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"Complex, Painful and Full of Joy": Elisa Miller On Her Adaptation of the Novel HURRICANE SEASON

Omar Sosa Topete

As part of the 21st Morelia International Film Festival (FICM), Elisa Miller, Mexican director and winner of a Palme d'Or for Best Short Film at the Cannes Film Festival in 2007 and an Ariel Award for Best Fiction Short Film in 2008, both for Ver llover (2006), gave a press conference where she spoke about her new project, Hurricane Season (2023), which will hit screens thanks to Netflix in early November this year.

Hurricane Season, based on the novel of the same name by Veracruz-born writer Fernanda Melchor, follows the story of four young people who find a corpse floating in a canal in their town and begin to discover perverse secrets of the place where they grew up, as well as becoming involved in a story that intersects love and the lack of it, violence, pleasure and diversity. For Elisa Miller, the novel meant a lot, it pierced through her and provoked the need to adapt it to her language. But adapting the novel to film "was a complex, painful and at the same time very joyful process," she says, as it meant taking the literary aspect out of it. Miller praised the writer and described her, from her point of view, as the most gifted of her generation.

The press conference was attended by María Secco, the director of photography; Rafa Ley and Mónica Vértiz, producers; and a large part of the cast, including Edgar Treviño, Andrés Córdova, Ernesto Meléndez, Paloma Alvamar and Kat Rigon.

The director was looking for new faces in the cast, which is why the majority of the cast is made up of actors who had only acted on stage. They all agreed that Elisa Miller is an extremely sensitive director who allowed them to make the character their own. "She, from minute one, got involved with us. For us it was important because she played with us and danced with us in the exercises we did," added Edgar Treviño.

One of the most important decisions for Miller was to stop showing the dark and violent context surrounding the characters, an element that is flooding the narratives of Mexican cinema, and rather show how it affects them socially and emotionally, in addition to focusing on the present of the characters and showing their past through layers and characteristic gestures taken from the novel. Andres Cordova mentioned that "Eli was a very bright light to pinpoint everything that involved the nuances of the characters."

The entire team is excited to see how people will receive the film, as they believe the production was rich in diversity and very tactful, which makes it a more relatable experience for the audience.