Ian lives with his father on a boat anchored in the Ebro delta. The boy has powers, he can make others see things that aren’t there. Father and son keep this unusual ability a secret, although they use it to make some martingales and make a living. But someone very powerful, who also knows the peculiarity of the young man, finds him and a relentless pursuit is unleashed.
Daniel Benmayor directs Awareness, starring Carlos Scholz and Pedro Alonso, a film in which science fiction and action invite the viewer to reflect on the fragility of truth. “This film arose from the vision of a world where there are many points of view on the same issues, which forces us to consider the debate about manipulation and narrative”, Benmayor points out in a conversation with La Vanguardia in during the Sitges Festival, where Awareness was shown yesterday, which will have its world premiere on October 11 on Prime Video.
“The idea of how to live in a fragmented universe helped me to explain the emotional journey of a boy who is at the epicenter of a war because he has the power to generate illusions in others. A young man who is forced to evaluate the opinions and information he receives and to make decisions based on a gray scale, because all parties can be right in a certain sense”, adds the director.
And although the film is full of action and fight scenes, the director explains that “the most difficult thing has been to collect the feelings, because the films are all emotion”. Something that both protagonists agree on. Alonso, who plays Vicente, the father of this peculiar young man, points out that Awareness “has ultra-emotional moments, because it touches on something very universal, about what it means to care for others”.
And Scholz, who plays Ian, says that representing the feelings “is more complicated than filming the fights, because you learn that by training”. “I was moved and I was very touched by the scenes I filmed with my father in the fiction”, says the young actor.
Awareness, which also has María Pedraza, Lela Loren and Óscar Jaenada in the cast, makes a couple of perceptible gestures of complicity in The war of the galaxies, which can be “inspiration or homage, call it what you want, because it is the cinema that my generation has grown up with and that has left a mark on all of us”, adds Benmayor.
The film offers an open ending, but a sequel, so fashionable at this time, “is not on the radar” of the director, who has wanted with this decision to “invite the viewer to think, to participate in the film and to decide how the truth of I an can be after this intense physical and also emotional journey”.