Secuenciadas
By Ana & Marisa
March 19, 2025
Director Enrique Novials returns to behind the camera
with the short film 'The Bounty Hunter'. A bounty hunter will doubt whether or
not to fulfill the task he has been entrusted with in this new western with
feminist overtones that the screenwriter has also shot in Cardiel, in the
province of Huesca, this March.
[Director and bounty hunter face to face, under the watchful eye of the team.]
A woman escapes fleeing from her husband, and they put a price on finding her. The bounty hunter who locates her must decide if he fulfills the commission or if perhaps the fair thing to do is to let her go free. "It's a feminist western again," Enrique Novials explains to Secuenciadas, although he recognizes that this was a story he had not planned.
Her goal was to close her western trilogy with 'Letters to the Daughter', after filming 'Kill Them and Don't Come Back Alone' in the desert of Almeria and the beginning of the story, 'Calamity Jane', in Mequinenza and Cardiel. "Letters to the Daughter was out of budget, I started writing and this script came out with which in some way I have fulfilled my feminist trilogy" of the Wild West, she details.
He wrote the script in November last year, in a moment of
inspiration that, as it should be, caught him working. As he had contacted the
actor Alfonso Desentre to participate in 'Letters to the Daughter', he decided
to keep it to give life to the husband in this story.
[Aurora is not for saloon games, she wants to leave never to return.]
The protagonist, the woman who escapes her life without looking back, is played by Aurora Laray, an American actress whom Enrique Novials met at a festival in Arizona. "She writes scripts, she is a singer, a comedian, and she was presenting the festival. She liked “Kill Them and Don't Come Back Alone” and told me that she wanted to work with me," she recalls. Neither short nor lazy, Aurora go her tickets and has planted herself in Aragon to participate in the project, in which she also lends her voice for the main song.
The bounty hunter is Igor Arán, an actor from Mequinenza
in whom the dire sees a lot of potential, and the cast is closed by a classic
in his works, José Gallardo. The four make up the cast of this short film that
has been shot in English and Spanish, each in their own language, in the style
of the Tower of Babel in the Aragonese Far West.
[The cast is very smiling after an intense day of shooting.]
Enrique Novials' team
In the technical team, accompanying Enrique Novials, we find Valen Haralambidis in sound and music; Irma Borbón in makeup; and Josep María Vives, Laura Fornos and Ana Belén Izquierdo, as assistants. With music by Valen and voice by Aurora, the director also dares with the lyrics of the main song of the short, which refers to the story of the bounty hunter and his moral dilemma about what to do with his life, while wondering where his horse is. We imagine him like Manolo Escobar, telling the world that "wherever he is, the horse is mine".
The director is going to get down to work soon with the editing. "It will be a rather short film, which will not exceed ten minutes," he clarifies. It could be ready in June and Novials hopes to be able to premiere it at the end of summer at the Mequinenza film festival, out of competition if Novials takes charge of the western section of the festival again.
As for his future, Enrique Novials, who always has his
project ”'Letters to the Daughter’ in mind for when it is possible for him to
carry it out, is working on another western that arose from a visit to an
Italian festival, and in which he collaborates with the actor Gianpaolo Gentile
and they will try to shoot in November in Italy. Aurora Laray also wants him to
direct her in the film 'Gussy', which has been written by the multifaceted
actress; as well as Novials will shoot a documentary in Mequinenza with Sadie
Duarte.
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