Extra Terrestres

(Extra Terrestres)

Carla Cavina / Venezuela, Puerto Rico / 2017 / 110 min
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  • Shine Film Festival Miami

    Best Picture

  • Cineffable Film Festival Paris

    Audience Award

  • Puerto Rico Queer Film Festival

    Audience Award

  • Inside Out LGTB Toronto Film Festival

  • Chicago Latino Film Festival

  • Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival

Pricing
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Synopsis

In Spanish with English subtitles

With Sunshine Logroño, Marisé Alvarez, Elba Escobar, Prakriti Maduro

Teresa is a vegetarian and a successful astrophysicist who lives with her girlfriend, Daniela, in the Canary Islands. After years of self-exile, Teresa returns to Puerto Rico to invite the family to her wedding. But the Díaz family, who lives in a rural town, are a conservative and well-to-do family who control much of the poultry industry in Puerto Rico.

No one in the family is what who they appear and none is willing to reveal their most intimate secrets, so once back home, Teresa chooses to lie. When several acts of sabotage force the closure of the family business and Daniela, tired of waiting for Teresa, travels to Puerto Rico to meet her new family, the Díaz family nucleus collapses like a supernova star, unleashing a chain reaction that puts in evidence that we are all “extraterrestrials.”

Related Subjects
About the Director
Carla Cavina was born in Puerto Rico on September 30, 1975. In 1993, she published the poetry book Corredora de Sueños. She completed a bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts/photography from the University of Puerto Rico (UPR). She studied theater, acting and dramaturgy with El Teatro Rodante of the UPR, Bread & Puppet Theater (Vermont) and Mala Yerba (Ecuador).

Dedicated to performance, photography, theater and set design for more than 10 years, Cavina also took several scriptwriting workshops. In 2002, she and founded the Cinematic Workshop, an organization in which she serves as president, and with which she conducts community film workshops throughout the island.

Cavina wrote, directed, and edited the shorts Do you have Fire? (2007), the video art Ming I or the Darkening of the Light (2008), The Sky of the Mice (2009) and Do we know each other? (2014) that has been presented in more than 17 national and international festivals. In 2008 she wrote her first feature film Extra Terrestres, which was produced and released in 2016. In 2024, she directed the documentary film Water Strike.

Press

“Caught between a secret to share and a family crisis, this impressive debut from filmmaker Carla Cavina is at once a lesbian love story, a family drama, and an ode to the magic of the vast and unknowable cosmos.” – Vancouver Queer Film Festival

“An impressive debut for Puerto Rican filmmaker Carla Cavina. Local actors Marisé Alvarez and Sunshine Logroño shine in this well done meditation on the country's current economic and existential crisis. ” – Fico Cangiano, CineXpress

“Director Carla Cavina Meléndez brings a warm, authentic tone to the familial interactions of the film, highlighting the ways in which sibling and parental love can be obfuscated by surface level tensions. The film’s strength is in that emotional core.” – Imad Pasha, The Daily Californian

Notes on the Film

Extra Terrestre is a “Western Sci-Fi Family Dramedy” that deals with the interconnectedness of our lives, about how our desire to be happy meets and unravels with the search for happiness of others, and about how infinitely small we are, human beings, within the context of the cosmos. My personal interest was to explore the crisis on many levels and how love and solidarity, in the context of family unity, are the beginning to come out.

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