_{Daughter of Rage by Laura Baumeister}

Amsterdam-based Halal came on board the project at an early stage, discovering it several years ago around the time it passed through International Film Festival Rotterdam’s CineMart. Halal’s producer Christine Anderton was first to identify its promise.

“She found the project and she worked on it most of the time,” says Gijs Kerbosch, founder and head of fiction at the company.

Kerbosch, who attended the Rotterdam co-pro market with Anderton, remembers “having such a good click” with Baumeister and her producers, Rossana Baumeister and Bruna Haddad from Felipa Films in Nicaragua, and Martha Orozco from Martfilms in Mexico. “The pitch of the project and the version of the script that they had at that point was so good.”

The Halal producers liked the fact that this was a film being made by a female director. The story also grabbed them immediately.

This is a tough and emotional drama about an eleven-year-old kid (Maria) and her mother eking out an existence in the shadow of one of Nicaragua’s biggest landfill refuse sites.

_{Daughter of Rage by Laura Baumeister}

The girl is “forced to become an adult at a way too young age. That is something that intrigued us. There is much conflict and drama in that story,” Kerbosch explains why Halal was so drawn to Daughter of Rage. “We felt that this is a story which should be told.” He described the project as “a small story which is actually a really big story. Every time, I bring out the trash, I think about this film and about this dump. This is a very negative spiral we are in. How are we going to break that?”

Halal is well accustomed to coming aboard co-productions like this. Even so, Daughter of Rage took time to pull together. The project had Mexican, German, French, Norwegian and Spanish involvement - and support from Creative Europe MEDIA. It has taken around five years to finance the project and to get it shot. That, though, is not unusual in projects of this complexity. “I would love to find a way to make it faster but I do not know how,” the Dutch producer jokes. What is more, in this case the pandemic caused extra delay.

“The structure of the co-production was a challenge,” Kerbosch acknowledges, but he also speaks of “the love that everyone had for the film” and the strength of the main producers who ensured that everybody bought into Baumeister’s artistic vision. “There was discussion about the film and how to structure it… yes, it was a lot of work, but there were no discussions about ego or cultural conflict which you sometimes have with co-productions.”

The different European partners generally communicated with the South Americans in English (“my Spanish does not exist, unfortunately,” confides Kerbosch).

In terms of Dutch input, much of the post-production was done in the Netherlands, and the film received support from the NFF+HBF Co-production Scheme, run jointly by the Netherlands Film Fund and Hubert Bals Fund.

The Halal producer regards co-producing as a way for the company to “work with talent in different cultures, to learn about different countries and how people work there; the exchange of ideas and bringing them to another level. That is the core of co-production.”

Belgian outfit Best Friend Forever recently came on board to handle world sales. The film’s roll-out is now beginning in earnest.

As for Baumeister and her production team, yes, Halal would be very keen to work on their future projects. “She is a wonderful person and a super talented director,” Kerbosch says of the young Nicaraguan auteur for whom a very bright future is predicted. “She has delivered an amazing debut film shot in her own country [Nicaragua] which is not easy. She can perform under pretty hard circumstances and high pressure. Yeah, I think from the point on, she will be working on a lot of beautiful projects - and we would love to be part of that!”

Daughter of Rage (original title: La hija de todas las rabias) is directed by Laura Baumeister. It is produced by Felipa Films (NIC) and Martfilms (MEX), in co-production with Halal, Heimatfilm (GER), Promenades (FRA), Cardon Pictures (NIC), Dag Hoel Filmproduksion (NOR) and Nephilim Producciones (ESP). Sales are handled by Best Friend Forever.
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