– Gonzalo de Castro, Dafne Fernández and Almudena Amor star in a film by Inefable Productions, with a screenplay written by Arturo Ruiz Serrano and José Manuel Carrasco
l-r: Actor Gonzalo de Castro, actresses Dafne Fernández and Almudena Amor, director Martín Cuervo, executive producer Lydia Palencia and actor Álvaro Cavadas on the set of Desde arriba
Filming has begun on the island of Gran Canaria for Desde arriba, the new feature film by Martín Cuervo (Con quién viajas, Todos lo hacen, Coartadas). The cast includes Gonzalo de Castro (Goya nominee for Suso’s Tower, seen this year in A Sucker’s Born Every Minute), Dafne Fernández (the series Headless Chickens, also appearing in A Sucker’s Born Every Minute), Almudena Amor (Goya nominee for The Good Boss) and Álvaro Cavadas.
The film is described as an awkward comedy in which the humour arises from an extreme situation handled with complete naturalness. The story follows an actor in crisis who is forced to live with his teenage son, an introverted boy he barely knows. The conflict erupts when the boy climbs onto the roof of the house and refuses to come down, forcing his father to confront his inability to manage their relationship and the unresolved tensions within the family.
The project is based on a screenplay written by Arturo Ruiz Serrano and José Manuel Carrasco, winners in the Fiction category in the second edition of Break On Time, the international screenplay competition organised by ISII Group to support new voices and emerging talent in the audiovisual sector. Desde arriba is the first feature film to emerge from this second edition of the programme, which is supports projects from the writing stage through to production.
To mark the start of the five-week shoot, with a budget of approximately 4 million euros, director Martín Cuervo, said: “In Desde arriba, there are no written gags; you laugh at people’s behaviour, at the absurdity of it all. I think that’s why we all like it, because we don’t often see this sort of film in Spanish cinema.”
The film centres its narrative on intergenerational communication breakdowns, the fragility of the middle-aged ego, and the challenges of navigating relationships within blended families. “I find this story compelling because of its intimate scale and its apparent simplicity. There are no big plot twists or narrative devices. It all unfolds before our eyes, in the conversations, in the gestures, in the glances that avoid meeting. Desde arriba offers an intimate and familiar experience, one the viewer can step into and leave with an uncomfortable question: how many times have we tried to help when, in reality, we just wanted the other person to act in the way we needed them to?” continues the director.
In the same vein, Arturo Ruiz Serrano and José Manuel Carrasco reflect on the origins and essence of the story: “With this script, we wanted to talk about family — mainly the challenges of parenthood: past, present and future. The film shows how the responsibilities we failed to shoulder in the past come back to haunt us in the present, and how acting and making decisions becomes increasingly difficult as time goes on.”
Finally, executive producer Lydia Palencia notes: “At ISII Group, we’re driven by a desire to produce very different films.” Gonzalo de Castro adds that “this feature film is a challenge, as the humour isn’t spoon-fed,”; while his co-star Almudena Amor admits that “when I read the script, I laughed and cried: that’s what life is like – sometimes it’s surreal”.
Desde arriba is a film by Inefable Productions (ISII Group).
(Translated from Spanish)
