Friendship and Fantasy Intertwine in ‘Don’t You Let Me Go’ as It Heads to Huelva After Tribeca Win

Produced by Uruguay-based Agustina Chiarino’s Bocacha Films, the feature clinched the Noah Ephron Award at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. It marks Guevara and Jorge’s third collaboration with Bocacha, a production company at the forefront of pan-regional co-productions. Paris-based Alpha Violet is handling international sales.

The film opens at a wake. Adela, portrayed by Chiara Hourcade, reminisces with friends there to mark the death of her best friend Elena, dead at 39. The friends and family gathered are heartfelt, polite and emotional in this most clinical and anodyne of places. “Nothing here reminds me of my sister,” remarks one.

Waves of grief hit people at different times; Adela’s strikes as she sits in her car to leave. It’s in these opening moments that the fantastical strikes. From this moment, the narrative via the fantastical transports viewers back in time to a joyful weekend with Elena (Vicky Jorge) and their friend Luci (Eva Dans).

“The fantastical is born from a need to understand reality differently,” Guevara and Jorge told Variety. “In her most vulnerable moment, Adela manages to summon a bus that lets her travel through time, similar to the Catbus in “My Neighbour Totoro.” Thus, the rules of the world she arrives in must necessarily be different. Elena, alive and drinking a smoothie with her, is just as fantastical and wonderful as the little bird reciting Pessoa or the shoe that endlessly spills sand. Adela doesn’t perceive these surreal gestures as strange. At some point, she even embraces them and uses them to make her friends laugh.”

Though the story begins with loss, it evolves into a celebration of deep, unwavering friendship—the joy, the inside jokes, the comfort that only best friends can offer. Do you see friendship as the film’s central theme, perhaps even more so than grief or are the two intertwined?

The film speaks of an absence but does so to celebrate that there was a presence. It’s a celebration of the joy of shared time. In that sense, the theme of the film is indeed friendship; specifically, it could be friendship at a particular moment in life when the adult world and its responsibilities haven’t yet intruded much into the protagonists’ routines.

In fact, the first version of the script was just that weekend they spend together. But at some point, we realized we didn’t want to dramatize the plot, so to speak; we wanted only the purest, maybe romantic, version of that moment, and that had to do with invoking it from the depths of grief. So we decided to frame it with loss, to have Adela embark on the same search we were undergoing. That’s when all the fantastical elements came in. Adela travels through time to reconnect with Elena. We’re seeking the same thing by making this film.

We worked a lot on the scenes, especially on the dialogues, so they felt believable. The actresses also each nurtured their character compositions, which grew once they became part of the project.

Additionally, Chiara, Eva, and Vicky made a plan: they met during the casting process and decided they would become friends. They created a group chat for the three of them started going out together and hanging out. They lived in the same little house during filming. They took care of each other. Surely, something of all that they created together can be felt in the film.

All these elements have a literary origin. The title, in particular, both in Spanish and in English (which aren’t the same), comes from the name of a story by Alice Munro, an author we greatly admire.

In the chapter titles, we include dialogue lines from each chapter and some song lyrics that resonated with us and that we repeated like mantras. They are perhaps a slightly poetic gesture, but above all, they are a literary resource to divide the film into chapters, to make the structure evident, and thereby make the film more self-aware. They’re like little pauses we take to breathe, as if saying, “This is a story, let’s continue.”