“My biological father disappeared from my life when I was less than two years old. They told me that he had gone on a trip: every time he heard a plane, he looked up at the sky, looking for it. When I met him, four years later, the first thing I said to him was: ‘I don’t know you, but I know you’re my dad.’ I can count on my fingers the times I saw Santiago, that lurking ghost who was a tailor and a gambler. He roulette and horses, although he also wanted to be an actor…. but the underworld tempted him.” Who is speaking is Luis Ziembrowski. It opens its deepest intimacy and exposes the basal stone: the search that began by looking at the sky and ended by making him hit the road desperate to find the trace of his past, to contrast versions and sink the rake into the geological layers of his family formation. “Between January and March 2006, my foster father died and a few months later, my mother. I am orphaned. Or almost orphan. I then decide to get into my car with a camera and a director friend who offers to accompany me. I am heading towards Mar del Plata: I am going to meet Santiago again after eight years of not seeing him,” he says. Personal need ended up becoming creative food. From there it was born “The Villain”a film that premiered on December 7 at the Gaumont and on the 9th at Malba Cine.
To be or not to be, to act or live. He jokes that he had to make up a movie because he would never have been cast in Hamlet. “Like actor, I was called many times to play villains. The connection of life and fiction intimately awakened a possible story in me: finding a version of the day Santiago disappeared from the family world and unifying the stories of each of the family members. I never intended it, but now I can say that It is a repair event.”, he reveals.
News: What did it mean to materialize this project that had been simmering since 2006?
Luis Ziembrowski: Having arrived at the construction of a film with material so close, so biographical, so personal, so familiar, I am excited by the possibility of it being seen as a narrative, as a documentary, as a film. On the other hand, for me it is liberating, after so much time and after having chased a ghost. The film talks about the search, about who my father was and it seems to me, together with Gabriel Reches (with whom he co-directed) and with the editors, we built a story that transcends me. The topic being talked about is fatherhood and being a son and being a father. It is a story that can reflect and resonate in very different ways for each person who looks at it. The entire team showed a very particular interest because it was precisely a fundamental topic that unifies us humans. We had a very affective and affected adherence and daily monitoring of this. Furthermore, the film realizes that I am an actor, presents me as someone who has been called to play a villain, and asks if there is an evil gene, what could have conditioned this common denominator of how I was called to play. make villains of different stripes throughout my life.
When asked about the importance of financing Argentine cinema, he says: “I think it allows us to find authorial perspectives that constitute part of a cultural heritage.. And in that it is inevitable, as in all countries in the world, all of them, including the United States, and regardless of the large, small or medium-sized industry, that support comes from the State. The importance of auteur cinema is that it has a sovereign view and is not dependent on the narrative, aesthetic, visual and audiovisual patterns that the market may demand.” Let’s continue with your own construction of look.
News: In that meeting with his father, instead of that stereotype of the villain, he encountered a rather helpless and unarmed man.
Ziembrowski: Yes, it seems to me that what I found was a helpless father and that he also did what he could. So in that sense it works as a reconciliation, not with my father, but with history, with what he was, with what we people are. It seems to me to be a repair of something in life, more than the repair of a relationship. My father died the year after that meeting, I never saw him again after going to film it.
News: One weekend was just enough for all this.
Ziembrowski: Yes, because at first I didn’t think about making a film. Over time I dusted off the minicassettes.
News: Going back and forth about those tapes, about a possible script, did it impact you emotionally in different ways or did you distance yourself?
Ziembrowski: No, no, the distance was trying to articulate. At some point I said there is a germ of a possible film, knowing that it was not going to be just that material, but that it was going to be part of something else, I went deeper until in the last editing stage, it was already a manipulable material. It is a documentary in search of who my father was and along the way I have conversations with my sisters, I have meetings with my children, in a documentary and fictional way.
News: It must have been very motivating for them to get involved. Was there resistance or did they easily surrender to that creative and exploratory game?
Ziembrowski: It was mobilizing and that is why I feel deep gratitude for all the love they gave. Nothing was easy, traveling and showing a painful story, it is rowing in dulce de leche and it is thick; unraveling things that were already elaborated in a way, after so much time too and with certain mechanisms and procedures that we found to tell scenes in the film, made them come back to life and that was not easy at all, and it was very genuine and very brave from each one.
News: Did you learn anything from all this?
Ziembrowski: Yes, confirming things or hypotheses or certain existential parts that I was living and experiencing in being and not being and being and acting, in putting those two things into play at the same time in some scenes. I think it is also a confirmation of what my philosophy of life is, of the view that I have on knowledge, on the world, on emotions based also on my work. That was a huge learning experience and finishing the process that I started when I was in my forties, now at 60, is a journey. And at the same time I was making films, contributing to films by other creators, and at the same time I made a life, I made a family, I made children. The process of this was accompanied by my entire life. And for this to end up in a movie is a lot. There is also no speculation about whether it is profitable or not, it is about finding a narration and an audiovisual story. Creating that is already an immense learning experience.
Footnote: As a child, he looked at the sky every time a plane passed by, hoping it would bring his father. Today’s man uses the verb arrive over and over again to refer to this personal and artistic journey through which he illuminated a film and which finally left him on the ground.
News: “The Villain” goes from the most intimate and most private to reflecting on a universal theme. Maybe we never access the complete story, there are always holes in that plot, even if there is a physical presence, right?
Ziembrowski: Yes, I believe that one of the things the film talks about is memory and memory is that, the reconstruction, even mythical, that one makes of oneself. And that was also at stake. I think all of us children wonder what our parents’ lives were like before they became parents. In this case, mine were also accompanying me, one of my daughters even says at one point: “We didn’t really know why you wanted to make this film and now I realize,” and she says it after experiencing an intense scene.
News: That scene is in the middle of a family constellation. Was it real?
Ziembrowski: Yes, the constellator allowed me to record it. Because somehow I thought I could reach the search for where I walk in life. Let’s say with the family, with the acting, with the casting, with the test, with the scene, with fiction. As a search documentary, I am not arriving at results, but things are diverting me, going out on the road looking for family data that does not come up with anything and then in that there is also a investigation, there is a very large mobilization and not a result but a transcendence that allows us to repair things that were hidden, that were distorted, that were lived as best we could.
News: Does showing yourself like this in front of your audience have a plus? Is the bond you have with people going to be nurtured in a different way?
Ziembrowski: Who knows? I don’t know, I really don’t know, I think it’s possible. I don’t know if I made the film to devillanize myself in the way everyone looks at me. But I do know that they are going to meet someone openly, with someone else openly.