11 · 09 · 12

Press conference: No hay nadie allá afuera by Haroldo Fajardo.

"First of all, thank you for coming and to the festival for the invitation," the director said. "We're very happy. We never thought we would be here."

 

 

"At first, I wanted to talk about many types of adolescents and then I began to limit [the idea]," he added. "I think that if the film doesn't speak exclusively about me, it is based on memory and imagination. Since it's my first film, I needed something that was both close and also distant to me. The characters represent present-day youth. The young people are not actors. We found them playing rock and they seemed marvelous.  Punk is very influential, because at the end of the day it is a cry of desperation. On the other hand, it is also the same mood of the film. I knew I wanted to make a grunge film. I wanted the film to be very immediate, fast, short, one we could make ourselves."

 

 

The director explained the reasons why he decided to make No hay nadie allá afuera in black and white. "It is an aesthetic recourse," he said. "The resources that we looked at before making the film were in black and white. A film that I like a lot is Control (2007) by Anton Corbijn; perhaps it has nothing to do with it, but I took it as a visual reference. We reached the conclusion that young people polarize many things, and we wanted to show this [concept] in that way. We filmed with red, green, white and black tones to show all of the contrasts.

 

 

"We made the film with no pretentions," he continued. "We wanted to say something, tell a story, transmit an emotion. Every time we have an opportunity to present it, we take advantage of it; we don't expect to show it in theaters. We've been learning little by little, enjoying each step, screening it, traveling with it; what we want is to enjoy that it's done, film more, continue learning how to make films and present them. I don't think it's a perfect film, nor did we expect to make one. Good or bad, we've enjoyed it a lot and I think this is the path to follow. The best thing is to continue doing what we like doing," Fajardo said.

 

 

No hay nadie allá afuera will be screened today, November 9, at 4:15 pm at Cinépolis Centro, and Saturday, November 10, at 6:45 pm at Cinépolis Las Américas.

 

To read more about No hay nadie allá afuera, check out our previous interview with the director: here.