The use of fruits in the film was actually the first idea born for Everybody Loves Salsa, during the pandemic, when Canada was constantly in lockdown. The initial idea was extremely different, as it was not meant to feature specific fruits or to look the way it does now.

“I had been thinking for years about doing a project photographing fruit and playing with colour and textures, so I decided to bring that idea to life here, merging it with Everybody Loves Salsa. I come from Spain, where there are plenty of fruits, but when I moved to Colombia, I discovered an incredible variety I had never seen before. That immediately caught my attention, and many of the colours I used in Everybody Loves Salsa actually come from those fruits.

I thought it would be great to represent them in the film. Instead of illustrating them, I decided to buy typical exotic fruits from Colombia and create a kind of stop-motion sequence.

I built a small rotating platform, marked it with numbers to know how much to turn it for each shot, and photographed the fruits in 360 degrees. Twelve photos for every full rotation. Then I cut each image and used their tones to build the film’s colour palette.

You can see them in La Palenquera’s basket, but also in a moment when the camera dives into the background and fruits start flying everywhere. That was actually one of the very first physical parts I made for the project, after the storyboards and designs.”