A father and son return to the Amazon jungle to shoot a deeply personal film. Fiction and reality clash as father plays himself.
EL FATHER PLAYS HIMSELF is a documentary film about this unique father-son relationship, and the way filmmaking can both heal and destroy.
“An exorcism of ghosts, lies and absences… but also a hopeful message about the limits of art and that the possibilities created by cinema are the absolute protagonist of our lives.”
A FATHER, A SON, AND A MOVIE
Jorge left Venezuela when he was a boy. His father, Roque, stayed. Their country has since plummeted into total chaos. Much has been left unsaid between father and son, about the different realities they now live, about father’s substance abuse issues, and about the distance between the two men. While Jorge grew up with his father at a distance, he was always awed by the stories of his father’s adventurous life in the Amazon jungle in the 90s. He even went to the jungle with him once as a little kid.
Now living in exile from Venezuela, Jorge has written a fiction film script based on his father’s adventurous life. He asks his dad to play the role of himself, and Roque agrees. Jorge returns to Venezuela to shoot the film. What starts as an act of love and ambition to make a film, spirals into an intensely personal process which confronts Father’s struggles with addiction and his life devoid of his son. The extremely personal approach to filmmaking begins to rip at the seams of their relationship as it unearths deep-set anxieties and pains of the distance between the two men.
EL FATHER PLAYS HIMSELF is a film about making a film. But it digs deeper to observe the dynamics of a family broken by migration, the pitfalls of addiction to deal with that pain, and the ways in which cinema can bring us together, but also tear us apart.
FILMING IN THE JUNGLE
The setting of much of Jorge’s film is that of his father’s real life in the 90s — deep in the Venezuelan Amazon. Father built a tourist camp with the help of local Pemones indigenous friends, and all went well for a time… so well that Father was featured on TV in Venezuela’s famous travel show Bitacora.
This region is also home to the tallest waterfall in the world (Angel Falls), and unique rock structures found nowhere else in the world called tepuys. These tall plateaus are as old as the earth itself and iconic to Venezuela. A portion of Jorge’s film (and EL FATHER PLAYS HIMSELF) is shot on the top of a tepuy, a rich ecosystem where humans rarely tread.
This region remains spectacularly beautiful, a treasure for adventurers around the world. But it’s very difficult to get to now. In the 90s, as Venezuela fell into a devastating economic crisis which continues today, the region where Father’s lodge used to host people from around world fell into abandon. The Amazon jungle around it has since been carved up into illegal gold mines, where small groups of miners blast the earth with high-powered hoses, or excavate the rich river floors, for gold and other minerals.
EL FATHER PLAYS HIMSELF explores this region where Jorge’s film was shot, alongside Father who knows it so well. Here’s a small glimpse from the film of a jungle escape with Father:
SO … WHO MADE THIS DOCUMENTARY?
In 2018, Italian-American filmmaker Mo Scarpelli (ANBESSA, FRAME BY FRAME) asked Jorge Thielen Armand if she could tag along with him to Venezuela for his film production. As his partner, and a very curious person, she wanted to join the adventure.
Mo started shooting a “making of” — a documentary that follows the behind-the-scenes of making a film — but noticed that something else was happening beyond a movie getting made. She saw a son and a father using a film to speak about fear, love, regret, and the physical and emotional distance between them. “Never had I seen language between two people coalesce in this way. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. I felt it was a beautiful and incredibly dangerous thing, to open up that kind of communication. Where would this take them? Would it destroy them? I had to follow that. Everything became about following that.” (Filmmaker Magazine)
EL FATHER PLAYS HIMSELF is the result. Read more about the director and her intentions here.
AND THE FICTION FILM?
The film father and son made together was completed in 2020.
It’s called LA FORTALEZA, and premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in Tiger Competition, and is now screening at festivals.
Sometimes LA FORTALEZA and EL FATHER PLAYS HIMSELF screen together. Interested in this ? Contact us to see how to make that happen.
See more about LA FORTALEZA here.