Tessa Ia Nailea Norvind set in ‘Hyperballad’, by Alejandra Villalba García

Tessa Ía, who broke out at the helm of “After Lucía”, Michel Franco’s Cannes-winning debut feature, will star in “Hyperballad”, which offers what is proving to be one of the most powerful mixes of avant-garde Latin American cinema: genre, ambition. and a young director of her first feature film.

Directed by Alejandra Villalba García, “Hyperbalada” (“Hyperbalada”) has the main production of Hiperbalada, a production company led by Villalba Garcñia and the film producer Carlos Paz.

It is co-produced by Piano de México, behind some of the most audacious Mexican films in recent years, such as “Somos la carne”, sponsored by Alfonso Cuarón. Her cosmopolitan co-production credits range from “Triangle of Sadness” to “Annette” and “Memoria.” Julio Chávezmontes, on piano, will also produce “Hyperballad.”

Sharpening the contemporary touch of the project, “Hyperballad” plus the anguish, psychosis and “phantasmagoria” of the digital world, in the words of producer Paz.

Ía will play Tessa, a popular influencer, who returns to her childhood home in Tijuana where she is contacted by @murmur0, a strange YouTuber whose online profile claims he died 8 years ago.

However, @murmur0 still appears online and communicates with Tessa through disturbing videos. The increasingly eerie similarities between @murmur0’s tragic fate and Tessa’s own childhood memories plunge Tessa into a deep paranoia from which she may not be able to escape.

“Hyperballad” is a “hybrid horror film that doubles a voyeuristic camera and unsettling atmosphere to articulate a prevailing generational anxiety: existing for the gaze of the other and being consumed by it,” Paz said. Variety.

Based on the short film “Microcastillo” by Villaba García, seen at the 2017 Cannes Critics’ Week in Morelia, the film will up “the ante with a disorienting narrative and a deep insight into the digital phantasmagoria of Internet culture,” he added. .

The film co-stars Nailea Norvind, Ía’s real-life mother with whom she has worked before, as her on-screen mother. “Choosing the real-life mother and daughter actresses was an early decision in Alejandra’s writing process, with the goal of projecting a genuine feeling of tenderness and tension on screen,” Paz said.

In development, with tentative filming dates between late 2024 and early 2025, “Hyperballad” is written by Villalba García and his writing partner Francisco Sánchez de la Vega.