Alba is eleven. She feels anxious. Perhaps it is due to her socially inhibiting shyness, the plastic scoliosis brace she wears, or because her nose tends to bleed during recess. One day, she finds herself shipped off to live with her obsessive father Igor, whom she hasn’t seen since infancy.

Igor tries to be a father to Alba, but the en-counter is awkward and abrupt. Amidst new friendships, kissing boys, and her first pe-riod, Alba is faced with the painful process of growing up and her rejection of a father that is capable of openly showing the world that what is so secret to her: oddness.

I need to talk about what hurts me.

When I was thirteen I wore a false tooth, walked with crooked feet, and had to wear a plastic vest to correct the scoliosis that plagued my posture. It was just at that age when one starts to see under a different light what is going on in the immediate environment. The father who played like a kid at adult gatherings, and would fill the trunk of the car with seashells for his collection suddenly stopped being fun and started having a label. That label was Obsessive-Compulsive. I started comparing myself, and my family, with my “normal” classmates and their “normal” parents, and became convinced that my family wasn’t normal; that I wasn’t normal.

Alba is the result of a long and difficult search through the most intima-te memories I have of my relationship with my father, and through the anxiety of my pre-adolescence. This has led me to explore the beauty that can be found in the bizarre. I want to take on human quirkiness as something intrinsically beautiful – to focus on the everyday moments in which we look and feel ugly, insecure, and deficient.

Ana Barragán is 25 years old, born in Quito, Ecuador. In the short films she has written and directed, she has explored pre-adolescence through tension, silences and dreams. Awake, her first short film that deals with a girl’s first period through images of ladybugs and red flowers won top awards for best Ecuadorian Short Film in the 3 most important film festivals in Ecuador and has been shown in the 5 continents.

Violet Sunday, her 2nd short that explores the relationship of two young sisters, was part of the official selection for the 2011 Locarno Film Festival, participated at the Latin American Film Festival in Toulouse and in Havana.

Alba is her first feature film. With the screenplay Alba, Ana won the first award for Screenplay Writing in 2010 from Ecuador’s National Film Council. Subsequently, it won the Project Development award in 2011, the award for Best Pitch at the first Meeting for Film Writers in Mexico, and has been selected to participate in the workshops Morelia Lab 2011 and Riviera Maya Coproduction Forum.

contactisabella@caleidoscopiocine.comanacrisbarragancarrion@gmail.