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7 hours ago
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Spanish sales company Film Factory Entertainment has picked up the rights to director Manuel Rios San Martín’s “The Cavern Crimes” and is pitching the feature to potential buyers at this year’s AFM.
Alfa Pictures will lead a Spanish domestic theatrical release for spring 2025.
The investigative thriller is set in Burgos near the Atapuerca archaeological site, home to the Gran Dolina cavern, where the oldest evidence of human occupation in Western Europe was discovered. Its narrative turns on an investigation into the ritual murder of a young girl that causes a mass psychosis in a nearby small town that experienced a similar trauma six years earlier.
“‘The Cavern Crimes’ is an intense suspense thriller with an attractive blend of crime and mystery set in the unique historical backdrop of the Atapuerca paleontological site, home of the oldest human remains outside of Africa,” Film Factory Managing Director Vincente Canales told Variety. “An iconic location never before portrayed in film. A really unique history that has a great international potential, so it’s the kind of film that can work everywhere.”
San Martín explained, “Violence is the fruit of natural selection, It contributed to bring us here, although now we are ashamed of it and don’t know how to handle it. But violence is literally in our DNA.
“It wasn’t enough for me to make an intense thriller. I wanted something more: I wanted it to have an underlying philosophy. Atapuerca is not only a fascinating environment, but also the bones found there generate questions about what really makes us human: violence or empathy. In the excavation, we found both cases of cannibalism as well as hominids who helped others who were sick hundreds of thousands of years ago,” the director adds.
Produced by La Charito Films, one of the companies featured at a Spanish Screenings Producers Showcase at the AFM, “The Cavern Crimes” is currently in post-production after shooting between August and October of this year.
English (US) ·