Leonor Reyes: Last News

Amy Nicholson From its opening minutes, Martika Ramirez Escobar’s meta-prank “Leonor Will Never Die” aims to scramble the viewers. Leonor Reyes (Sheila Francisco), an elderly retired action film director in Manila who, the title assures us, must have some claim to immortality, pads into view from the knees-down and steps onto a trunk – the universal film cliché for suicide.

Martika Ramirez Escobar’s feature, “Leonor Will Never Die” has quickly made waves in its early awards circuit, with recognitions including the Amplify Voices Award at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival and the Special Jury Prize for Innovative Spirit at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. As the film’s Nov. 25 premiere at the Metrograph in New York City encroaches, signifying the start of its limited theatrical release, Music Box Films dropped a first look at the movie with an official trailer. The film centers around Leonor Reyes (played by Sheila Francisco), a once beloved filmmaker in the Filipino entertainment scene, now burdened by old age, the grief of loss and financial hardship. The plot thickens when Leonor flips through an unfinished script she had written, and soon after, finds herself a character of her own creation after a coma-inducing head injury. Lying in a hospital bed, she envisions herself in the story of her script, bringing fantastical, genre-bending elements into the fictional drama.

Christopher Vourlias Music Box Films has acquired the North American rights to writer-director Martika Ramirez Escobar’s genre-bending “Leonor Will Never Die,” which won the Special Jury Prize for Innovative Spirit in Sundance this year after premiering in the festival’s World Cinema Dramatic Competition.The film tells the story of Leonor Reyes, once a major player in the Filipino film industry during its ragtag action cinema glory days, but now in her golden years and struggling to pay her bills. When she reads an advertisement for a screenplay contest, Leonor begins tinkering with an unfinished script about a young man avenging his brother’s murder at the hand of thugs.But after a falling television knocks her unconscious and sends her into a coma, Leonor finds herself inside her incomplete movie, re-writing and editing on the fly in a fantastical bid to complete the film while her body lies in limbo.