presence, this ‘kind of ghost’ starts haunting them. Things go really bad, because it is a horror film.
Paula and Andres, for you as actors what was it about the project that appealed to you when you read the script?
PAULA CASTAÑO: At first, when I received the script, I always had this thought that horror films were trivial, but when I received the script and I read it, then I saw these movies that Andreas gave me to watch, I realized that I was so wrong. This genre is amazing and has a lot of possibilities. It’s a metaphor for life. Every day we are dealing with our demons and monsters and our own feelings and we don’t understand each other. This genre we can show these monsters, these demons, and materialise them and talk about them, and try to understand and to face the demons that we have in ourselves.
ANDRES LONDONO: In my case, I got this script a few days after I came back from another project that was completely different. And first of all, I always wanted to work with Beltran so I was already excited about the fact that I was getting a story that he wrote. I read this story and the character was so interesting to me in the way that he was very complex and not very obvious and very different from anything that I’ve ever done before. It’s a horror film, but it’s a love story. The fact that this character is going to challenge me, you know, and these different forms is just very exciting to me.
Andres, you were working on Tarumama for a number of years, during which you became a father. Did that influence how the story developed?
AB: The whole process of writing the film was maybe a couple of years. When I started writing the script we wanted to have a kid and then she got pregnant and we were waiting for our kid. When we started shooting the film, our daughter was one year old. The whole process of writing was basically about that, about being a parent, being a dad and hearing my wife and her expectations of being a mother. Also the co-writer Anton Goenechea, who was in the same process, has a child that is almost the same age as mine. Sometimes we were writing about that and we’d stop writing and we said, “we’re talking about our own fears of parenthood, we’re talking about what we are really facing right now, and also we’re talking about the fear of losing your wife, or your partner because of having a child.” That was something that was really important because of the relationship between Oscar and Sara. They are basically having troubles, not because of their kids, but because they have kids, it adds more pressure. We were talking about that and also we were trying to understand what women might feel. We’re not going to be able ever to understand that as men, but that we were trying to understand what they face. They face so many transformations, their bodies, their mind, hormones, so we were talking about that and eventually the film is about not only the couple, but about motherhood, about being a mum, being afraid of not being a good mum. All these topics that we really wanted to talk about and that’s why I feel it’s a really personal film somehow.
Paula, you yourself are the mother of a young child, do you think that this helped you connect to Sara?
PC: Yes, of course. Right now being a woman and a mother and a professional, I want to fulfill my dreams and I want to travel and do everything. I mean, society is so hard on us with everyone. I mean with men also, but with us it’s so difficult. I think Sarah is a very complex character, just having a child changes your world. If you add to what happens in the movie, it gets harder. You just get into this hole that you just can’t see the light. How are you gonna deal with this if society doesn’t help you, it’s so hard. To be a woman to achieve all these things together. So I think that the movie is great because the movie talks about these things. It’s a psychological drama and it was so fun to act and to play. If I wasn’t a mother, I think I would have done it differently. But because I’m a mother I think I understand, not that Andres won’t understand what’s going on in the movie.
Andres and Paula, you’ve both worked across film and television, which do you prefer?
PC: I love shooting with one camera. I love that about cinema because the crew’s energy is into that shot. It’s so easy and fun for me to do it that way. We are together doing that shot and then another and the next. For me I love that about cinema, it’s very different from making television.
AL: That’s a beautiful thing, especially when you’re doing a – like you said – an independent film. When you’re working with artists like these two right here, and the rest of the crew and the actors, because you get to really experience it, it’s almost theatrical. It’s almost like you’re doing theatre, like you’re doing a small production where we have the audience right there. We were in a cabin for three weeks and it was up in the mountains like this beautiful area, the outskirts of Bogota, and just getting to that place alone was a production itself. It was thirty minutes of a dirt road up to the hill, to where the cabin was built, because they built the cabin for this. By the time you got picked up till you go to set, you were already in an experience that was just out of this world. There was just something very magical and beautiful. It was kind of surreal when we were up there and we would just stay up there all day. It’s hard to compare to television because every project is so different, so unique and I find myself not being able to compare any of them. They’re all completely different experiences.
What advantages did making the cabin give you?
AB: Well, we were actually looking for a cabin in the woods and there are not so many in Colombia. You know, it’s just they’re more like houses, really typical houses. I wanted to have something that you couldn’t tell somehow that this was a house from Colombia. So we scouted a lot of houses and then I said to Natalia Echeverriwho is our producer, “we need to build it”, and she started laughing and said that we didn’t have money for that. Eventually we came up with this idea that we could build a really small house. It wasn’t huge. I also wanted to have the woods be part of the story. I didn’t want to shoot it in the studio and then go and do the exteriors in the woods. I wanted to have the real feeling of the woods. All that fog… I mean almost all of that is real. We wanted to have that experience and then when we did it with the production designer, Diana Trujillo, we knew that that was going to be the best scenario for us. Like Andreas said, we were actually there with no signal, we were somehow isolated feeling the story. The woods that you see in the film when we finished shooting at night was really scary, because it was like the monster, Tarumama can be anywhere. I would do it exactly the same way again because it gives much more truth to the story.
How did you each use your pandemic time, was there much time for writing or reading scripts and trying to plan what comes next?
PC: Well, right now I’m going to be in the theatre. I’m going to be doing a play. I’m so happy to return with…I worked during the pandemic, but making theatre is great, amazing to feel again the contact with the audience and public. During the pandemic I did a couple of TV shows. It was so strange for us, but at the same time, the actors, we have the same job.
AB: I wrote… well actually, during the lockdown, I couldn’t write because of my daughter, but we were pre-producing two TV shows and one that I was co-creating. So we had the writing room during the pandemic, during the lockdown, and then I was doing post production of Tarumama, which we had more time because of the lockdown. So we didn’t have to release the film. We were supposed to release the film one year ago. But because we have more time, we took advantage of that. Since we started working again here in Colombia, there have been many, many projects. I’ve been shooting three TV series non-stop. What we couldn’t do during the lockdown we’re doing right now.
PC: In the pandemic everyone is watching Netflix and Amazon. Man, It’s easier for us to show our projects and everyone is watching them. I think that’s amazing. A TV show I did was released in 2020 and it became this huge success because everyone was at home.
AL: It was definitely a beautiful time of introspection and reflection. Thank God I was able to work as well, I shot a film right in the middle of the whole of the whole lockdown here in Los Angeles. We were lucky enough to shoot days before a county near Los Angeles was shut down. We just finished production days before that happened. It was all very new. It was very strange to try to figure out how we were doing everything, you know, makeup and wardrobe. The whole thing was interesting, but it was a great experience. It’s a psychological thriller I’m very proud of. Also, I got to write a lot. I did a lot of writing and I ended up shooting a short film, long distance. That was a very interesting situation where I just called up a bunch of friends, you know, called on favours, actor friends and people and we all shot in our own home, it was all a long distance. Then I put it together and we ended up in the Dublin Festival, which was beautiful. So that’s something to remember for sure. Thank God things got back to normal now, the industry recovered quickly.
It did show the resilience of the arts. Everybody really relied on the arts to get them through this awful time. It was so good to see how quickly different places did get back to work.
AL: Times like these is when you start realising that the arts are that important in the world. In the history of humankind. I always find it so interesting when some people in our industry take it so lightly, “it’s not rocket science. We’re not saving the world.” I get where that’s coming from, and I get there are a lot of professions that are life-saving. But in a way Arts are life-saving, at least I see it that way. Times like these you understand the power and the impact and the need. It’s not just for entertaining, or for distraction, but for hope.
PC: I think that there must be a lot of sadness in the world, and I hope that when they see Tarumama, they’re gonna to feel a catharsis through the movie. You know, I really hope that I think
Why should people add Tarumama to their Grimmfest viewing, what are they going to get from your film that they might not get from others?
AB: I’m really excited. I studied in London, I did a Masters degree, so I lived there for one year. I did some short films in London so I kind of understand the culture, but I don’t know what people might say about the film. I think somehow it’s a film that people can relate to no matter where you are from. But that’s something that we never know as filmmakers. We just go with our instinct and we try to connect with people, but we don’t know how people are going to react. For Colombia, it has been a surprise because we don’t do many horror films, but in the UK there are many, many, many horror films. Maybe they’re going to find it somehow special. They’re going to see something that they haven’t seen before, which would be great.
Tarumama screens at Grimmfest 2021 on 10th October 2021. Tickets for the festival can be purchased here.
