I Have Electric Dreams

Costa Rican director Valentina Maurel’s debut is a vivid and emotionally supercharged family drama with lived in performances by a terrific cast. Eva is a strong-willed, restless 16-year-old girl whose parents are separated. She wants to move in with her estranged father, a poet who is in the throws of a turbulent midlife crisis and is living more like a teenager than his daughter. Here Eva learns important lessons about adult life, responsibility and sexuality, using this newfound experience as a strong foundation for her own independence.

I grew up in Costa Rica and I felt like doing a film there. I gathered many memories I had of my teenage years there even though it’s not an autobiographical film. So I felt the need of going back there and filming the city I grew up in and filming the people I grew up around, which was like fragile, artistic middle class, sometimes I feel like that’s disappearing… I didn’t want to make a film about a specific subject, I wanted to make a film about characters… I really like how in family relationships things tend to be extremely blurry but when people write scripts, they assume it’s like in a guidebook… it’s unstable who’s the adult and who’s the teenager.

Director Valentina Maurel, from an interview for Sarajevo Film Festival