EL FATHER PLAYS HIMSELF
PerSo Award

Director’s Statement

I started out to make a film which could observe what happens when a son rewrites his own father’s story, thus flipping the power dynamic of father above son, upside down. What are the limits of cinema in representation of those we love? What does this process unearth, and where does that leave us when it ends? As what I observed – a fictional film production – became more and more raw, the tensions around the son growing up outside of Venezuela, far from his father, and what emigration ripped from their relationship and their lives, were brought to the fore. The film thus became a grappling with the unanswerable question of how to mend what migration has torn apart.

There is no life for Jorge with his father in Venezuela. There is no way for Father to be present in his son’s life outside; the only life he knows is in Venezuela. Neither of them have ever found a way to approach the pain of this separation, until they create a place to safely express raw emotion: a “fictional” film set. But even this cannot last. Films end, filmmakers leave. Sons grow up, they leave, too, sometimes. The cleaving of father and son is universal, but here was rapidly expedited by time. The film production, their opportunity for wrestling these lifelong regrets, was 42 days long; then, Jorge would leave again. What this cleaving in this time of Jorge and Father unearths is unsurmountable — the hollow pain of separation, the isolation of becoming a man. We are left with two men vastly opposite in personality and demeanor, but sharing one essential thing: a clinging to a past, the desperation to distill memories in stories, in a work of art, in a film, in order to try to keep them alive.

The intention of my films is to linger, to study faces and reactions, and ultimately, to allow people to betray their own or others’ versions of themselves. Every man is a contradiction; some of us are ready to see, and ask why. Father is this way. EL FATHER PLAYS HIMSELF is the process of watching a father be seen, finally, by his son, and in a totally different way be seen by me; his daughter-inlaw, a woman, his friend. I leave much to be interpreted in what is “right” or “wrong” about this particular process of representation. What I do hope to impart is my solidarity with the human being, a camera’s validity of their fear of the world and their place within it. The root of all shades of machismo is fear. The root of family is love. EL FATHER PLAYS HIMSELF is this fear and love colliding.