13 Nominations for TAMBIÉN LA LLUVIA: Goya Award Nominations Announced Today

The Goya Award (Spain's equivalent of the Oscar) nominations were announced today and 'Tambien La Lluvia" (Even the Rain) scored 13 nominations including:

Best Music
Best Film
Best Direction (Iciar Bollain pictured below)
Best Original Screenplay
Best Direction of Production
Best Sound
Best Special Effects
Best Supporting Actor (Karra Elejalde)
Best New Actor (Carlos Aduviri)
Best Lead Actor (Luis Tosar pictured below)
Best Makeup and Hair
Best Costumes
Best Editing

The photo of Carlos Aduviri as 'Hatuey,' an indigenous Bolvian cast as a 15th century native, shows off some of the hair, make up and costuming that made the historical epic in the film within a film, seem as real as the depictions of native characters in a film like Apocalypto or The New World.

In the film, Carlos Aduviri plays a dual role. His character Daniel, gets a role in a film that is shooting in Cochabamba, Bolvia in the year 2000 when the government sold off the rights to the water to multinational companies that then tried to sell water back to the people at excessive fees. The Daniel character takes an active role in the riots that ensue, fighting for water for his people. In real life, Daniel is not an actor. He is a carpenter, who went to film school and now works in a film school and makes short films. His casting was very similar to the way it is depicted in the film (an open call for extras). The part was written for a very big, strong-looking warrior of a man. Carlos was cast against type for his intensity. Now he is nominated for a Goya Award for his work in the film.


Director Iciar Bollain serves as Vice President of the Spanish Academy for the Motion Picture Industry. 'Tambien La Lluvia" is her fifth film. Her film is also the official Oscar submission from Spain and is competing for one of the five Best Foreign-Language film nominations with 60 other films. The nominees will be announced on January 25, 2011. If she is nominated, Bollain will be the first female director from Spain to be honored in this way. Bollain became attached to the film to direct after Alejandro Innaritu, who started to develop the project, departed to make BIUTIFUL. Now, BIUTIFUL, the Mexican Oscar submission starring popular Spanish actor Javier Bardem is up against Spain's TAMBIEN LA LLUVIA, which stars Mexico's biggest actor, Gael Garcia Bernal. Go figure!

Other multiple nominees at the Goyas are:
BALADA TRISTE DE TROMPETA with 15 nominations, directed by Alex de la Iglesias, PA NEGRE with 14 nominations and BURIED with 10 nominations.

Production Company Morena Films did well last year at the Goyas with CELDA 211 also starring Luis Tosar.

Tambien La Lluvia will be released in the United States on February 18, 2011 by Vitagraph Films.

Read more about Tambien La Lluvia and the water riots on Facebook or our website.

Vitagraph Films Acquires All North American Rights for Official Spanish Oscar Submission, TAMBIEN LA LLUVIA (EVEN THE RAIN) From Wild Bunch

Columbus Day, October 12, 2010 – Vitagraph Films, LLC partners David Shultz and Margot Gerber announced today that they acquired all North American rights for Spain’s official entry for ‘Best Foreign Language Film” for the 2011 Oscars, TAMBIEN LA LLUVIA (EVEN THE RAIN) from Wild Bunch, on behalf of producer Juan Gordon’s Morena Films. Ironically the deal was finalized in time to announce the acquisition on Columbus Day, as the “film-within-a-film” in TAMBIEN LA LLUVIA chronicles some of gold-seeking Christopher Columbus’ exploits with the indigenous people he encountered in the Americas, circa 1492.

An official selection of the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival, TAMBIEN LA LLUVIA is directed by Icíar Bollaín from a screenplay by Paul Laverty (ROUTE IRISH), a frequent Ken Loach collaborator. The film stars Gael Garcia Bernal, Luis Tosar and Carlos Aduviri.

The deal was negotiated on Vitagraph’s behalf by European agent, Guy Amon of the Paris-based Leisure and Multimedia Consulting. LMC has been representing films in France since the early 1980s and works with Munich based TMG/CONCORDE FILM ‘s Dr. Herbert Kloiber and Markus Zimmer on film and television acquisitions for German speaking territories and sales in the French market of TMG's productions.

TAMBIEN LA LLUVIA sets up an intriguing dialogue about Spanish imperialism through incidents taking place some 500 years apart, while examining the personal belief systems of the members of a film crew headed by director Sebastian (Gael Garcia Bernal) and his producer Costa (Luis Tosar) who arrive in Bolivia to make a revisionist film about the conquest of Latin America. Set in February and March of 2000 when real-life protests against the privatization of water rocked the nation, the film reflexively blurs the line between fiction and reality in what Variety calls "a powerful, richly layered indictment of the plight of Latin America's dispossessed." Carlos Aduviri is dynamic as a local who is cast as a 15^th century native in the film, but when the make-up and loin cloth come off, he sails into action protesting his community’s deprivation of water at the hands of the government. Meanwhile, Gael Garcia Bernal’s Idealist film director is as relentless as Werner Herzog infamously was in making FITZCARALDO, pushing ahead against all odds, ignoring the prevailing danger about to disrupt at any moment. Despite the devastation emerging around him, Sebastian seems unable to engage with any emotion over than a dogmatic desire to get his film done. And of course, the film also recalls themes in Herzog’s AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD and the film-within-a-film scenes are as brutal as any in APOCALYPTO.

Founded in 1999, the Los Angeles based Vitagraph Films, LLC is a self contained theatrical and home optical, television distribution entity. Vitagraph currently has the documentary AHEAD OF TIME: The Remarkable Life Story of Ruth Gruber (directed by Bob Richman) in theatres and will open TODAY’s SPECIAL on November 19^th. In 2009, Vitagraph Films distributed VALENTINO THE LAST EMPEROR, a documentary on the Italian haute couture fashion designer Valentino and the Academy Award and Golden Globe nominated THE BAADER MEINHOF COMPLEX: The Story of the Red Army Faction, a docudrama based on the West German terrorist group that formed in the late 1960s in opposition to the prevailing post-WWII government. In 2005, Vitagraph Films released Spanish filmmaker Alex de la Iglesias’ EL CRIMEN FERPECTO in the U.S.

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