“La Mesías” star Carmen Machi, Almodóvar muse Rossy de Palma and Blanca Portillo, a Cannes best actress co-winner for Almodóvar’s “Volver,” are set to star in “The Prey” (“Dia de Caza”), billed as a contemporary revision of Carlos Saura’s 1965 pic “The Hunt,” quite possibly his crowing achievement.
The film is set to shoot in July in Spain’s Extremadura, with theatrical release scheduled for summer 2025.
Brutal, kinetic at times and taking no prisoners, Saura’s original won a Berlin Silver Bear. The film follows three once-close friends reuinting for a rabbit hunt; the final bloody outcome was read as a broad metaphor of the social elite in dictator Francisco Franco’s Spain.
Directed by Pedro Aguilera (“Splendid Hotel,” “Sister of Mine”) “The Prey,” set in the summer of 2024, has three women reuniting for a rabbit hunt in the very same stark valley where Saura shot “The Hunt” almost 60 years before. Under a remorseless sun, past resentments resurface and finally explode.
“It’s impossible not to remember that almost 60 years before, another hunt, in that very same location, ended in tragedy,” the synopsis reads.
The film’s screenplay is written by Lola Mayo, who co-penned Javier Rebollo’s “The Dead Man and Being Happy” and “Woman Without Piano,” a San Sebastian best director winner.
“The Prey” is produced by Jaime Gona and associate produced by Stéphane Sorlat (“Goya, Carriere and the Ghost of Bunuel”) and Thomas Pibarot (“The Beasts”). Anna Saura, daughter of Carlos Saura, executive produces.
It is structured as a Spain-France co-production, produced by Gona’s Gonita Filmacción and Sorlat’s Mondex et Cine. The film is backed by Spanish public broadcaster RTVE, pay TV giant Movistar Plus+, the government of Extremadura, Ibero-America film fund Ibermedia, the E.U. Creative Europe Media Program and Madrid’s regional government.