Maria Enganxa. Are you ready to see her face?

Hello! We are Cinètica Produccions, a Majorcan audiovisual production company, with more than 15 years of experience, founded and directed by Luis Ortas.

What we would like to achieve with this campaign is to finance the production of a short horror film based on the story of Maria Enganxa, a well-known Mallorcan legend, especially among the rural population of the island, which has been transmitted orally from generation to generation. This short film is intended to be, in turn, the teaser or prequel to a feature film entitled Fantasmata.

Mallorca island, winter 1975. During the traditional winter pig slaughter, a grandmother tells her grandchildren the terrifying legend of Maria Enganxa. A story that narrates the life of a woman who lives in the wells and who drags into the wells the daring children who dare to look into them. After listening to the macabre story, the children bet to see who dares to look into the well. Marina and her sister Joana walk fearfully towards the center of the courtyard, where the well is located. A noise comes from inside. Their cousins run in panic. They, terrified, expect the worst. Maria Enganxa appears.

• Genre: Horror / Thriller

• Length: 10 minutes

• Recording format: 4K

• Sound: Stereo

• Year: 2023/2024

• Language: Catalan, Spanish

• Subtitles: Catalan, Spanish, English

Some say she is a witch, others say she is a fairy, but what is known about Maria Enganxa is that, according to her grandparents, she was a very despotic woman who enjoyed hurting others. She soured the milk of the cows, spoiled the crops and stole children to initiate them in witchcraft....

At that time the Inquisition "reigned", which ordered the burning and torture of all those accused of witchcraft. So, legend has it that one of these people was Maria Enganxa. She was taken prisoner but on the second day she managed to escape. Nobody knows how she did it, so the whole town went out in search of her with torches, pitchforks and sticks.

When they located her, Maria was standing on top of an old well in the middle of the field with a small hook in one of her hands. Before they caught her, Maria raised her arms to the sky and said:

"I swear that you will not take me alive, I swear that from hell I will take your children and train them in witchcraft with me, from hell, for ever and ever."

And, without a second thought, Maria threw herself into the deep, dark well. The people did not heed Maria's threat and everyone left her for dead.

Legend has it that, at midnight, when a child passes near a well, he hears a sweet melody coming from inside. When the child (the curiosity of children is well known), puts his head towards the well, Maria with the hook appears and drags the child into the depths without anyone ever knowing anything more about the creature.

What the legend tells, about a woman captured and accused of being a witch, is surely what happened to a real Maria Enganxa. Although now we do not know who she is, probably there was a real character behind the legend.

The investigation of the truth and the eagerness to bring all these secrets out of oblivion is what made Luis Ortas (the director) work, for so many years, within the documentary field. But there is a part of the stories that cannot be proved because there is no documentation and that are part of oral history.

Likewise, oral memory always ends up becoming legend, as is the case with the story of the Count Mal, another legend of a ghost that rides along the roads at night, in the style of the headless horseman.

Originally, the character of the Count Mal is real. He was the former master of the Galatzó house, the place where the short film will be shot. His real name was Ramon Burgues Safortesa. The biography of an obscure historical character that ends up becoming a popular legend, making this figure the most terrible of ghosts.

It is the revenge of the people, to make the characters that frighten them go down in history feel remembered as terrifying people who, even after death, continue with their evil deeds.

That is why we say that we mix reality and fiction. On the island of calm has always hidden terror, which lives under the image of paradise.

I was born in Mallorca in 1973. I was the youngest son of a family of people from Madrid who had arrived on the island two years earlier. Since I was a child, the native Mallorcan culture was foreign to me. A different language and different legends, the sea, the caves and the tourists. A world that was my world but at the same time different from that of my family. At that time, families like us were called "outsiders". We were immigrants from the mainland and had arrived on an island with a rather hermetic culture and society. Because of this way of seeing life, the Mallorcan culture caught my attention from an early age. For me, it was both an exotic culture and my own, but not that of my parents.

I had to be the one to learn the cultural codes of the society, since they were not transmitted to me through my family. Maybe that's why it always caught my attention and that led me to get involved in researching this culture, its language, its legends and its fears.

Now that I am part of it, I want to spread it around the world and find the universal message in the local stories. Maria Enganxa is a Mallorcan legend that talks about a woman, a witch who lives in the wells. The legend of Maria Enganxa is told to young children to frighten them at the idea of going near the wells. She is a woman who lives in the cisterns and wells and who drags curious children inside to make them disappear forever. It is not known what happens to them afterwards. It is the great terror of all the little ones, so the legend fulfills its function to prevent the creatures from risking their lives. However, it also generates morbidity and the challenge of seeing this woman's face. In some wells, a woman's face was drawn on the back of the bucket, so that the most defiant children would be frightened when approaching the well. Maria Enganxa is a project that starts as the origin of a future film. It brings together and reinvents all the themes that I have been touching with the documentary genre during the last fifteen years of uninterrupted work.

WHY A SHORT HORROR FILM?

For years the character of Maria Enganxa had been on my mind to write a project. I started to write it during my quarantine for Covid-19, without knowing very well why I was writing a horror project. Later, I've realized that this is a technique I've had since I was little. In moments of fear, I imagine a greater fear, which I control, because the present fear does not control me.

To find my references, I found inspiration in three films very different from each other but that gave me different points of view about fear. The first one The Ring, the Japanese version of the film that later had an American remake, in which a legend, a well and the idea that death haunts the characters, fit perfectly with my project.

Pan's Labyrinth, again the legend that takes place in a limited space and mixes myth and our real history, the Civil War, in a setting that seems to be a story for children, due to the fact that its protagonist is a girl, but that, nevertheless, is a film rated for over 16 years old.

And, finally, Antichrist, Lars von Trier's film in which a couple lock themselves in a house in the woods to try to recompose their relationship, but that finally end up both in self-destruction derived from the guilt of their young son...

The project of Maria Enganxa wants to be a short film that will derive in another more extensive enterprise, a feature film or a series in which I want to innovate in the genre of fantasy and horror to make an auteur drama with horror film aesthetics, around the fear to make very necessary reflections for the time in which we live. This fact of using a genre such as horror to explain social and emotional problems, we have seen it in the zombie films of George A. Romero, who with his series of zombie films, what he really does is a critique of American society.

Fantasy has also been used to make us see that reality is much harder than we can conceive and that, many times, it is easier to understand the reality that surrounds us with fiction, as in Pan's Labyrinth by Guillermo del Toro and Un monstre em ve a veure by J. A. Baiona.

Luis Ortas Pau - Director

The rewards we offer are as follows:

• Your name in the credits: You can appear in the credits of our short film, as a patron.

• Link to online viewing: Receive the exclusive link to watch the short film online, before its premiere on IB3.

• Merchandising of the short film: Poster, mug, tote bag and t-shirt.

• Script signed by the director and screenwriters: Receive, at the address you indicate, the signed script.

• Viewing of the Making Of and invitation to the private premiere, which will take place in Majorca (not including accommodation or flights).

• Appear with your name or your company logo prominently in the credits of the short film (at the beginning).

• Be named main sponsor and appear in the credits as such.

Shipping costs: Shipping costs are covered, as long as the recipient is in national territory. We have added 2 add-ons rewards: One to cover shipping costs to another country within Europe and another for shipping to the rest of the world. Therefore, it is necessary to add this reward, whenever you wish to receive the other rewards abroad, to cover this additional cost. Thank you for understanding!

• The first 100 participations under 25€: Will participate in the drawing of 10 complete merchandising packs of the short film (poster, mug, bag and t-shirt).

• The first 100 participations over 25€: Will participate in the draw for 5 special and limited edition merchandising packs and the costumes that Maria Enganxa will wear in the short film + her hook!

Check here for the rules of the raffle..

We are an audiovisual production company based in Mallorca, founded by Luis Ortas in 2007. Our project portfolio covers a wide variety of genres, including commercials, institutional videos, promotional videos, music videos, features and an extensive list of international documentaries.

For almost a decade, from 2010 until mid-2019, we had the honor of working closely with MEDIASET ESPAÑA COMUNICACIÓN, playing a crucial role as news correspondents at TELECINCO and CUATRO.

However, in March 2019, we took a new direction to focus on content creation, including documentaries and fiction for both television and digital platforms.

Among our most notable achievements is the feature-length documentary 'Després de la boira', which has been distributed internationally and awarded the CANAL+ Documenta Madrid 2015 award. It was also selected for the Barcelona Jewish Film Festival and was a finalist at the Shanghai Magnolia Awards.

In February 2019, we generated a huge impact with the premiere of our documentary 'Milicianes', which achieved an impressive screen share on TV3, with a 17% share and 515,000 viewers.

Our miniseries 'La Paca, la matriarca de la droga' achieved an outstanding 4.7% share on IB3, surpassing the channel's average audience, and had a following of 17,000 viewers. This project became the first IB3 content broadcast on AMAZON PRIME.

In 2020, we presented the exciting documentary 'Constel-lació Comelade', an international co-production between the Balearic Islands, Catalonia and France, focusing on French musician Pascal Comelade. The documentary attracted some 7,000 viewers during the three-day Docs Barcelona online festival on Filmin and received a great deal of media attention. It was also screened at the Atlantida Mallorca Film Fest and at Cinespaña Toulouse.

Our latest achievement was the fiction short film 'Cleo viene esta noche', distributed by Freak Agency, which won First Prize and the Roel de Oro at the 36th Medina del Campo Film Week, participated in the Malaga Short Corner Festival and competed in the Un Impulso Colectivo Selection at D'A Barcelona.

We invite you to explore our website and discover more about our exciting trajectory and creative projects: https://www.cinetica.tv/en/home/

Your contributions will be 100% dedicated to the technical team in charge of the post-production of the short film.

Post-production will take place during December 2023 and January 2024. Therefore, we will be able to deliver all the rewards before the end of March 2024.

Follow us on social networks to keep up to date with the latest developments.

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If you need to contact us directly, you can do so at: [email protected]