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Alejandro González Iñárritu Gives Master Class at CCU and Unveils FICM Plaque

Gustavo R. Gallardo

Gustavo R. Gallardo

With the presence of the president of the Morelia International Film Festival (FICM), Alejandro Ramírez, and the festival's founder and director, Daniela Michel, Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu, actress Maribel Verdú and producer Frank Marshall, special guests of the festival, unveiled the plaque that acknowledges the winning films of the last edition of the festival, at the University Cultural Center.

Alejandro Ramírez said that this is already a FICM tradition and thanked the special guests for unveiling the plaque, which will be placed at Cinépolis Centro. Subsequently, the Mexican filmmaker, Alejandro González Iñárritu, offered a couple of Master Class sessions for young filmmakers and the general audiences, regarding the filming process of Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, his most recent film, which premiered at the 20th FICM and will represent Mexico in the 95th edition of the Academy Awards.

 

González Iñárritu on Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths: “I am not interested in reality; it bores me deeply...”

The filmmaker, dressed in black, re-entered the Nicolaíta auditorium of the University Cultural Center, this time together with FICM founder and director, Daniela Michel. He greeted and thanked the public who waited for hours to see and listen to him and was met with cheers and a standing ovation. “We love you!” a young man screamed from the packed seats.

Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths narrates the existential journey of Silverio, a renowned Mexican journalist and documentary filmmaker who, after being declared the winner of a prestigious international award, must leave the United States to return to Mexico. The supposedly simple trip will take him to a limit between the absurdity of his memories and his fears.

"Bardo has several possibilities of being," explains the director. "The one I took is that of limbo in the Catholic tradition, where babies who are not baptized and die go; the soul stays in a place that is not the earth nor the sky.” The director said he wanted to take it as a poetic figure that made fun of himself and others without anyone being obvious.

 

Silverio, a character played by Daniel Giménez Cacho, "is between reality and fiction; truth and lies." In this regard, he said that he chose the "best actor in Mexico" because they both were in very similar places, among other coincidences. “It was like seeing an old friend […] He was Silverio without having to do anything,” he said.

“One of the most difficult, stressful, and delicate things in the director's work is choosing the casting. If you mess up there, there's no way you're going to save a movie,” he said.

In Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, he explains, Silverio acts as a ghost that walks through his memories, dreams, and fears, for which he required an actor who could be a presence that wouldn’t react or overact: “It is what that a true master of his craft does. It looks like he’s not doing much but it’s the most difficult thing to achieve. When you erase all traces of yourself and make it seem very natural”.

González Iñárritu also spoke about the relationship between Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2015), Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, and even with his virtual reality installation Flesh and Sand (2017), for which received a special Oscar. He explained that a decade ago he started practising meditation, which has allowed him to observe his thoughts and allow himself to mock the voice in his head. And that with Flesh and Sand he reaches a place where he can turn the viewer into a wandering phantom.

"I think that somehow Bardo has those two things [...] there is a duality of thoughts, of feelings... That multi-reality interests me a lot because many things about the self are revealed, and the dark room is illuminated," he explains.

 

Alejandro González Iñárritu said that Bardo had three filming processes since various problems led to changing the human team. "The same film was choosing the team," he stresses.

What did not change, he said, was the goal: to make a "beautiful and genuine" film, which blossomed from a wound, because "the origin of beauty is the wound." That, he says, is why he didn’t want to make a dark film, but a transparent one. "All the films I've made are personal," he said, advising young people not to be afraid to find themselves, to seek inner growth, and not to minimize their own dreams.

“This film is not hallucinating, it is not 'half crazy,” he says bluntly and adds: “I am not interested in reality, it bores me deeply. Reality is too present [...] It invites me not to go, but to go deeper, and stop licking our wounds”.

“On a formal level, the truth is that I am exhausted; I would no longer film another movie like Amores Perros (2000) […] There is no going back to that conventional realism”, he admitted.