The WISH
original title: Lo DESEADO
2025, 75 min., Spanish
CATEGORIES : Drama, Fantasy, Mystery
COUNTRIES: Mexico, Italy, Argentina
PRODUCTION : BUDGET : 180 000 euro
CAST
Eva Bianco, Pedro de Tavira Egurrola, Liz Correa, Víctor Laplace, Beto Bernuez
CREW
Director : Screenplay : Darío MascambroniCinematographer : Nadir Medina
Producers : Natalí Córdoba, Darío Mascambroni, Claudio Esposito, Samantha Cito, Jesús Magaña Vázquez, Antonio Pita
COMMENTS
FESTIVALS: BAFICI (American Premiere) 2025, BIF&ST (Bari International Film & TV Festival) 2025, Fribourg IFF 2025 (World premiere)
DIRECTOR’S NOTE:
LO DESEADO stems from that need that many of us feel at times and for which there is not always a solution: the need to recuperate the lost time.
Family dramas are recurrent in my filmography, but in LO DESEADO fantasy emerges as a determining factor in the development of the characters. To complex problems, magical solutions. And it is in these problems that I am interested in investigating.
The guilt of a father who has basically abandoned his daughter for twenty years and her fear of suffering a new disappointment. An old woman with the pres- sing need to leave the past behind and the desperation to believe that it is now too late to do so.
The magical component, represented not only by the amulet capable of granting a wish, offers us a wonderful opportunity to explore the fantasy genre and design a mise-en-scène that captures the viewer not only on a narrative level, but also in sensorial terms.
I like to think of the development of LO DESEADO as a mountain path full of bends, inclines, obstacles. I think I know most of the way, but I have to walk it paying enough attention to discover what appears to be unknown at the moment and which is ultimately what a journey like this one is made for.
SYNOPSIS
A murder in the middle of the mountains, an aboriginal amulet with magical powers and two people desperate to make up for lost time.
A too-young father who has neglected his daughter for years decides to make up for it by spending a few days’ vacation with her at a remote camp in the Sierras de Comechingones, Argentina. There an elderly and mysterious woman, in whose eyes shines a yearning for a different life, runs the sparse cabins that welcome the rare guests near a river steeped in ancient legends. As her father learns of a local museum of indigenous artifacts, the lady reveals to the girl the existence of an amulet that has every power, including the power to straighten out the past of its new possessor, but only after the death of the previous one. Quietly, the balance of the group becomes complicated, because each of them dreams of asking the amulet for a better life, at any cost.
PRESS
Darío Mascambroni takes a new step forward: refining his style, producing brief flashes of unexpected truth -a trademark of his cinema, but also what we could call a politics-, his new film is no stranger to masterfully executed forms of realism, to which he adds almost supernatural elements with regal pertinence. The Wish works as a plea, a dream, an invocation. Straddling a suspense typical of modern cinema -underground, with the caution of someone walking through a minefield-, the film is careful not to take everything for granted and, instead, offers a reflection on its own existence. The director seems to have found a key for cinema to recover its ability to ask questions. – BAFICI 2025