Bendita Film Sales has acquired worldwide rights to Love is the Monster, a dystopian thriller by Costa Rican director Neto Villalobos, ahead of its world premiere in the Toronto International Film Festival's Centrepiece programme Variety.

The 51st edition of TIFF runs 10–20 September. The film marks Villalobos's third feature, and his third trip to Toronto — both of his previous films, All About the Feathers and Helmet Heads, also premiered at the festival Variety.

Love is the Monster stars Paulina García, a Berlinale Silver Bear winner, as a grandmother told by doctors she has little time left to live. When her seven-year-old granddaughter is kidnapped, she sets out to rescue her. The story is set in a near-future San José, Costa Rica, where part of the population lives in walled communities, hires armed security nannies, and enrolls children in combat training programmes Cinelatino. The film was shot in Golfito — described as a tropical fjord on Costa Rica's Southern Pacific coast — and in Corredores, in the same region Variety.

Bendita, which describes itself as a boutique international sales agency, will handle the title globally. Luis Renart, CEO and head of sales and acquisitions at the company, brokered the deal Variety. A sales agency acts as the intermediary between a finished film and the distributors who license it for individual territories — in effect, the film's passport to reach audiences beyond its home country.

The production spans six countries. La Sucia Centroamericana (Costa Rica) leads, with co-producers Cine Infinito (Peru), Expansiva Cine (Panama), Clara Films (Chile), Avalancha Studio (Mexico), and Liminal Estudio (Mexico). Ana Lucia Arias, Felipe Zúñiga, and Villalobos himself produce through La Sucia Variety.

Villalobos studied sociology before majoring in film direction in Barcelona Cinelatino. His crew includes cinematographer Nicolás Wong and production designer Mauricio Esquivel, both named by Variety as Costa Rican Below-the-Line Talent to Track — a designation for crew members working in craft roles rather than above-the-line creative leadership Variety.

The film's path to the screen was unusually long. Its development took it through more than a dozen industry forums and work-in-progress labs across three continents, including the San Sebastián Co-Production Forum, the Costa Rica Industry IFF (where it won the Cinerent Award), the Panama Film Match, the Cinelatino Toulouse IFF, and the Darkroom WIP at the International Film Festival Rotterdam Variety. These forums function as matchmaking events where filmmakers pitch unfinished projects to potential co-producers, funders, and distributors — often the difference between a script that gets shot and one that does not.

What stands out is the scale of the collaboration behind a film from a country not known as a major production hub. Six companies across Latin America pooled resources to bring a Costa Rican story to one of the world's most prestigious festivals, and a boutique sales agent is now betting that international audiences will follow.