La Bien Querida

LA BIEN QUERIDA: "Me Envenenas" Single Digital and Video by Carlos Vermut

“Me Envenenas” is a special song in LA BIEN QUERIDA’s discography: it’s a tour de force, a brief crescendo, full of anguish, agonizing and sickly. It is a fundamental piece within the album “Brujería”, the sixth album in Ana Fernández-Villaverde’scareer. That is exactly why it needs to have a special release. And, the thing is, the video that goes with this Single is directed by none other than the multiple-award-winning film director Carlos Vermut, who is the author of movies like “Diamond Flash” and “Magical Girl”, which already form a part of the history of film. The video has left us speechless, distraught, excited… But no one can explain it better than the director himself:

“The music video for the song “Me Envenenas” comes from an idea that I began to think about a few years ago. It was the idea that a Japanese woman, an office worker, tired of having to hold back and perform the role assigned to her by her job and by society, decided to dress up as a ghost at night and scare people, and get some release that way.

The idea (which still interests me now) had to be pushed aside because of other projects I was working on, and sometimes I fantasized about the possibility of being able to do something with it somehow.

When I talked to Ana about the video for “Me Envenenas”, we were very clear that we wanted it to tell a story. It was important that it had a narrative. After thinking about it a lot, the idea of the office worker came back to me and I found the perfect excuse to make that idea a reality in “Me Envenenas”.

When I started to think about the esthetic and texture of the video, I started to watch some Japanese television shows from the 90’s and early 2000’s about ghosts. In the shows, they recorded visits to supposedly haunted houses, or they selected home-videos that had hidden faces of ghosts in them. I liked the way those videos looked, the graininess, the grittiness, the pixelated faces of the characters. That is when I thought that recording the video with a camera from that time period would give it that special texture, so far from the sharp definition and bright colors we are used to in music videos nowadays.

I decided to film the video in the Kabukicho area, which is the red-light district of Shinjuku, a district of Tokyo. The contrast between darkness of the horror movies and the neon lights in that area seemed funny to me. It was a lot of fun to see people’s reactions to a girl dressed up like a ghost. Some people followed her, others just watched, and some got scared.

The “Me Envenenas” video is a tribute to the Japanese horror films from the end of the 20th century like “The Ring” or “Dark Water”, which have made their mark on the collective imagination for horror.”

Carlos Vermut