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U.K.-French film company Alief has boarded Cinélatino winner Victoria Linares Villegas’ upcoming horror debut “No salgas” (“Stay Quiet”) as its world sales agent and co-producer, teaming up with El Perro de Argento, the Dominican Republic-based production company founded by Linares Villegas and Carlos Marranzini.

Alief partners Brett Walker and Miguel Angel Govea are heading to Cannes with a sizzle reel to meet with potential buyers and post-production partners at the Marché du Film. Pic is slated for completion by winter 2024, in time for the festival circuit.

Currently filming in the Dominican Republic, the queer coming-of-age horror pic stars Camila Issa (Nickelodeon’s “Are You Afraid of the Dark”) Cecile van Welie (San Sebastian’s New Directors Award winner “Carajita”) and Camila Santana (Berlinale Generation’s “Ramona”) as well as newcomer Gabriela Cortés.

In “No salgas,” van Welie portrays Liz, a college student grappling with her sexual identity. While...

Ahead of its world premiere screening as part of Berlinale’s Generation 14plus strand, Alief has swooped on global sales to Dominican director Victoria Linares Villegas’s second non-fiction feature, “Ramona,” and has provided Variety exclusive access to its first look trailer.

After its Berlin run, “Ramona” is set for a North American bow at the True False Documentary Film Festival in Columbia, Missouri this March, where Linares will receive the Visionary Award.

A postmodern look into the class divide and lives of an already vulnerable population, the project has emerged as a documentary with glimpses of scripted narrative, which the director credits to the adolescents she interviewed; their predicaments became paramount.

“I started developing ‘Ramona’ in 2016 as a fiction film, about a pregnant teenager who escapes the outskirts of Santo Domingo in search of a casting call for her favorite telenovela,” Linares recounted in a statement.

“As I was writing the screenplay,...