The short film shot entirely in natural locations in Lanzarote, "Before the Eruption", has just won the Award for Best International LGTBI Short Film at the Alicante International Film Festival and has already been seen at festivals in the United States, Australia, India, Chile, Greece, South Korea, Mexico or Brazil. Next week it will be seen within the Official Section of the prestigious Huesca International Film Festival, which qualifies for the Oscar Awards. In addition, it has been part of the Movistar Plus programming since this week.
“Before the Eruption” is a new short work by Lanzarote filmmaker Roberto Pérez Toledo, who has filmed in his native island for the first time. Director of feature films such as “Six points about Emma” and “Like Foam” and a host of award-winning shorts such as “Vuelco” or “Los gritones”, Pérez Toledo continues to champion diverse and committed cinema, this time focusing on the transgender reality.
With a cast made up of young Pablo Capuz, Javier Orán, Javier Morgade, Edgar Córcoles and Jorge Alcocer, “Before the Eruption” is, according to Roberto Pérez Toledo, “a postcard about those first days in which its protagonist sheds ballast and tells who he really is to his best friends, while they carry out a trip to Lanzarote that they had dreamed of since they were children.”
“Identity is the great underlying theme of the short film: the urgent need to find your little place in the world and occupy it. And suddenly I imagined these characters among volcanoes. On the island where I was born, Lanzarote. And then I understood why: because our identity, what we are, is like a volcano that erupts, destroying everything. You can try to keep the volcano dormant, but your identity ends up sprouting, like lava. Because you cannot silence or appease what you are,” adds the director and screenwriter.
“Before the Eruption” is a production by Rafael Álvarez through MGC Marketing Producción y Gestión Cultural together with La Créme Films, with photography direction by Juanmi Márquez from Tenerife. The short film will continue its journey through festivals around the world while it is available from this week on Movistar Plus.
Trajectory of Roberto Pérez Toledo
Born in Lanzarote, Roberto Pérez Toledo has a degree in Audiovisual Communication. In 2012 he premiered his first feature film as director and screenwriter, “Six points about Emma”, which won the Silver Biznagas for Best Actress (Verónica Echegui) and Best Screenplay at the Malaga Festival, the Audience Award and the Award for Best First Film at Cinespaña (France), the Award for Best First Film at MadridImagen or the Award for Best Canarian Feature Film at the Las Palmas International Film Festival, among other awards.
In 2013 he participated in the collective feature film “In the end everyone dies”, together with three other directors and with the sponsorship of Javier Fesser, and in 2014 he launched the tv movie (shot according to the #littlesecretfilm manifesto) “The rare friends”, broadcast on the Calle 13 channel and later turned into a viral phenomenon on the network, where it has accumulated more than twenty million views. In 2017 he premiered his latest feature film, the third solo one, entitled “Like Foam”.
He is also director and screenwriter of more than forty short films (“Vuelco”, “Los gritones”, “Rotos”, “Cupido in love”, “Sí a todo”, “Admirador secreto”, “La peli que vamos a ver”, “Flechazos”, “Antes de la erupción”...) that have toured festivals on five continents and won dozens of awards. Many of them also accumulate millions of views on his YouTube channel, where his branded content works with brands such as El Corte Inglés or Mapfre also stand out.
For his contribution to cinema that makes sexual diversity visible, he recently received the Honorary Award from Lesgaicinemad, the most important LGBT-themed festival in Madrid in Spanish-speaking countries. He recently created and directed “Amor superdotado”, the first Spanish fiction series for Facebook Watch, and has just shot his new feature film, “Places we have never been to”.