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Interview with Gabriel Serra, 2015 Oscar nominee

Ma. Cristina Alemán, editora en jefe (@mcristina)

La Parka / The Reaper, a short documentary by Nicaraguan director Gabriel Serra and produced by the Centro de Capacitación Cinemtatográfica (CCC) has screened at 33 festivals worldwide, including the 11th edition of FICM in 2013, and is now nominated for an Oscar.

La Parka is the story of Efraín, a man who has worked in a slaughterhouse in the State of Mexico for the past 25 years. Through this man, who is responsible for killing around 500 bulls a day, the documentary explores the concept of death and, without judging, confronts us with the implications of eating meat. Efraín, whose alias is ‘La Parka’, explains it best: “I wouldn’t kill a human being because a human isn’t an animal, it’s not a cow. I kill cows out of necessity, because they must be killed so that we can eat.”

In an interview with FICM, the film’s director Gabriel Serra shared his emotion on being nominated for an Oscar: “I am very calm, I feel good, happy with everything that is happening, happy for the people who worked on the documentary.”

Although the director hails from Nicaragua, La Parka was born out of an interest in a specific aspect of Mexican culture. Serra explains that as a foreigner he was struck by the amount of meat consumed in this country, especially on the street, so he decided to find out what exactly was behind each taco. When asked “what nationality is your short film”, he responds: “Mexican, definitely. For the production, for the idea of death that is explored, for the people involved. This film, with this theme and with this particular protagonist couldn’t have been made in Nicaragua, nor in any other part of the world. But I am Nicaraguan, and I am the author, the creator.”

Serra began his creative process by writing the psychological profile of the person who he imagined for his documentary. With this defined, he went out on the slaughterhouse trail to find his protagonist: “I was introduced to the oldest man in the slaughterhouse, and he wasn’t right, then I interviewed the youngest person there, and he wasn’t right either. From a distance, I saw Efraín, who was on the mound where he works and I asked, “who is that?” Then I started talking to him and he told me things about the death of his family, and he also told me the most poetic thing I have ever heard in this job – that when the animals feel that they are going to die, they shed a tear. Then I realized that he was a very conscientious man with many interesting details about him ... For two months I went to the slaughterhouse and back on the subway, and I wrote a sort of chronicle of everything we talked about. I didn’t take a camera, I just absorbed everything so that I could write it down on paper.

After this long preparation, a week before beginning to shoot Serra decided to radically change his approach. Initially, I was going to look at three processes: the slaughter of the animal, the distribution of the meat and its sale in the taco restaurants. That is to say – death, guilt and love. However, as Serra got to know Efraín more, he decided to make the whole film about him: “he had all the elements I was looking for, and it felt more powerful to concentrate all my energy on just one thing.”

The director’s creative decisions, plus support from advisors Everardo González and Tatiana Huezo, had a very fortunate outcome. La Parka has enjoyed a long life at festivals around the work and, thanks to its being selected for New Directors / New Films by MoMA and the Lincoln Center in New York, it is now among the 2015 Oscar nominees.

You can read more about Gabriel Serra in FICM’s Filmmaker Directory: here.