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25 New Face Rosario Garcia-Montero Goes for the Oscar with The Bad Intentions
When we put assemble our 25 New Faces list each year, we like to play the long game. We’re not looking for people who are going to break in just a few months at Sundance, although some inevitably do. For the most part, we’re trying to be ahead of the curve — sometimes extremely ahead of the curve. We want to find people who aren’t on all the tracking lists yet so we can claim our bragging rights years later.
One of the long calls we made was on Rosario-Garcia Montero, selected for our list in 2004 on the basis of her extremely odd but utterly unforgettable short Are You Feeling Lonely? It told the story of a morgue janitor blind-calling yet-to-informed widows in the secret hopes of finding a date. That film is embedded below, and above is the trailer for Montero’s first feature, The Bad Intentions, which she spoke about in our profile in 2004. Years later Montero made the film, and it premiered at the Berlin Film Festival this past February. It also won the Grand Prize recently at the Mar del Plata Film Festival, and now it’s the official foreign-language Oscar entry from Peru. The trailer is above, and the film itself can be viewed on Netflix instant streaming. So check it out, especially if you’re an Academy voter, and support our “slowest blossoming new face of independent film” (her words, in an email).
