Directed by: Gabriela Calvache
Country: Ecuador
Premiere: Palm Springs ShortFest – June 26, 6:00 p.m.
Program: A World Imagined
By Valerie Milano
Los Angeles, CA (The Hollywood Times) 6/19/25 – “Plague Season is my first genre film,” says director Gabriela Calvache, speaking ahead of the short’s world premiere at Palm Springs ShortFest. “As an Ecuadorian woman filmmaker, I’d only made dramas before… but with Plague Season I fully embraced that freedom to make a dystopian story you don’t usually see from a Latin American woman.”
Click below for our exclusive interview:
And what a story it is—subtle, atmospheric, and deeply haunting.
In Plague Season, silence is a language—and the earth is speaking. Set in a near-future Ecuador ravaged by drought and decay, this slow-burn dystopia offers no explosions, no chaos. Instead, it gives us stillness, buzzing insects, and the uncanny hum of a planet in retreat. The apocalypse, here, isn’t cinematic—it’s intimate.
The film follows a small family navigating an eerie world where the landscape is dry, colorless, and unsettlingly alive. Insects crawl. Wood rots. Memories flicker like light through fog. The human figures—spare and often silent—cling to ritual and survival, haunted not just by personal loss, but by the vanishing of the natural world.
“I wanted to remind audiences we’re animals at our core,” Calvache says. “In a collapsing world, the characters survive by embracing their own instincts… the film mirrors how I feel the world is right now—chaotic and threatening—yet it also shows how love and family can be our recipe for survival.”
The narrative resists exposition. Instead, it drips emotion and meaning through visuals and sound. The cinematography leans into natural light and desaturated tones—dusty greys, cracked soil, brittle skin—while the soundscape is a chorus of the earth: wind, cicadas, silence. Every moment feels fragile and alive.
This isn’t dystopia as spectacle. It’s dystopia as mood—a somber reflection on climate collapse, ancestral memory, and what Calvache calls “the resistance of love.”
“In a time when we see wars and conflicts everywhere, the film honors love as the most powerful force,” she told us. “Our protagonist’s mother embodies that love, reminding us how vital compassion is to survival.”
Even the insects carry weight. Though fictional, the imagined “plague bug” at the heart of the story is symbolic of both decay and warning.
“Ecuador is one of the world’s top biodiversity hotspots,” Calvache explains. “I created an imaginary insect to symbolize all creatures warning us about global collapse.”
That subtle ecological metaphor grounds Plague Season in the very real anxieties of our era, particularly for regions like South America, where biodiversity is sacred—and imperiled.
There’s an almost mythic quality to the world Calvache has conjured. It’s not post-apocalyptic in the traditional sense—it’s pre-extinction, lingering in that uneasy space between recognition and resignation. And therein lies the film’s power: it trusts us to sit with the discomfort, to feel the weight of what’s coming—not as a storm, but as a slow hush.
⭐ Verdict: ★★★★☆ (4/5)
Plague Season is a lyrical, unnerving meditation on ecological collapse and emotional endurance. It eschews disaster tropes for decay, silence, and resilience. Director Gabriela Calvache gives us a world where the loudest screams come from what’s unsaid—and a reminder that in the face of planetary grief, survival may depend not on power, but on presence, instinct, and love.
Premiere Info:
Date: June 26, 2025
Time: 6:00 p.m.
Location: Palm Springs ShortFest – A World Imagined Program
More Info: plagueseasonshortfilm.com
