Martika Ramirez Escobar makes no bones about her expectations when she submitted her debut feature, Leonor Will Never Die, to Sundance. After a year of rejections, the entry fee felt like money down the drain. She was flat broke – had sold possessions to finish the film, even her car. But then an email landed in her inbox advertising earlybird entry. “I couldn’t afford the normal price, but this was cheaper.” Half-reluctantly she paid and clicked send: “Then I forgot about it. I didn’t even tell our producer.”
How much was the fee? “Sixty dollars. Expensive!” Her idea of success by this point was watching her film in a cinema, any cinema. “That was the dream. Just one theatre with more than 10 people in the audience,” she says with a big smile.
The happy ending to the story is that hundreds, probably thousands of people have now watched her deliciously eccentric oddball comedy. It started when, to her astonishment, Sundance snapped up the film and she won a Special Jury award (making her the first woman from the Philippines to win at the festival).
In the year since, the 30-year-old from Manila has been on the road. In all corners of the world at film festivals she has watched audiences fall a little bit in love with her fictional creation Leonor – a woman in her 70s who was famous back in the day as an action movie director (wonderfully played by stage actor Sheila Francisco).
Now Leonor is contemplating a comeback, and digs out an unfinished script. But disaster strikes in the form of a freak accident that puts her in a coma. Lying unconscious in a hospital bed, Leonor becomes a character in her own script. And here is where the film gets gloriously weird, zigzagging between the real world of Leonor’s life and the trashy action B-movie in her imagination, bullets flying, blood spurting. If you can picture Wes Anderson directing a Tarantino movie, you’re halfway there.
Seeing the love for her film has been “surreal” and “overwhelming,” Escobar tells me, eyebrows shooting up. “It’s been crazy. You make films from the inside. They’re so personal. And Leonor is a strange film based mostly on my dreams and things I imagined. So, to find someone who gets it, that makes me feel like, OK, I’m not alone …” She’s momentarily lost for words. “That’s our mission as film-makers, I think, to connect with everything and everyone around us.”
What is it about the film that has struck a chord with people, I wonder? She thinks about it carefully. “In a world of sad films, this is a kind of joyful film.”
She is talking over Zoom from Luxembourg where Leonor Will Never Die is screening at yet another festival, the latest leg of the world tour. Friendly and warm, Escobar doesn’t stop smiling for the entire hour-long conversation. She is dressed in a bleached denim jacket covered with patches and badges. Combined with her short, blunt Amélie fringe, the look is arty kooky-cool – she wouldn’t look out of place in a Wes Anderson movie herself.
She was only 21 when she wrote the script and 28 when she directed it. Why the interest in making a film about an older woman? “I’ve always been fascinated by grandmas,” she says. “This is not my first film. It’s my third.” She reels them off: first a film school project, then a documentary about senior citizens, now the feature film. “The inspiration for Leonor is partly my grandmother.”
Escobar was brought up by her mother in Manila, and the two of them lived with her maternal grandparents. When she was growing up, her grandmother Hedy, now 77, felt more like a best friend. They’d sit for hours together making paper dolls or painting rocks. Hedy was a housewife and mother of four. “But she was such a prolific artist at home, too. She’s my favourite artist. She’s a great clothes maker, painter, visual artist. But she was never known for it. She never belonged to an institution. She was never recognised as an artist.”
What she admires most about her grandmother is that in a world that looks pretty gloomy a lot of the time, Hedy knows what she needs to be happy: nurturing relationships, spending time with her plants and pets (she has a turtle, cats, a dog, although the parrot recently passed away – she once kept an owl). Hedy manages to find beauty in the world despite the pain of losing a son in a car accident in his 20s; the loss of a child is an experience shared by Leonor in the film.
“When I ask myself what’s meaningful to me in my life, I look at my grandma,” says Escobar. “I ask what’s meaningful to her. For her, it’s the little things and the relationships. I want to be the same. I want to have the same wisdom as her, to train my grumpy self into a happier, younger person.” She laughs.
It’s a whopping understatement to say that women over 70 are underrepresented in movies. The older women we do see often fall into depressing stereotypes – kindly grandmas or grumpy old ladies. What’s so brilliant about Escobar’s film is that it is a portrait of the artist as an older woman, still in her creative prime, ideas pinging.
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That was personal, says Escobar. “I think about growing older: am I still going to be a film-maker? Will I be able to keep doing what I truly love doing?”
The unconscious Leonor becomes trapped in her script – a pulpy revenge story about a hot young construction worker who takes on the gangster who killed his brother. As a character in the movie, Leonor gets to rewrite her life, fix her regrets.
It tickled Escobar to cast a woman in her mid-70s in flowery dress as an action hero. “We all know the action genre is macho. I thought: why not make a film with a hero trying to save the world through tender solutions, treating everyone with love. When Leonor is faced with the bad guys, she tries to talk it through, to shake them up: ‘You’re not going to solve the problems of the world through bloodshed, killing everyone who you think is bad.’”
Escobar shot this meta-narrative as a parody-homage to the 70 and 80s action movies her generation in the Philippines would watch on TV at home after school, all the family.
What was she like growing up? “I was a weirdo kid,” she says, laughing. She knew she wanted to be a film-maker from a young age. Her favourite toy was a video camera given to her by her grandfather. In primary school she became “Video Girl” – the kid they sent for to make a film for the head teacher’s birthday or a school assembly. In her family she was the go-to for funeral videos. Her grandfather shared her interest in cameras; he was her No 1 fan.
“When everyone would tell me you’re going to end up as a starving artist, he was the person who said: ‘Do what you want.’” He died while she was making the film. She had a dream about him the night before she submitted Leonor Will Never Die to Sundance.
It took eight years to make the film – a labour of love that sometimes felt more love-hate. “Many times I wanted to stop it,” she admits. But her producers encouraged her. “That kept me going. Knowing that someone actually trusts and believes in your silly idea, it makes you think that maybe it’s not a bad idea after all.”
Escobar hasn’t made a penny from the film yet. In the Philippines it didn’t even get distribution. But she has been hailed by the industry and critics alike as an eccentric, original talent to watch.
However, she looks mortified when I describe her as a hot young director. “I’m not a hot young director!” she insists. “I’m a new director.”
The label makes her squirm, but she is in demand. There have been meetings in Los Angeles, agents listening attentively to her ideas. The experience plunged her into a mini-crisis as she thought about the future. While it’s nice to feel wanted, it’s complicated. “Because in the US they ideally want to work with people based there who want to make English-language films with bankable ideas. It’s making me think about: what do I want to happen next? What do I want in life as a film-maker?”
Could she see herself swanning off to make a mega-budget film in Hollywood? “I’m not sure. I don’t see myself doing that in the next few years.” Her next film is to be smaller, she tells me, smiling at how bonkers that sounds. “More personal. More experimental. It’s the opposite of a more commercial project, working with stars, more money.”
She has spent four years writing the script. At her current rate it’ll take another four to finish, she jokes. Has she done a mental calculation of how many movies she’ll make in her lifetime?
“That’s just like five! Unless I start to get my pace up.” Then, once again, she laughs at herself.
