Film Feature – Psycho-Thriller / Action – Color – 16:9 – English – 110min

LOGLINE: Mark navigates via his VR (virtual reality) system in the icy city of Detroit, the capital of the New Russian Empire where money is in short supply. Together with his significant other, Maria, they do their best to survive, with their baby, Biel, who nearly dies in a car crash. In the real world, Mark will realize that he is not responsible for the infant’s death and will get a second chance at Maria’s side.

DIRECTOR’S MOTIVATION

COLD LOVE is for me a portrait, in broken-dream format, of the hardships suffered by many couples after a baby’s birth intrudes on how we, as humans, calibrate reality in our everyday existence.

We are surrounded by a million inputs in the forms of messages that influence our attention, our way of thinking, the choices behind our needs, our desires, our risks, fears, rage, hate and much more.

Often, our mind tends to confuse salient events in our lives through mental voids or memory alterations that are provoked by our brain as a survival mechanism. This is the starting point for presenting a film that mainly speaks about how to overcome the worst life crisis possible: that of losing one’s child.

Moreover, in the last decade, we have witnessed the Russian annexation of Crimea and, currently, the war in Ukraine, saturated by messages alerting us to the Russian threat to our Western civilization. This has led me to refurbish a world governed by a new Russian empire, re-creating it as a hypothetical model of virtual reality in a genre that approximates a psycho-thriller with elements of action and dystopia. Everything is interlaced with a real, current world in which the dramatic tempo is elevated to more earthly questions: the dependency of a couple, the surmounting of traumas and the struggle to get on with common destinies in a love relationship.

This story travels through two parallel realities interconnected by a VR device, which performs a subtle “mirror” function, reflecting fears, frustrations, desires and impulses that are latent and hidden, concluding in the re-creation of a world apart in which we live submerged, many times silently.

Working this narrative from a time-tested love relationship, far from the initial stages of infatuation, and situating the characters before the challenge of a major precipice, has allowed me to illustrate how life, often ironic and unpredictable, requires persistence and savage tenacity to emerge victorious in the quest to overcome adversity.

I was interested in locating the story in the city of Detroit, an iconic industrial setting, the ancient motor/car city, reflecting its two contrasting sides: one of survival in which its citizenry are basically slaves versus its brighter side where the community congregates and carries out progressive activity in which it grows as a society.

Initially, the story is situated in a post-war-but-near future, in a city under siege by Russian forces, where basic supplies and money are scarce, and vile metal becomes such an absolute obsession for survival that the main characters are forced to make a succession of tragic decisions which they will need to take control of their own destinies again. Meanwhile, the audience gradually discovers the story is happening inside a virtual reality world as a parallel universe.

All of this occurs during a time when the whole world is just checking their bank accounts and it seems that money is the priority for our global society. Thus, we examine the process of overcoming the trauma as a couple, going through the spectrum of blame, resentment, dependency, society, sacrifice and, finally, forgiveness.

I’m very interested in showing the tenderness and fragility of our characters as they face an aggressive destiny, to generate empathy among the audience by mixing tender and warm moments with very cold and harsh ones. This is achieved by characterizing them in intimate tones, with elliptic and tense dialogues, and a strong, internal dramatic rhythm.

We believe the story has all the necessary components to become a commercial as well as innovative feature film within the characteristics of the psycho-thriller/action genres.