Francisca Alegría ’16 Signs Distribution Deal with Kino Lorber for Latest Feature

International film distribution company Kino Lorber will theatrically release The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future (2022), a debut feature film from alumna Francisca Alegría ’16.

Alegría’s film, which was co-written and directed by Alegria and produced by Adjunct Associate Professor Shrihari Sathe '09, premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival and begins in a river in the south of Chile where fish are dying due to pollution from a nearby factory. Amid their floating bodies, long-deceased Magdalena (Mia Maestro, Frida, The Motorcycle Diaries) bubbles up to the surface gasping for air, bringing with her old wounds and a wave of family secrets. This shocking return sends her widowed husband into turmoil and prompts their daughter Cecilia to return home to the family’s dairy farm with her own children. Magdalena’s presence reverberates among her family, instigating fits of laughter and despair in equal measure in all but Cecilia’s eldest child, who finds much-needed comfort in their grandmother’s love and unconditional understanding during a time of transition. A lyrical rumination on family, nature, renewal, and resurrection, The Cow Who Sang A Song Into The Future is an ambitious proposal for acceptance and healing, suggesting that the dead return when they are most needed.

As Alegría discusses in her director’s statement, the film takes inspiration from a region in the south of Chile where, in 2017, thousands of fish appeared dead, and the cause was never identified. This incident occurred just a few months after the installation of a pulp and paper factory that has been reported for spilling toxic waste—a factory that still functions to this day.

“Like in many parts of the world, my country has had several mass deaths of animals, and no authority has prioritized the protection of its ecosystems over the economic growth provided by private companies,” Alegría said in her director’s statement. “Thinking of those fish, I wondered if they knew that something was wrong before they died. I wondered if they felt fear while agonizing or if they could see where they were going next. A once magnanimous belief system is falling and reaching the state of agony that Mother Earth has been in for a long time. We are all suffering together now, and I wish that we could be more aware, more empathic, and more willing to listen.”

In addition to screening at Sundance, the film has also received official selection in the following film festivals: San Francisco International Film Festival 2022, Seattle International Film Festival 2022, and the Frameline Film Festival 2022. It has been called “hauntingly moving and hopeful” in a review from Indiewire, and a review from Vox praised the film as “mysterious and elegiac, a tale of warning about a collapsing ecosystem and about deep family wounds.”

Francisca Alegría is an award-winning filmmaker who obtained her degree in Directing from the Universidad Católica de Chile and her MFA  in Screenwriting and Directing at Columbia University. Her short film And the Whole Sky Fit in the Dead Cow’s Eye (2016) received the award for Best International Fiction Short Film at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, Best Latin American Short Film at Miami Film Festival and was selected at Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, and New York Film Festival. Alegría’s debut feature, The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future (2022) was selected for the Sundance Screenwriters and Directors Labs and premiered in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.