OF ANIMALS AND MEN The production team of the feature film “Of animals and men” presents a story framed in a very unusual context on these frantic days, full of noise and publicity advertisements that overwhelm and distract the human animals who are installed in a permanent work routine, with the time against them. In this context, the dedication to a son is, apparently, the most absurd decision and, perhaps, the biggest affront to a society that promotes production over all things. Right there, in this very real and tangible world, through a series of absurd products announced on TV, a very thin illustrator with the only company of his cats, survivor as many others to a non-wanted birth and forcibly stuck in this eccentric advertising world as commercials director, keeps, still without knowing, a little hope in his heart but also in his bowels, of having the chance of rearing a child as a little personal salvation. One in which the animal nature of rearing his own offspring, gets reaffirmed… but, how to get a son when disdain against women is so evident? Egustín, our main character, is a bizarre man with great difficulties to get involved into relationships and full of odd habits. He was born in a cab, on a dark 1970 day, on his way to the clinic and between a nasty traffic jam and his mother’s pain who hallucinates sinking on her own amniotic fluid while giving birth to her baby. As many others, he is an unwanted child, a ballast for his mother who does not hide her disdain. Egustín is, therefore, a survivor. A being who seizes life as a parasite, one of those ones who subsist just out of a drop of water in the middle of the desert, which is what his mother has given him as physical and emotional nourishment. That is why Egustín is so thin; his body is a line and his face an empty blackboard. He has been born from death and has to learn how to live. As an adult, Egustín lives out of his job as a draftsman and publicity cinema director and, due to the distant relationship with his mother, he ends up developing a slight misogyny and a bigger love for non-human animals who, he thinks are more decent and sincere. Based on them, Egustín understands the nature of motherhood and child-rearing, developing on him some kind of hope of identification with an animal of his own kind. A son who reflects him and bonds him with humanity and also, as a possible mean of self-knowledge and belong. Egustín is a character who creates, raves and fantasizes from images which represent him. For instance, a doll who he creates resembling his own image and which, with the pass of the story, is getting transformed as if the character internal changes were reflected, in a more concrete and symbolic way, on the doll. Irene, the co-starring character, was born in a country house in 1975, as a deeply wanted by her father girl, who stays with her after the mother feels she does not have any more to do in that home. For Irene the bond with nature is very strong and is evident in her love for plants, light and her work as a painter. Pleasure and pain live on Irene’s contradictory, masculine and even ugly -at a first sight- face, but unbearably beautiful when you keep looking at it. She requires a careful look, as well as her paintings, on which animals materialize memories… and work as Irene’s internal states depictions, depictions of her emotions and what for her the world is. Irene is a strong-mood woman, cruelly sincere and realistic, facts that give her the necessary strength to deal with Egustín and defy him. The film crew is composed by members with an ample experience in audiovisual field. “Of Animal and Men” is the first feature film of the director and scriptwriter Mauricio Montes, who studied cinema production at San Francisco (CA).In 2008, he filmed the short film “Good Bye” in New York, as a part of a intensive programme of production and film direction at University of New York. This work was granted the first prize to best short film in Film Annex and has been nominated in important national and international film festivals. Mauricio Montes also has vast experience in audiovisual means as a publicity film director. Vicky Idrobo is a part of that new generation of cinema industry, and is already harvesting success as a general producer of her first feature film “La Sangre y la Lluvia”, at different festivals and international funds such as the Script and Development Price, by Hubert Bals Foundation and the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2003; The Script Laboratory at Sundance Institute, Oaxaca – Mexico, 2004; Price for Cinematographic Development and National Council of Arts and Culture in Colombian Cinematography, 2004. Produire Au Sud Selection, Nantes, France, 2004; Cinemart Selection, Holland, 2005; Co-production Price, Ibermedia, Spain, 2006; World Premier Venice Festival, 2009; Biarritz Film Festival, 2009; Manheim International Film Festival, 2009 and Thessalonoki International Film Festival, 2009. Currently, she is working on her second feature film “El Cartel de los Sapos” as a line producer.