Alejandra Márquez Abella may be heading for the stars. The filmmaker is in talks to direct “A Million Miles Away,” a biopic of a Mexican American astronaut that’s set up at Netflix. The Hollywood Reporter broke the news.
Based on Jose M. Hernandez’s autobiography “Reaching for the Stars,” the pic will revisit how Hernandez, who “didn’t learn English until the age of 12 and spent his childhood moving from town to town and working fields with his family,” co-developed “the first, full-field digital mammography imaging system to detect early breast cancer and persevered through many rejections to become a crewmember of Space Shuttle mission STS-128.”
“Miles Away” will mark Abella’s English-language debut. Her last two features, 2015’s “Semana Santa” (“Holy Week”) and 2018’s “Las niñas bien” (“The Good Girls”), screened at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Abella has “spearheaded Mexico’s Ya Es Hora movement, along the lines of this country’s #MeToo movement, condemning gender violence and promoting more stories told from the female perspective,” THR notes.
When we asked Abella her advice for other women directors, she said to “find strength in the assets that we culturally as women have, and that are commonly considered weakness by the system. To concentrate on our own desires and trust our intuition and way of looking at things. Don’t be afraid of kindness and softness: it’s a gift,” she emphasized.
