A FEW QUESTIONS FOR…

 

Argentinean director Federico Godfrid, who studied film editing at the National University of Buenos Aires and will present his feature debut La Tigra, Chaco at Art Film Fest.

When did you start shooting your film La Tigra, Chaco?

Around three years ago, we went to northern Argentina to a small town called La Tigra in the province of Chaco. There we began to envision a film we wanted to shoot. We wrote the screenplay in ten days. Then we edited it in Buenos Aires, and roughly a year later we jumped right into shooting the thing, which took about a month.

How did you approach writing the screenplay?

We had three months to write it, but we continued to touch it up during filming. Intensive production of the film took four weeks. When we moved to La Tigra, which is a thousand kilometres from Buenos Aires, we had fourteen-hour workdays to look forward to. We knew that the film had to be finished in four weeks, because we had to return home. We shot twenty-one hours of footage, and the post-production took one year. 

What inspired you to make this film?

We wanted to make something that could happen in the place we went, something we could all identify with.  This is actually how the character of Esteban emerged. Just like us, he comes from Buenos Aires to La Tigra, and he gives the impression that he’s seeing this place for the first time in his life. We knew that we wanted to make a film about relationships, whether in a family or between lovers.  That was our point of departure, from which we unfurled individual plotlines. On one hand, there's Esteban's relationship with a girl, then you've got the familial relationship between him and his aunt, his stepbrother who he’s never seen, and for that matter with his father, who doesn't even appear in the film.

La Tigra, Chaco is your very first film? Then what brought to cinema in the first place?

It happened more or less by chance. I think I've longed to make films from the day I began studying. I graduated from the National University of Buenos Aires in 2001. Afterwards I taught film directing and worked in theatre, but the idea of making a film seemed very remote. In fact, for about seven years I shot nothing at all. And then, on my seventh day in La Tigra, it just came to me, and it was literally magical. We were there together, and between me and my co-director Juan Sasiaín, the idea to make a film just began to emerge. We started to attract other people who wanted to contribute to the idea, and suddenly we had a crew. At the beginning we didn’t know whether we'd have enough money, but fortunately everything worked out completely as we’d imagined it. And all at once I became a film director.