Alief Scoops Global Rights for Teen Pregnancy Doc ‘Ramona,’ Drops Trailer (EXCLUSIVE)

variety.com:

Holly Jones Ahead of its world premiere screening as part of Berlinale’s Generation 14plus strand, Alief has swooped on global sales to Dominican director Victoria Linares Villegas’s second non-fiction feature, “Ramona,” and has provided Variety exclusive access to its first look trailer.

After its Berlin run, “Ramona” is set for a North American bow at the True False Documentary Film Festival in Columbia, Missouri this March, where Linares will receive the Visionary Award.

A postmodern look into the class divide and lives of an already vulnerable population, the project has emerged as a documentary with glimpses of scripted narrative, which the director credits to the adolescents she interviewed; their predicaments became paramount.  “I started developing ‘Ramona’ in 2016 as a fiction film, about a pregnant teenager who escapes the outskirts of Santo Domingo in search of a casting call for her favorite telenovela,” Linares recounted in a statement. “As I was writing the screenplay, I interviewed several of these Dominican teenagers, seeking to capture a true representation rather than a caricature.

This felt all the more crucial given that the Dominican Republic has the highest rate of teen pregnancy in Latin America and the Caribbean,” she added.