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Watch it Burn

After a house fire, a newly-divorced single mother is accused of abandoning a stranger who dies.

synopsis

Alma (35) is recently divorced from Rafa, her ex-husband who cheated on her. Healing from a painful betrayal, Alma is increasingly anxious. One day when Alma drives her son home from school, a stranger stops her car, asking her to help bring a man to hospital. Suspicious, Alma denies the request and drives away. Days later, Alma is summoned by the police. Due to her negligence and refusal to help, the man died. Alma is required by Paulina (the dead man’s daughter) to pay blood money. Alma refuses, but Rafa secretly pays her debt. When Alma finds out, she looks for Paulina to ask for the truth. The situation escalates as the two women are very suspicious of each other. When someone sets fire to her house, Alma is sure that Paulina is behind it and reports her to the police. When the actual reason for the fire is discovered, Alma’s world turns upside down. Once a victim, now a perpetrator. Confession is not an option. She doesn’t want Rafa to see her life crumble after divorcing him. Alma explores the haunting lengths to which humans can go to prove that they are right. Alma decides that possibly the only way to prove herself right, is by proving everybody else wrong.

Director’statement

Watch it Burn is inspired by a specific event in my family back in 1999, when one night, my family turned down a stranger who came to ask for help. In the following weeks and months, all my family members kept discussing the incident, looking for the best reason proving that turning the stranger down was the right decision. Everybody just wanted to be right, and I found this deeply disturbing. Watch it Burn is a morality thriller about how far humans can go to prove that they are right, how terrifying it is for us to admit that we are wrong, and the tragic consequences of such an obsessive quest. My exploration is haunted by the question: is the truth a final place of arrival, or is it nothing more than a means to prove ourselves, right? Which one is more important? The truth or feeling righteous? And to whose benefit?

TFL PROGRAMME:
ScriptLab 2023

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