5 Questions with Gustavo René
1) Can you talk briefly about your background, and how you first got interested in filmmaking?
When I was about twelve, I watched a film called “7 Cajas” (it’s on Kanopy in case any readers are interested). More than twenty of my cousins, uncles, aunts, and family friends were squished in front of our tube TV watching this bootleg DVD. It was the first time I had ever seen a Paraguayan film, the first time I had ever seen my culture represented in a movie. I didn’t immediately grab my parents' video camera and start making films. In fact, I always thought I’d be an architect if my plan of becoming a professional soccer player failed. Here I am today, neither an architect nor a pro soccer player, but that pride and emotion I felt from that experience of watching “7 Cajas” has made its way into all my work.
2) What was the initial idea for this project and how did it evolve from there?
The idea for this project was born out of a conversation I had a few years ago with my good friend (and this film’s costume designer), Sofia Zur. She shared an article with me published by Remezcla. It was a photo series by an artist named Delphine Blast, who traveled to different Spanish speaking countries, photographing girls in their elaborate quinceañera dresses juxtaposed by the backdrop of their run-down neighborhood. Their parents took out massive loans, dipping thousands of dollars in debt, just to give their daughter this right of passage. My family has the same story. I remember my parents coming home from work, exhausted, slipping cash into a shoebox for years in order to save up for my sister’s quinceañera. I began to imagine what the pressure must feel like for a girl who’s constantly balancing her Paraguayan heritage and her American surroundings. The story built in my head, frame by frame, as I started to recall the memories of my own childhood and that of my sister’s, separated by only a few years, but united in the same struggle to fit in with the wealthy, white crowd we could never really be, no matter how hard we tried to assimilate.
3) What was the biggest challenge in making this film? And the easiest part?!
When I realized that this was the first Paraguayan-American story to ever be told on film, I felt a tremendous weight of responsibility. If this was the first time we were being represented, I wanted to accurately share our experience. Eventually, I had to let go and just focus on this snippet of my family’s story, hoping that other young Paraguayans and first generation Americans would see themselves in Pacurí.
The easiest part was the writing process. I had my sister to lean on, making sure the script felt truthful and was headed in the right direction. That said, reading it aloud to my parents for the first time definitely had me choking back tears.
4) What’s a film you’ve seen recently, new or old, that you really loved and why?
I finally got around to watching Ciro Guerra’s “El abrazo de la serpiente” (Embrace of the Serpent), and it certainly lives up to its reputation. There’s something magical about the film. There are these little moments of visual beauty that need no verbal explanations. And the final dedication, “This film is dedicated to the people whose song we will never know”, has me feeling a greater sense of urgency to tell more Paraguayan stories.
5) What’s next for you?
I’m finishing up a few short documentary projects, but I’m mostly hoping to go to Paraguay in 2021 as a Fulbright scholar to help build some film industry infrastructure and maybe make a short film while I’m at it. Regardless, there’s a lot of reading and writing on the to-do list.
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IG: @gustavorsanabria