Romanian producer Bianca Oana, who produced Alexander Nanau’s Oscar-nominated collective and Adina Pintilie’s Berlinale Golden Bear-winner Touch Me Not is the coproducer.
“In June 2019 I was invited together with Romanian filmmaker Ioana Țurcan to participate in the first edition of the TorinoFilmLab documentary workshop. We were put together in the same group led by filmmaker Diana Groó with Theo Montoya & Juan Pablo Castrillon, who presented their project Anhell69. I was impressed with how similar Colombian youth were to the youth I had met back home in Romania or anywhere across Europe. In the beginning, my thinking process was that I could never have anything to do with Colombia, because it's so far away. But this resemblance struck me and looking back I realise how Eurocentric and limited my vision was. As I was watching the footage Theo presented, I realised that this film could be the film of an entire generation of lost kids nowadays”, Bianca Oana told FNE.
A funeral car cruises the streets of Medellín, while a young director tells the story of his past in this violent and conservative city. He remembers the preproduction of his first film, a B-movie with ghosts. The young queer scene of Medellín forms the cast for the film, but the main protagonist dies of heroin overdose at the age of 21, just like many friends of the director. Anhell69 explores the dreams, doubts and fears of a doomed generation, and the struggle to carry on making cinema.
The cast includes Alejandro Hincapié, Camilo Machado, Alejandro Mendigaña, Julián David Moncada, Camilo Najar, Juan Esteban Pérez, Sharllot Zodoma, Víctor Gaviria and Theo Montoya.
Anhell69 is produced by Theo Montoya and Juan Pablo Castrillon through Columbia’s Desvio Visual, Bianca Oana through Romania’s Monogram Film and David Hurst through France’s Dublin Films, in coproduction with Balthasar Busmann and Maximilian Haslberger through Germany’s Amerikafilm.
The project was supported by El Fondo Mixto de Promoción Cinematográfica o Proimágenes Colombia, theRom anian Film Centre (CNC), IDFA Bertha Fund (supported by the Creative Europe MEDIA programme), Region Nouvelle-Aquitaine, the World Cinema Fund, the Romanian National Television (TVR), Comision Filmica de Medellín, Tribeca All Access, Avanpost, TV7 Bordeaux, KANALDUDE.
Romanian Vlad Feneșan and Marius Leftărache composed the original music for the film.
In February 2022, another coproduction between Columbia and Romania had its premiere in an A-class festival: the documentary Alis by Clare Weiskopf and Nicolas van Hemelryck, which also won the Crystal Bear for Best Film at Berlinale’s Generation 14plus. Alis is a coproduction between Columbia’s Casatarantula, Pantalla Cines from Chile and Radu Stancu through Romania’s deFilm.
