A 70-minute film shot with a mobile phone and less than 700 euros arrives this Friday, November 6, on the screen of the Teatro Alameda. It is 'Nadie', the first feature film by the Sevillian Mario L. Fajardo, which is screened at 17:00 as part of the Special Screenings section of the Seville European Film Festival, with a Q&A with the audience afterwards.
The director, 27 years old, has written, directed, acted in and produced the film on his own, without any prior audiovisual training. To shoot it he used an iPhone 14 Pro Max inherited from his mother, a tripod, lenses that attach to the phone, a microphone and two lights, and his own home as the setting. His two dogs, Luca and Fermín, also appear in the cast.
The bulk of the budget, a little under 700 euros, went on a licence for the editing program DaVinci Resolve, about 300 euros. The rest went on basic recording equipment. In addition to the script and direction, Fajardo took on the editing, the post-production and the piano composition of the main musical theme.
The story follows Gonzalo, a man shut away in his house a year after the disappearance of his daughter. While trying to keep alive an investigation that seems to have stalled, he begins to notice strange things in the home: objects that change place, signs of an alien presence and increasingly strange behaviour from his dogs. The home thus becomes a threatening space, as the
Universidad Pablo de Olavide details.
Shooting was combined with his job in the financial sector in Seville. «I have gone to bed at four in the morning and at seven I had to go to work,» the director says. That tiredness, he explains, ended up weighing on the dark atmosphere of the film. He wrote the script in a few weeks, shot in less than two months and devoted about a month and a half to editing and post-production.
Fajardo studied the Double Degree in Business Administration and Management and Law at the Universidad Pablo de Olavide, where he began in the 2017/2018 academic year and remained linked until 2024. Before devoting himself to cinema, he oriented his training towards those degrees following the tradition of his father, a lawyer. He is now working in parallel on a novel that he also hopes to publish.
To see the film you have to go to the Teatro Alameda on Friday, November 6 at 17:00, as part of the festival's programme.
