El Sol Como un Gran Animal Oscuro is inspired by the poetry of Alejandra Pizarnik. While very well known in her native Argentina and around Latin America, Pizarnik (at the time) hadn't been translated into English by a major press, and very few poets in the U.S. knew who she was.

Much like Bleeding Palm's animation, Pizarnik's poetry is dark, strange, and magical. She was enormously talented, but struggled with drug abuse and mental illness until she took her own life in 1972 at the age of 36.

The film doesn’t glorify her death. The temptation with presenting Pizarnik is the same one with presenting Sylvia Plath: it's too simple to allow her death to be the organizing factor. And Pizarnik's poetry is actually just the opposite: it's a struggle against death and the instruments Death uses against a person: the body, the mind, and the world.

To write the actual script, Ronnie and Christina enlisted the help of fellow Borscht family member Bernardo Britto. They also cast Miami artist Agustina Woodgate (an Argentinian, like Pizarnik) as the voice of the narrator and asked Miami music legend Otto von Schirach to compose the score.

Poetry and mental illness are heavily linked in Pizarnik’s work. Despite her best efforts, she found no cure for either. “El Sol Como un Gran Animal Oscuro” is an adaptation of Pizarnik’s poetry that does not contain any single one of her poems. When we commissioned the film from Bleeding Palm and Borscht Corp., we asked them to only let Pizarnik’s poetry inform the lyrical aspects of the filmmaking: the tone, the colors, the music, and the themes. Unlike films, Pizarnik’s poems do not have plots. Trying to give them one after the fact, or trying to use Pizarnik’s biography as a plot, seemed disrespectful to the power of her work. Our hope was that the film would stand on its own, irrespective of Alejandra Pizarnik, but also that the film might make a few people curious about its point of origin.

- P. Scott Cunningham, Director of O, Miami Poetry Festival