Remember the Seed

Well, that did not last very long, but the fact is that I am here! I am a son of Cinema. 

Fictional characters, films, and my mother´s idealistic cinematic fantasies got me to this planet. 

And cinema continued to impact me. 

At the age of 4, I saw Shane by George Stevens on a black-and-white TV. I was so deeply moved, I said to myself: “When I grow up, I am going to make others feel what they made me feel. I want to make films to make others feel profoundly.”

Under Franco´s fascist regime´s censorship, my parents drove to France to see erotic movies like Oshima´s The Empire of the Senses, Last Tango in Paris, and so on. The good thing about being alone is that not only did I watch films, but I also read lots: Jack London, Jules Verne, Italo Calvino, Robert Louis Stevenson, Edgar Allan Poe, Miguel Delibes, Calderon de la Barca, Arthur Conan Doyle, Oscar Wilde, Agatha Christie, and many other writers. Thanks to them, I travelled far away, and my life was much better. Since I was very little, I discovered the power of film and stories to transform my life. I would go by myself to the small neighborhood cinemas, cinemateques in the towns I was in. 

The good thing about my parents’ separation is that I got to experience different kinds of films: arthouse with my mother (Bergman, Pasolini, Herzog, Eisenstein, Tati, Kurosawa, Fellini, Antonioni, Fassbinder, Trumbo), and action, war films, and thrillers with my dad (Sergio Leone, Coppola, Melville, Scorsese). My dad did not speak much, so when he visited me, we found a way to connect: we saw 4 or 5 films per day, for days and days. Cinema was our only communication. With my mother, films led to intense philosophical, metaphysical, political, and life-enriching debates.

Now, I aim to make films that are entertaining and at the same time make us reflect about our collective human condition, our existence; films that provoke a transformation in the viewer and remind us of the interconnectedness of our existence while giving spectacle, keeping the audience engaged with an extraordinary experience. Cinema as a way of asking ourselves questions, of making some sense of this life. 

Perhaps in the process of making movies, I will gain a little understanding and honor the mystery that brought me here.

To me, cinema is powerful. It gave me life. It gives my life meaning.