CAVERNARIUS

Feature film project about “the last bastion of Neanderthal resistance” and the “Maqui resistance” (Spanish fighters in the mountains of the Post-Spanish Civil War period) in a common place: the caves of northern Spain.

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SYNOPSIS​

The discovery of a corpse inside a cave, and the subsequent discovery in the same enclave of fossilized remains of a young Neanderthal, gives rise to the beginning of a fiction that unites its protagonists 25,000  years later.

Camila, a 13-year-old teenager, and the young Neanderthal Hunk maintain narrative continuity, by skillfully intertwining the last days of a Neanderthal clan harassed by the Cro-Magnon, and a group of Maqui beset by Franco's forces, in the same geography. Both species (Neanderthal and Maqui) are doomed to a common destiny of fleeing and struggling to survive, recreating customs and ways of losers in a common space... the cave: a shared space, a time capsule that over 25,000 years has hardly undergone any transformations, one that holds together the traces of these fugitives´ journeys.

Adventure, action, suspense, love and even humour establish strong bonds within this constantly hostile environment. The fragmented film’s plot, always supported by action continuities that join both temporal dimensions, allows the viewer to create a unique story.

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CAVERNARIUS is based on classics of the genre, such as “Quest for Fire” (Jean-Jacques Annaud) and all the films about the Spanish maquis, to adapt them to a new proposal: to show the nakedness of the protagonists; of the person and the character that circumstances have turned them into. It flees from the stereotype of the proposals made up to now on the subject of the maquis and ventures to “recreate”, for the first time in Spain, the epic of the Neanderthal decadence eliminated from the Cro-Magnons.