25/10/2023 - Antonio Méndez Esparza's fourth feature film, finally shot in his native Spain, is not satisfied with belonging to just one film genre and continually switches to other genres

Based in the United States, filmmaker and teacher Antonio Méndez Esparta made headlines when his first film, Aquí y Allá: Here and There [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Pedro Hernández
film profile], won the Cannes Critics’ Week Grand Prix, and his second film, Life and Nothing More [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Antonio Méndez Esparza
film profile], won the Independent Spirit John Cassavetes Award in 2017. Always placed in the aftermath of reality and filming his previous works in America, he has finally shot in Spain (and in Spanish). Something Is About to Happen [+see also:
trailer
interview: Antonio Méndez Esparza
film profile] brings to the screen the novel of the same name by Juan José Millás, starring Malena Alterio and Aitana Sánchez Gijón and premiered worldwide in the official section of the 68th Seminci - Valladolid International Film Week.

Both book and feature film portray Lucía, a mature woman who, abruptly and due to the incompetence of her superiors, loses her job as an IT specialist at a dental company. So the time has come to reinvent herself and, without losing her natural charm, she starts working as a taxi driver, travelling the streets and picking up customers, while flirting with her upstairs neighbour, who is fond of listening to Puccini's opera Turandot (an aria from the final act of this opera gives the film and the novel their title).

Spurred on by her imagination and dressed as the mythical daughter of the Chinese emperor, this Travis Bickle from the less photogenic neighbourhoods of Madrid will start to meet new people who get into her vehicle. Among them, a writer and a theatre producer, with whom she maintains relations outside the vehicle, mixing pleasure with business, hopes and dreams, and above all commitment and passion, because for her "love is the world's fuel".

Something Is About to Happen is therefore driven between what the central character does and what she imagines, what she lives, feels, thinks and carries with her personally and familiarly. With full support from Alterio, its main actress, the film follows in the wake of the literary and meta-fictional games of Millás' writings, jumping from reality to fiction and even questioning the work of the writer, that insatiable and cruel vampire of other people's lives and fabricator of utopias.

Something Is About to Happen is not satisfied with moving through one narrative plane (what is real and what is fiction in the head of its central character, this modern and motorised Doña Quijote?), but, as if affected by (cinematic) dysphoria, it slips between comedy and drama, mystery and strangeness, urban road movie and revenge film, in such a way that it is hard to define this feature film as a single genre. It jumps from one to the other until it mutates into an undefined, unexpected and slightly disconcerting film.

Something Is About to Happen is a Spanish-Romanian production from the companies Aquí y Allí Films, Wanda Visión and Avanpost. Its international sales are managed by Film Factory Entertainment.

(Translated from Spanish by Vicky York)