Francisco, Lena, and their teenage daughter Adelaida are a family very much a regular family. Their days spent in Bogotá are filled with mundane moments – folding laundry, fighting over curfew, dining with friends. They’re happy enough even as the strains of living together can take their toll. Director Lina Rodriguez‘s This Time Tomorrow (Mañana a esta hora) is fascinated by these day-to-day moments. Her film, which premiered last year at the Locarno Film Festival, is a collection of moments. “I’ve always had this attraction to the present moment,” she told a packed crowd last year when presenting her drama in New York City. “I was trying to make a film about how we can take the present for granted.”
For, despite playing like a near-documentary look at this tight-knit family, This Time Tomorrow eventually shifts gears once tragedy strikes. The recently released trailer doesn’t quite give away said tragedy. Instead, it just introduces us to the family in question, showing us glimpses of their lives – Adelaida at school with a friend, Francisco working his sculptures, Lena hard at work at her home office. It’s best not to know much and to just get a chance to experience this quiet, observant drama with eager, curious eyes. It does, after all, offer a look at middle-class Bogotá that so rarely gets to be seen on screen by international audiences, a detail that’s not lost on its Canada-based but Colombian-born director.
“Unconsciously,” she shared, “I made part of the film because I’m longing for my relationship with Bogotá. This is not exactly how I grew up, like my family dynamic is very different. But I’m always curious to find more ways of connecting with Bogotá.” Yes, this is the rare Colombian flick that is uninterested in drugs, wars, or politics, and which focuses instead on the daily life of those who try to work through the kind of grief that can take hold of any family. Check out the full trailer for Rodriguez’s contemporary take on a family melodrama below.