‘How To Deal With a Heartbreak’ Director Joanna Lombardi’s First Hybrid-Documentary ‘Stay Still’ Heads to Málaga (EXCLUSIVE)

variety.com:

Holly Jones Award-winning Peruvian multi-hyphenate Joanna Lombardi (“In House,” “How To Get Over a Breakup”), formerly in charge of heading Movistar’s original content slate for Latin America, dives into documentary with her latest feature “Stay Still” (“Quédate Quieto”), selected to screen in competition at the upcoming Málaga Festival, running Mar.

1-10. Produced by Lombardi alongside Hernán Musaluppi co-headed Cimarrón Cine (“El Motoarrebatador”) and Enid “Pinky” Campos (“Dioses”), the film – selected for San Sebastian’s Co-Production Forum in 2021 – centers on a gravedigger and two young women vying for security and a place to settle down. “At first, I approached this story because I wanted to relay what it was like moment by moment to invade a piece of land.

Find the place, demarcate the space and have to stay there, without moving, so that they don’t take it away from you. In order to tell this story, I spent time walking through encampments, looking for a woman who’d lived the experience and wanted to talk about it,” Lombardi told Variety. “On one of those journeys, I found an illegal cemetery in the middle of a hill.

It seemed incredible to me that it was there. I kept walking until I met Hilton, the illegal gravedigger of this cemetery. I spent about two years interviewing Hilton while he looked for a woman who didn’t appear.