Poster Design for Memento Mori

Memento Mori

When film director Fernando López approached us to design the poster for his latest film, we felt deeply honored. Designing a poster for an auteur film carries a responsibility that goes beyond the commercial. In addition to the obvious goal of generating enough curiosity in the audience so they want to see the film, there’s the challenge of making the film crew feel represented.

In this case, the strategy was to make the film title work as a logo. The script (no spoilers) has to do with death. In one scene, we see the tombs and the handwriting the townspeople use to mark them. The proposal we made for Memento Mori comes from that style of writing.

To achieve this, I started writing with my right hand (I’m left-handed) and with my eyes closed, but it still felt like the handwriting of someone who had already studied the forms and structures of letters.

So when my son arrived —he must have been around eleven years old at the time— I asked him to write those words with a very thick brush. Since he had no training in lettering and didn’t know how to handle a brush for writing, he produced exactly the result I was looking for.

The design of the poster has a modern and minimalist style that matches the film’s art direction.

We also designed the promotional pieces for the screening of the film at the Cinemateca Distrital, which included street posters, window displays, postcards, and social media materials. At this stage, we used the image of the anímero, the film’s main character.

Memento Mori: awards and selections

–Salón Internacional de la Luz. Volumen XV. Colombia. 2025 – Best Film
-12º Premios Macondo. 2024 – Best Art Direction, Costume and Makeup
-4º Festival Cine en las Alturas. San Francisco del Monte de Oro. Argentina. 2024
-26th Film by the Sea Festival, The Netherlands. 2024 – Film & Literature Competition
-10th Curaçao International Film Festival. 2024 – Yellow Robin Competition
-24th Havana Film Festival at New York. 2024 – Special Jury Mention
-40º Reflets du Cinéma Ibérique & Latino-Américain, Villeurbanne. 2024
-41º Rencontres du Cinéma Latino-Américain, Bordeaux. 2024
-26º Ícaro Festival Int. de Cine en Centroamérica, Guatemala. 2023
-14º The Latino & Iberian Film Festival at Yale. 2023 – Best Film
-9º Festival de Cine del Bajo Cauca, Caucasia. 2023
-10º Festival Int. de Cine por los Derechos Humanos. Bogotá. 2023
-27º Festival de Cine de Lima. 2023 – Honorable Mention, Cinematography
-62º Festival Internacional de Cine de Cartagena. 2023 – Opening Film