Please tell us about the projects you worked on before making ‘A Family Affair’. How did you start, and how did you learn to make films?
“A family affair” came about as an extracurricular project. We shot it with the equipment’s we were lent so kindly from my university in Buenos Aires, and, along with a crew of 15 persons, most of them students like me, had four days of shooting. This was my first time directing but I had work on film mostly as a production/costume designer, which is something, I think, reflects on my own work.
Tell us about ‘A Family Affair’. How do you describe it?
I always thought that I should start writing about something that’s familiar to me, the very cliché but also true saying of: “write what you know”. Since this was my first screenplay I ever wrote, I wanted to keep it relatively small and familiar, like an exercise of putting four characters in a single place and make them talk, then see where it goes. That’s how this short film started, which I think is about the very universal themes of family, connection, and overall humanity. I wanted to be able to look at every one of these characters in relation with each other but also on their own.
Please tell us about your favorite filmmakers.
I feel like it changes all the time but lately I’ve been really into Andrea Arnold, Luca Guadagnino, Kristoffer Borgli and Hirokazu Kore eda.
If you were given a good budget, what would be your ideal project?
I very much look forward to making a tv show, I’m in love with that medium and consume a lot of it. I think it gives you the time and length to really go deeper into the characters and develop the narratives. I would love to make some kind of tv show that it’s about personhood and the struggles of everyday life, but through a very specific lens, which is my own. I have a motor skills disability and I feel like we never got to see a character like that who is just living his life and not being constantly consumed/stereotyped by it.
Describe how you would ensure that production is on schedule. What steps would you take?
Making films/tv show requires a lot of work and a lot of people, which is probably the best part of it. It’s a collective work. The pre-production process would have to be very long and very mindful in order to effectively get the production in order, and that would include everything from shot listing to storyboard to casting, etc. I also find that working with friends or people I trust benefits my projects, which ultimately takes us to a better result.
What was the hardest part of making ‘A Family Affair’.
I would say the hardest thing about it was that I didn’t really have much resources to do it. It was a very small-scale student production but I also think that can help you sometimes to think out of the box and to get very resourceful about your decisions. Overall, I think it was a great experience for my first film.
If possible, tell us about your next work. What plans do you have for your future work?
I’m currently developing my second short film, which is set to shoot on the first week of December. This one is very much inspired by the logic of social media and our relationship with everything we consume from them and pop culture in general. I’ve read Fredric Jameson’s “Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”, which I found very helpful. My hope is to talk about this very modern and ultimately depressing topic but with a lot of humor and heart.
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