A still from “The Virgin of the Quarry Lake” by Laura Casabé, an official selection of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute.
By Shelby Shaw
Director Laura Casabé discovered Mariana Enríquez’s writing in 2018 after a friend suggested it would probably be appealing, and Casabé found herself entranced by the story La virgen de la tosquera. Enríquez was well-known but not inaccessible in Argentina, so Casabé sent her an email asking if they could talk about adapting some of her short stories. After meeting in person and bonding over horror films and anything in the weird genre, Casabé combined her inspiration from La virgen de la tosquera with another of Enríquez’s shorts, El carrito, to arrive at the story for her narrative feature film, The Virgin of the Quarry Lake.
As Casabé relates this genesis history of her film at the Egyptian Theatre on January 27, the audience sits rapt after having just watched The Virgin of the Quarry Lake premiere in the 2025 Sundance Film Festival’s World Cinema Dramatic Competition section. Revolving around a trio of teen girls who each hope to fall in love (and maybe lose their virginity) with the charismatic and handsome Diego (Agustín Sosa), the girls assume their leader, Natalia (Dolores Oliverio), will be the one to end up with him, given their closeness. But Diego quickly becomes absorbed in the older and more mature Silvia (Fernanda Echevarría), to the girls’ wounded pride. As Natalia yearns ever stronger for Diego with the unsuccessful attempts of using folk spells, dressing up, and Y2K online chat rooms, inexplicable forces start to cause concern as disastrous things happen seemingly out of the blue.
Commenting on genre films in general, Casabé gushes about her love of horror films and weird films and anything bizarre, which coincides with how she describes teenagerhood as “unsettling.” Not wanting to portray youth in a comical way, she set out to show her characters with a “raw” edge, which echoes the power cuts in Argentina that Casabé says were happening around 2001, and were making people nervous all the time. In Quarry Lake, Casabé shows “power” coming and going on a tighter, local scale, in mysterious ways. “I do think that genre is kind of plastic,” she says. “It could be really playful at some point.”
When asked about giving advice to those wanting to produce films now, Casabé passionately says, “Go for it. Always. Always make the movie that you dream of. Never compromise. And there [is] going to be a way.”
