Leap Year

At first director Michael Rowe wanted the violence and sexual relations on screen to be real. The leading actors,Mónica Del Carmen, who plays Laura and Gustavo Sánchez Parra, who plays Arturo, accepted so much that they asked for clinical tests to be done to avoid catching diseases. But during filming Sánchez Parra proposed to solve some things with tricks because "that's what filmmaking is all about, making people believe that we do things for real." So Rowe changed his position and later confirmed that in the end only two scenes were unsimulated (but he didn't want to say which ones). One of the two is definitely where Arturo severely hits Lucia's bare bottom with a belt, as confirmed by Del Carmen herself who said that "The one with the belt was real. At the beginning I was loose and the rebound hurt me a little bit. We looked for a way to get it right." Instead, the scene in which Arturo burns Lucia's breasts is definitely faked (again according to Del Carmen) and the one in which he pisses on her looks like it. Thus the other unsimulated scene is perhaps the one in which Lucia masturbates Arturo on the bed (but it is not excluded that the erect penis that can be seen is not that of Sánchez Parra but rather a prosthesis), or perhaps more likely the one in which the two they have sex on the bed in the missionary position (at the end of the act some frames show Sanchez Parra's erect penis and it seems to actually come out of Del Carmen's vagina).

Mónica Del Carmen's first lead role in a film.

Winner of the Camera D'Or prize for Best First Feature at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival

During editing Óscar Figueroa cut 40 minutes from the film, including most of the explicit sex sequences. Among them, Michael Rowe said that the one he most regretted being taken out was one in which Laura masturbates on the bed with a dildo.

Director Michael Rowe discovered Mónica Del Carmen, the actress who plays the protagonist of his work, "while she was doing theater for children." The fact is surprising, because in her role, violent sex scenes are the main thread of the plot. "When she read the script she told me it was really strong and took a week to decide with her boyfriend and some feminist friends whether to do it," the filmmaker revealed.