I Have Electric Dreams

They loved each other, they beat each other – this dense Costa Rican drama portrays a fascinating and conflicted daughter-father relationship. Winner of three prizes at the Locarno Film Festival.

The mother builds, renovates, creates order. The father is unstable, tends towards destruction. Nevertheless, it’s him the 16-year-old Eva feels drawn to after her parents’ divorce. She tags along as he looks for an apartment and attends alcohol-fueled poetry workshops. They smoke together. While Eva struggles with growing up, the father wrestles with his own helplessness, which repeatedly erupts in violence. The two recognize and accept each other.

The relationship is mirrored by the film itself: an electrically charged balancing act between affection and anger, between the need for fatherly love and an awakening, confused, and impulsive sexuality. A constantly surprising debut whose universal story gets under the viewer’s skin.

Director