Elmala3ien (the damned in arabic) was my first collaboration with Juan de Dios Garduño, one of the writers of LLAGAS.
This psychological horror middle length film (31 minutes) was shot in Valencia in November 2010 and planted the seed of what was going to come next (Aeterna, Llagas... I met a lot of members of the team here).
It´s also the first middle length production being supported by the Valencian cinemathèque.
The plot?
Emad, an Egyptian living in Valencia (Spain), makes up a story about curses with the aim of sleeping with Ana, a Spanish woman with a great mystical interest.The conflict arises when she really starts to suffer the curse.
We shot this project in 2011 in a very brief time (3 days + 2 more sessions out of the house parts) but with a very talented team.
The main characters are Ahmed Hussien, Maribel Bravo and Abdelatif Hwidar. Both male actors are Egyptian, Maribel is a well known actress here in Valencia.
This film was very experimental to me, we mixed a lot of different techniques: 3D images, chroma, stop motion, motion graphics, traditional effects, underwater takes...
This is an eye recreated in 3D for one of the takes, created by Daniel Sarmiento.
So, why sex wars?
Because our idea was to show a normal story about a man and a woman that doesn´t understand each other in a very typical situation (the classic womanizer and the girl that just fights for a man because she thinks he´s worth it) through the veil of horror.
Everything starts pretty normal and little by little, horror comes into the stage to a very shocking ending.
Funny anecdotes? Sure!
The pool scene was pretty hard for Ahmed and for the underwater camera operator, Agustín Rovatti. It was October and the temperature was just 5º... But they did greatly!
Poor Ahmed, he couldn´t wear a scuba suit like Agustín and was really freezing!
A part of the script was in arab, so I had to learn it by heart in order to edit the arabic speech (I don´t know that language).
We also created a contest of people doing original pictures of themselves with the Elmala3ien logo... We had over 100 people participating!
And the winner, the girl is wearing a traditional valencian dress for Fallas:
And, finally, the discotheque scene was shot in the middle of a REAL PARTY! At Grupo Las Ánimas.
As usual, for the most violent scene of the movie (it occurs inside of a pyramid) we had David Chapanoff (who later did the special effects and make up for LLAGAS).
We shot it in Llumm Studios.
Boro and Israel, DOP and camera operator, did a great job as well with the takes. Also, I met Carlos Corresa, who later did the coloring for all my projects since Elmala3ien (Aeterna, Llagas, Heraion,"> Sinnside, ">some music videos...).
Carlos and my first assistant Nicolás Castelló.
When we released it, we were surprised by the attendance of Paco Plaza, a very well known spanish film director (together with Jaume Balagueró he created the infamous REC saga among other projects)
Paco with me and Juan de Dios Garduño.
After the screening we talked and he showed interest for our next project, Llagas, and decided to help us.
As a personal reflexion, I think Elmala3ien is the perfect example of a seed. Of course, it is not perfect, it has some story problems, sometimes it gets slow etc. but it helped me to grow up personally and as a filmmaker, so I invite you to check it out and just have fun with it (there are pretty intense scenes as well), we did it with a very little budget but with a lot of hard work!
