Uruguayan filmmaker Lucía Garibaldi world premiered her second feature, A Bright Future (Un futuro brillante), in the Viewpoints section of the 2025 Tribeca Film Festival. The Sundance Award-winning director, in 2019 for The Sharks (Los Tiburones), created a dystopian sci-fi drama set in a bleak South American neighborhood that seems to be caught in a time warp. None of the adults seem genuinely happy, and the youth don’t appear to have grown up knowing there is a future to aspire to other than heading “North.”
There is a scene of a teenager/young adult, Elisa (Martina Passeggi), who is undergoing a “test” via a set of questions and a drawing. The two adults seem impressed, as indicated by their facial reactions and then tell her she is going to the next level. Before long, the news spread to the adult community. She is on her way to earning an opportunity to go “North,” where select individuals go for a better life. Her older sister left for that land of opportunity and then was not heard from again. Elisa’s mother, Nélida (Soledad Pelayo, The Freshly Cut Grass), believes Elisa is fine, wants Elisa to succeed, and then seeks to join them by winning a travel auction.
As the youngest person in the community, Elisa is accustomed to doing as she is told, but the now 18-year-old is not so keen on following the same routine. The vacant apartment next door is now leased to Leonor (Sofía Gala Castiglione, The Crimes that Bind), a nurse with a prosthetic leg, and that shakes up the entire status quo when Elisa learns about the rest of the world and life. With these revelations, Elisa questions the “North” and resists.
Garibaldi co-wrote the screenplay with Federico Alvarado. They wrote a great story about the gloom and doom that remain after some life-altering event, not explicitly described. There are limited resources, and each neighborhood may be slightly different, but nothing spectacular as another teenager describes in some free time from the testing. When questioned about what he states, he only knows of this when he has accompanied his father in a delivery job. Ants are met with horror when they appear, and large-scale fumigation is a routine measure. Dogs do not exist in their world thus there are no pets.
The outstanding ensemble cast also features Alfonso Tort (The Freshly Cut Grass).
A Bright Future (Un futuro brillante) Uruguay/Argentina/Germany, 2025, 98 min. In Spanish with English subtitles.
Director of Photography: Arauco Hernández Holz; Production Designer: Cecilia Guerriero; Sound Designer: Mercedes Tennina; Editor: Sebastián Schjaer; Music: Fabrizio Rossi.
Source: Production company: Montelona; Co-production companies: Cimarrón and Achtung Panda!