Paola: In the beginning, I didn’t think about that. On the Rising Interest in Women’s Stories I liked that people could recognize specific places or noticed the family’s accent was authentic to that time and place in the ‘90s. I wanted to add another dimension to what my family went through apart from the social context. Paola: Things happened in my life, but I was interested in making my autobiography very colorful. On Adding Surrealistic Flourishes to Her Life Story That way, we made the scenes and locations real.

I had to send them separately to Santiago and his group in Colombia. Paola: In the script, we made a list of everything – people, floors, details, everything – then I drew them. Even if they were animated, I wanted them to have a lot of life. I think my big challenge was to give life to these characters.

We would get a lot of raw material and build things up. There were some scenes quite easy for us, because Paola had to draw them. I preferred doing it this way because it was like an inventory of my life.Ĭaicedo: We basically started from scratch. It was much easier just to do it myself than to tell someone else my sister’s clothes looked a certain way, the furniture looked like so. It was a portrait, for me to sketch the drawings from memory. Power Paola: It took five years to do all of the drawings. It was important to be truthful and to be as faithful as possible to the original graphic novel. I wanted to be very respectful because it’s Paola’s life. Every week, she used to post one new page from the book.

Santiago Caicedo: Well, first I found Paola. On Finding and Adapting Power Paola’s Breakthrough Graphic Novel Here are a few of the highlights from our discussion. During our conversation, the director and writer-illustrator discussed their collaborative process, the importance of telling women’s stories, and the honesty that comes with writing about your life. She was heavily involved in the production, as the pair told Remezcla during the sunny Festival Internacional de Cine de Cartagena de Indias in Colombia. Power Paola teamed up with director Santiago Caicedo to bring her 2011 graphic novel to the big screen via animated movie Virus Tropical. Now, the author has also become a filmmaker. Power Paola, the pen name of Paola Gaviria, uses colorful anecdotes about her parents, two older sisters, and housekeeper to explore her life story from the time she was conceived to when she became a young woman. Growing up is never easy, but divorce, money problems, and moving between two countries makes things much harder for Paola, the young Ecuadorian-Colombian girl at the heart of Power Paola’s deeply personal graphic novel.

Virus tropical by Powerpaola