David Baute, director of ‘Mariposas negras’: “We want the figure of the climate migrant to be legally recognized”.
Source: www.kinotico.es
After winning the Forqué and Gaudí awards, the film competes in the Goya 2025 for the award for Best Animated Film with a message of environmental urgency.
The animated feature ‘Mariposas negras’ has had one of the most fruitful runs in the Spanish medium in recent memory. From its premiere at the Annecy Festival, one of the most important in the genre, to the awards it has recently received at the Forqué Awards and the Gaudí Awards (the latter only a couple of days ago), everything has been success. The film is the first incursion of documentary filmmaker David Baute (‘La murga, ópera popular’, ‘Éxodo climático’) in the animated language, to which he transfers many of the social and environmental interests that he has demonstrated throughout his film career. The relevance and timeliness of the story, which follows the lives of three women displaced from their homes due to various natural disasters, as well as the remarkable work in the field of animation, are just some of the reasons that have positioned ‘Mariposas negras’ as one of the great favorites for the 39th edition of the Goya Awards, which will take place next Saturday, February 8 in Granada.
For his part, from his native Canary Islands, Baute says: “I started the research 13 or 14 years ago, filming in the places where these stories are happening, where these migratory displacements were taking place. At the beginning I followed the communities, but then I wanted to focus on the stories of specific people and families, from which we could not only draw the map of what was happening globally but also connect”. On the process that led him to choose animation, he says: “We couldn’t do as much follow-up as we would have liked because it meant living with these women for years. And we missed very important episodes in their lives, especially in terms of displacement, which is the second part of the film. That’s when we understood that animation could reach places where we physically couldn’t, so we could tell their stories honestly and also reach a wider audience.
Regarding the enormous positive reception the film has received from audiences around the world, the filmmaker mentions: “We want to call attention to an urgent issue, which is to recognize the figure of the climate migrant. It is the only cause of migration that is not contemplated at the international level, neither by the United Nations nor by any government. If the reception and the awards we receive serve to make more festivals and more people aware of these stories, we are happy.”
“For me the biggest prize is to reach people, and nothing makes you reach people more than an award,” adds Roch, noting that the journey of ‘Mariposas negras’ is still in progress: ”Something that was also a huge achievement for us was that the film reached the UNHCR directorate of the United Nations, that the director general asked David and me to accompany him to present the film at the Cervantes Institute in New York. We didn’t make the film under the UN umbrella, but once it was made, we were able to establish contact and this spring we will present it again at their headquarters”.
Baute, for his part, shares the news that ‘Mariposas negras’ has reached the ears of one of the world’s top leaders: “The Pope has been interested in the film. He is very sensitive to migration and climate change in general. And he wrote us a letter telling us that the theme of our film had caught his attention, so we have already sent it to him and we hope he can see it soon”.
