José María Cabral's 'Sh*t Happens' Heads to Tallinn with Latido on Board

Madrid-based Latido Films has picked up worldwide rights to "Sh*t Happens," the first dark comedy by José María Cabral, ahead of its world premiere in competition at Tallinn's Black Nights Film Festival. Cabral is a three-time Oscar hopeful for the Dominican Republic and the first Dominican filmmaker selected for Sundance, with 2017's "Woodpeckers."

Rafael Elías Muñoz and Sárah Pérez Báez produced the feature for Lantica Studios, a leading Dominican production company.

Latido Films' managing director Antonio Saura, a long-time collaborator with Lantica, said: "This film is brilliant, the premise is original and provocative and performances are great; it is not only entertaining but also has a deep clever analysis of class and racism that makes you think after you've seen it."

What is the film about?

Formerly titled "Gut Feelings," the film follows a family of three: father Raúl (Spanish star Fele Martínez, known from Almodóvar's "Bad Education" and the Netflix hit "Alpha Males"), his wife Verónica (Lizbeth Santos) and daughter Isabella (Leonoro Forero). To cure his sickly daughter, the biotechnologist Raúl discovers the remedy inside Lidia (Cindy Galán), the nanny.

"When Lidia and the maid Dominga (Isabel Spencer) grasp the value of what they've been unknowingly providing, they decide to challenge the upstairs-downstairs dynamic in the household," the synopsis runs.

The Spanish-language title, "Comemierda," carries a double meaning, Cabral explained. "Literally, 'Come Mierda' translates to 'shit eater,' but in the Dominican Republic and much of Latin America, it's commonly used to describe someone who is snobbish, or looks down on others, often associated with wealth and privilege," the director said. "By combining the two words into one, we're playing with both meanings."

Why dark comedy now?

"I don't think I consciously decided, 'Now I'm going to make a dark comedy.' I think the story demanded it," Cabral said. "I've always been interested in social issues, class and the contradictions of the societies we live in, but I didn't want to make a film that felt heavy and charged. By using comedy, it gave me permission to go into uncomfortable places differently. You laugh first, and maybe a second later you ask yourself why you were laughing."

The premise began with a less absurd observation: the relationship many Latin American families have with domestic workers. "A nanny can raise your children, know the most intimate details of your family, be emotionally indispensable, and yet there can still be this very clear social hierarchy separating her from everyone else," Cabral said. Reading about wellness trends and alternative medical treatments supplied the film's strange central therapy, which he calls "the perfect metaphor for the power dynamics we wanted to explore and challenge."

The core, Cabral said, is simple: "It's about class, dependency and power." He added: "We tend to think the person paying the salary has the power. But domestic relationships are much more complicated than that. What happens when the person you employ becomes the person you desperately need?"

How did the filmmakers calibrate the tone?

Cabral wrote the script with Miguel Yarull and Nathalie Peralta. Their biggest rule: "The characters could never know they were in a comedy." He cites the influence of Ruben Östlund, Bong Joon Ho and Yorgos Lanthimos, filmmakers who "allow situations to become absurd without explaining the joke."

Martínez, Cabral said, "has this incredible ability to be funny without playing comedy," keeping Raúl human throughout his questionable acts. Lizbeth Santos prevented Verónica from becoming "a caricature of a wealthy controlling mother," while Galán and Spencer anchor the shifting relationships among the women of the house.

The film's Almodóvar-style visuals — vibrant colors, composed framing, rich interiors — were deliberate. "The house is almost another character," Cabral said. The team favored wide ensemble compositions with fewer cuts, letting characters move within the frame. "Fele could be delivering an absolutely insane line and we would be discussing motivation and emotional truth as seriously as if we were making a Bergman film," the director recalled.

With Latido handling sales and a competition slot at Tallinn secured, "Sh*t Happens" now positions itself as a Caribbean-rooted satire with clear international festival ambitions.