The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) announced today additional titles for the lineup of its 47th edition, which includes the world premiere of the Nicaraguan movie Daughter of Rage / La hija de todas las rabias, the debut feature by Laura Baumeister. The news comes after the San Sebastian Film Festival had announced the European premiere of the film in its New Directors competition.
Mixing scathing social realism and oneiric lyricism, Baumeister’s first feature is set in a garbage landfill in the Central American country. The film tells the story of eight-year-old María, who struggles to get by and is left to her own devices by her mother. When she accidentally kills the new-born puppies they were about to sell, she is punished by being left alone to live and work at a recycling factory. María will learn how to survive and accept this abandonment, using her strong willpower and fertile imagination.
Baumeister was born in 1983 in Nicaragua and graduated in film directing at the Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica (CCC) in Mexico City. She has written and directed several short films, including Isabel in Winter (2014), which was selected for the Critics' Week at the Cannes Film Festival; Primal Force / Fuerza bruta (2016), which received Special Mention at the Rencontres de Toulouse Film Festival (France), Best Actress at the Morelia International Film Festival, and Best Short Film at the Mérida and Yucatán Film Festival; and Water Navel / Ombligo de agua (2018), which had its international premiere at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, received a special jury mention at the Morelia International Film Festival and exhibited at the Clermont Ferrand Festival in France. A co-production between Nicaragua, Mexico, the Netherlands, Germany, France, and Spain, Daughter of Rage is her debut feature.
