The 2025 Sundance Film Festival premiered 87 feature films, one of which was “Llueve Sobre Babel” or “Rains Over Babel,” written and directed by Gala del Sol. This experimental, thought-provoking, mystical Latin American film is del Sol’s first official feature film, and it is a must-see.
This creative feature follows many, different characters trapped in a tropical-punk, dream-like world of Babel, longing to find cathartic answers behind their struggles and purpose within the fantastical world. Each character goes through their own journey, some intertwined with one another, full of color and fun to dive deeper within themselves. The director describes the feature as a “reflection of the questions that we as a group, the filmmakers and the actors, were living at the time”.
“Rains Over Babel” explores many themes and questions that are extremely relevant to exploring identity, which is an important topic talked about today in the conversation of finding yourself, and freeing yourself from guilt. This conversation was vital to the making of the feature. Del Sol recounted the process as “a film that was made upside down”.
Conventionally when making a film of any sort, the process starts with the writing before it gets handed over to the actors to embody the character on the page. However, the director had no written story in mind at the beginning of this project. It was amid the COVID-19 pandemic while being safely quarantined that she felt an itch to work creatively in film to keep her mind off things. Del Sol met up with a group of talented theater actors on Zoom and gave the power to the actors to create their own characters before writing any script.
“I had them do an activity of character creation: create a character that will help heal something from your life,” director Gala del Sol prompted the actors. “Create a character that you've always wanted to play…that's how it got started. It was not a premeditated thing. We didn't know that this was gonna turn into a feature or anything. We were just playing during the pandemic really to counteract the existential crisis of the pandemic.”
The actors all came up with specialized characters that represented a part of themselves that yearned to feel seen and understood on the screen. Soon, the director realized that there was a common theme within all of the actors’ stories.
“Some of the actors definitely brought things from their own lives and inserted that into the characters…to make it very varied somehow because everyone has had a different life experience. But also if you see closely, the common theme that crosses them all is guilt,” del Sol explains. “They're all trying to heal something that generates guilt in them.”
Guilt became the string that tied all of these characters together and what ultimately inspired del Sol to write the script, based on the characters that the actors created. While putting the film together, the director said that she visited an exorcist priest to talk about guilt and why people hold themselves back from being at peace.
Del Sol talks about her conversation with the priest, “He told me, ‘The reason why you are here trapped in the material world is because we feel guilt. We think that we don't deserve happiness. We think that God is judging us, and we have not received forgiveness…but that's all bull. The reality is that we have to forgive ourselves, it's on us. We're here because we do not think that we deserve happiness somehow.’”
“Rains Over Babel” explores this concept through different characters that each audience member can relate to, or see another’s perspective and inner struggles, all having different backgrounds and reasons why they are trapped in Babel. The director explains, “What connects them all is this search for forgiveness, empowerment, and ultimately love… this search for their own place in the world and healing from grief.”
This enchanting world was shot in Cali, Colombia, del Sol’s hometown, which was a humbling and important experience for her. She describes this feature as a “love poem” to the city she grew up in. To del Sol, Cali is a place where anything can happen and wanted to represent that larger-than-life feeling the city invokes in the film. This perspective ended up shaping the way she sees the world.
“It's the city where everything can happen. Growing up, I saw so many different things that seemed more closely related to fantasy than to reality…it's a city with a lot of social differences. I wanted to talk about that in the film, and then there's the outcast as well. No one talks really about the outcasts, so I wanted to really have them be the main characters, these misfits.”
Although Cali is one of the most dangerous cities in Colombia, the director was focused on “extracting” the special and beautiful things about the city as well as the people in it.
Del Sol explains, “I get these incredible stories out there and these people who have such amazing ways of seeing the world, and then I try to extract everything that is extraordinary about the people. I think it's extraordinary, you know, and that's what I'm going to stay with to depict in the work that I do. I think it's a good way to see the world, you know, I guess after seeing so much. It’s having a vision and being able to extract whatever is good and whatever is extraordinary and be able to play with that in your work.”
The director’s impactful feature was made with “labor of love,” and not only for the city of Cali but for everyone looking to free and heal parts of themselves.
“I think in general it is just a fun film…it's a very different kind of film. If you're open to new possibilities, a different kind of story, a different kind of Latin American film, if you're into magical, fantastic realism, go watch it. I think I think you're gonna like it,” director Gala del Sol says.
“Rains Over Babel” premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival on January 26th with a total of five screenings through the festival. Later in February, the film premieres at The Rotterdam International Film Festival for its European premiere.
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