Corona lockdown of 2020

“Corona” began to be filmed during the lockdown of 2020 in a unipersonal way by its protagonist, screenwriter and director, Lolo Martín. The reason for its birth is personal, human and simple: not to go crazy during 45 days of lockdown in a 40 m2 apartment. But as the project took shape in its script and storyboard, the idea of it being simply a therapeutic exercise gave way to the idea of making a professional short film that would portray what we all lived through during that cruel period. Once the lockdown was over, the shooting was extended until almost two years later, we know in independent filmmaking how difficult is to find the right professionals, to have the money to rent the materials you need and to take meticulous care of every detail of the photography or sound so that the final result is the one the audience deserves. Post-production, in which the almost 100 hours of recorded material had to be shortened to 19 minutes, was extended from 2022 to 2024 for the same reasons mentioned above.

The result is an auteur drama short film, shot with a single camera, with an indie feel but with a technical finish that does not raise suspicions about its low budget. The script focuses on the human component and seeks the viewer's empathy with our protagonist, immersing the former little by little in the dreams and emotions of the latter. The result is a work of “lockdown cinema” that immortalizes the concerns, fears and experiences lived by the bulk of humanity in the terrible year 2020.

What we wanted was to introduce the viewer, as the story progresses, in the suffocating atmosphere of a solitary lockdown in which dreams begin to give way to the worst nightmares, always from a point of view in which the viewer could become emotionally involved through equivalences of his own life easily substituted by those of the film. If in ten or twenty years we would like to reliably recall everything we experienced at the beginning of the pandemic and its subsequent lockdown, “Corona” would be the cinematographic reference to look for.