Fasten Films Sets Projects With Mar Coll, María M. Bayona

Adrià Monés’ Fasten Films, producer of Cannes-selected “The End of It,” “Strawberries” and “Rehearsals of a Revolution,” has announced a new slate of films led by Catalan talent Mar Coll, Maria M. Bayona, Adrià Garcia and Nely Reguera.

Fasten is also developing debut features from Víctor Alonso-Berbel, Jordi Boquet, Carlos Lechuga and Oriol Pérez, positioning the Barcelona, Madrid and Canary Island-based production house as a driving force in a new-phase and already vibrant Catalan Cinema.

Mar Coll: ‘Dasha’

Col (“Salve María”) is set to direct “Dasha,” “a dream project for us as producers, a mafia thriller and black comedy set in the wild, excessive Lloret de Mar of the 2000s, where entertainment and political tension collide,” said Monés.  

“Dasha” also marks “a bold new step for Mar Coll, one of the filmmakers who helped shape a new Catalan cinema, working here with Valentina Viso, one of the key screenwriters in Spanish cinema, and Nataliya Kolesova, an emerging Ukrainian-Russian-Catalan voice with a singular perspective,” Monés added.

María M. Bayona: ‘The First Witch’

Following on her English-language debut, Cannes Premiere title “The End of It” starring Rebecca Hall, Noomi Rapace and Gael García Bernal, Bayona will shoot in Catalan, her native tongue, “The First Witch,” set to be shot in the Pyrenees.

“A rare voice in Spanish cinema, Maria combines emotional precision, genre ambition and a fearless sense of scale, and this new project feels both culturally rooted and unapologetically ambitious,” Monés enthused.

Adrià Garcia: ‘Sira and the Hidden Arcadia’

Fasten’s first family animated feature mixing 2D, 3D and stop motion, Garcia’s “Sira and the Hidden Arcadia” will be made in collaboration with Guillermo del Toro’s Guadalajara-based Taller del Chucho and written with Mixtec filmmaker and screenwriter Ángeles Cruz and Ulises Porra.

Nely Reguera: ‘Teresa Up in Arms’

“A dramatic comedy full of emotion, slapstick and tenderness, in which Nely Reguera completely subverts the traditional figure of the stepmother,” said Monés, Reguera’s new project, “Teresa Up in Arms” “moves as far away as possible from the Walt Disney archetype: it laughs at menopause, mindfulness and contemporary self-help culture, while fighting for a more generous, complex idea of family,” Monés added.

Reguera will write with Eduard Sola, a 2025 original screenplay Goya Award winner for “A House in Flames,” and Viso, Mar Coll’s regular co-scribe and a Catalan Academy Gaudi Award orginal screenplay winner for 2024’s “Salve Maria.”

Fasten’s Next Step Forward

Rolling off a rich new talent ecosystem of film schools, led by Pompeu Fabra U and the Escac, Catalonia’s film industry benefits hugely from robust support this decade from the Catalan Government’s ICEC film-TV agency, which launched a Minority Co-Production Feature Film Fund in 2020 and followed up with €1.5 million ($1.7 million) grants for higher-end Catalan-language TV series.

Carla Simon’s “Summer 1993,” a 2017 Berlin Best First Feature Film, brought down the flag on the closest Spain has had to a film movement in decades: Auteurist fiction films grounded in a large sense upon a specific place, but which talk about big picture social and gender issues. Simon’s “Alcarràs” won a Berlinale Golden Bear, “20,000 Species of Bees,” a Catalan co-production a year later. 

Bulwarked by Catalonia’s Minority Co-Production Fund, Monés has already carved out a reputation for remarkably cosmopolitan co-production. He partnered, for instance, on Cannes’ 2023 Camera d’Or winner “Inside the Cocoon Shell.” Fasten Films’ new slate, however, now aims to broaden the Catalan cinema’s gamut, go pedal to metal on ambition and add a broader audience edge. 

Fasten’s new slate represents “the kind of cinema we believe in: ambitious, original and unafraid,” Monés told Variety. “They grow out of the intimate drama that has defined much of recent Catalan auteur cinema, a tradition we deeply admire and feel indebted to, but they also try to take a step further, embracing genre, spectacle, emotion and political engagement, while reclaiming cinema as a collective celebration.”

That new ambition cuts various ways. One can be scale. “The End of It” weighs in with a budget of nearly €8 million ($9.3 million), said Monés. “First features with this budget are very difficult to finance,” he recognized. He managed to mesh, however, financed international co-production – BBC Films, Norway’s Eye Eye Pictures, behind “Sentimental Value,” as well as Canary Island tax incentives, a Spanish ICAA film agency subsidy, a Filmin streaming service pre-buy and U.S. investors. The Mediapro Studio took an equity position and made a Latin America pre-buy.

Another step forward for Monés is certainly genre, natural for a producer who cut his teeth making “[REC]” in the Canary Islands. Monés calls “The End of It” a near future drama with genre elements. Bayona’s follow-up, “The First Witch,” is set against the earliest witch hunts in the fifteenth century. “The film reminds me a bit of Chicho Ibañez Serrador’s ‘Who Can Kill a Child?’ It’s genre edge, of about talking about society, violence suffered by children, and how it repeats in time.” 

The ambition is also artistic, however. “Sira and the Hidden Arcadia” “brings together Mixtec culture and Catalan modernism in an adventurous, emotional and visually singular world. It speaks about identity in all its forms, gender, origin and belonging, at a time when the world seems to be turning inwards,” Monés explained.

Behind such expansive moves, however, is one of the only production strategies which has worked down the decades: Talent.

“For me that always comes first,” Monés told Variety. I remember how, six or seven years ago, a mutual friend sent me María’s shorts and they drove me wild with enthusiasm. I told María: ‘Whatever you want, let’s do it.’ So we began to develop a screenplay and then María said she had another idea but was a very expensive sci-fi film. I said we could never make it just in Spain. María said she wanted to make it. So I said we’d have to make it a different way.”